Farm Business Management: The Strategic Farmer

Farmers face ever-changing production systems, markets and regulations. This means they must constantly review their long-term plans to ensure continuing economic and environmental sustainability. The challenge for the future is for farmers to assess opportunities strategically as they appear and overcome the temptation of just meeting the demand of day-to-day tactical decision-making. This long-term view is the world of strategic planning. Farm owners and managers must constantly review the future and systematically assess likely future scenarios in order to make adjustments to suit prevailing needs. Any manager or owner thinking about purchasing a new farm business either to expand, or replace, an existing property must conduct similar assessments. This book addresses these issues and provides methods and procedures that enable the development and assessment of future strategies. This book explains how to be a "strategic farmer" in an unusual way. Rather like a novel, it tells the story of a newly reconstituted farming couple who are searching for a new property on which to carry out their primary production plans following their departure from a family farm which was being assigned to the next generation. In a previous book in this series (Farm Business Management: The Decisive Farmer), this same couple were involved in a team approach to improving decision-making. This book covers the couple's efforts to find a suitable property meeting all their strategic needs having analysed the expected future scenarios. In this process the couple interacts with many of their farmer friends and advisors who also featured as characters in the previous books. Each chapter is devoted to one of the common issues facing the modern farmer when trying to create a long-term strategic plan. To assess each issue, tried-and-tested strategic planning procedures are demonstrated with full explanations of their logic and methods. Each topic is fully referenced to provide further reading and discussion. Lecture guides, case studies and exercises are also provided online on the CABI Digital Library. This book is a valuable resource for all farmers and students of farm management and agribusiness.