Weak Links By Joel Salatin

With ongoing supply chain glitches and forecasts of famine, caring wealthy people want to help by germinating new farmers.

Numerous trends indicate disturbing trajectories: aging farmers, escalating interest rates, high energy prices, ongoing industry-induced pathogens, increasing health costs, and expanding bureaucracy from regulation to market manipulation.

More people than ever are contacting me with the question “How can I help get more good young farmers started?” The question indicates an understanding that there are good farmers and bad farmers. Stockman Grass Farmer concurs with the good and bad farming mentality and our whole mission is to encourage good farmers generally and grass farmers specifically.

Most of these sincere, well-intentioned efforts center on land availability. Invariably these monied folks who want to facilitate farming and food solutions assume that land is the weak link. I watched numerous organizations attack this problem two decades ago and most of them no longer exist. The problem was the folks with money didn’t know anything about farming and the young recipients, bless ‘em, were by and large unproven dreamers who didn’t know much about farming either.

Two novices in an economic space do not create expertise. They compound disaster. Indeed, in the farm bloodbath of the early 1980s with unprecedented interest rates that turned into unprecedented farm suicides, Farmer’s Home Administration buy-back and loan forgiveness programs didn’t solve the problem either. Living through these cycles has made me seek for the reason why these life-lines fail.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the assumed weak link land availability is not the weak link. Whenever you attack a problem on the non-weak link, chances for success are dismally low. During these decades and watching these failures, I’ve watched our own farm apprentice graduates find farming success without owning any land or even borrowing for it. The most successful ones have not sought ownership at all.

Allan Nation used to tell me that land ownership was a defensive financial position for folks who had made money. He said controlling the land was an offensive position for folks wanting to accumulate wealth. In other words, in a wealth development strategy, don’t tie up your capital in land; keep it liquid in plants, animals, and lightweight (ideally mobile) infrastructure. If you look at the most popular writers in the pages of SGF Jim Gerrish, Greg Judy, Steve Kenyon you’ll note that none sunk a bunch of money into land. This is a curious thing and a theme I want to explore.

If land isn’t the weak link, then what is? I suggest three things: mastery, management, and marketing. Let’s look at them one at a time.

MASTERY. Another one of Allan’s axioms was that nothing beats experience. He used to tell young people who asked about going to college “you don’t need to attend college unless your vocation requires a license.” In other words, experience trumps academics when you’re doing practical vocations. And once you get into the labor force, you find out quickly that those credentials on the wall are not nearly as important as what you can actually perform.

Mastery comes from repetition. In his wonderful book Peak Prosperity, Chris Martenson explains that mastery requires doing something in every conceivable context. In other words, grazing management is easy when the rains come, the grass grows dependably, the herd of cows is fairly steady. But what about when drought hap- pens and you have baby calves and you lose a leased property?

Allan always encouraged newbies to start on stockpiled forage with dry cows in the winter. Why? That’s the least fragile context in which to start. The forage is out in front of you on the ground; dry cows are dietary forgiving; you aren’t running hither and yon making hay and doing all the other farm chores you put off until good weather. But until you’ve moved cows in the dry, in the flood, in the cold and in the heat, in snow, with new animals, old animals, well trained and poorly trained, you don’t become a master.

We process a lot of chickens here at our farm and I can teach someone how to gut a chicken in a few minutes. But mastery comes after you’ve done one with a full crop, old stewers full of female organs, on hot days, cold days, you get the picture. Sports commentators always yak about how many reps so-and-so has had the previous week. Why? Because the repetitions form the foundation to execution.

However you can express mastery, that’s what counts, and there aren’t shortcuts. That means you can’t wait for the opportunity; you need to blossom where you are with what you have. And if you’re looking for a next-gen replacement, don’t look for college degrees. Look for mastery.

MANAGEMENT. This includes everything from day-to-day work flow to building a team to handling the financial part of the farm business. Ranching for Profit schools make a wonderful point showing the distinc- tion between working effectively and working efficiently. Certainly we all want to be efficient, but first we must be effective.

Efficiently accelerating in the wrong direction doesn’t bring success. Allan used to say that almost all breakthroughs are break withs. What he meant was that most of the time the big catalysts to success come when we quit doing the wrong thing. Too often we think if we just double down on a procedure it’ll turn out okay. But doubling down on an incorrect procedure is not the answer; anyone who absorbs these pages knows we’re constantly showing ways to break with orthodox thinking.

In my view, management includes soft skills like relationships and communication as well as all the business aspects like margins and succession planning. I recently ran across a profound sentence I’m trying to repeat often in order not to forget it. I won’t quote it exactly, but here’s the essence: “What you least want to do is probably what you most need to do.”

This past summer a friend who is trained in Ziglar-speak tried to team me up with Tom Ziglar, Zig Ziglar’s son who now runs the Ziglar self-improvement organization, to offer their insights to farmers. Our message was “You’ve invested in how to farm; now it’s time to invest in you.” We had to cancel due to lack of interest. A similar response occurred a couple of years ago when SGF tried to offer a succession school.

May I challenge you a bit? I would suggest that having a good relationship with your spouse and kids beats the importance of growing a better calf any day. What we least want to do is what we need most. Grass farmers, we’ve got to get a handle on management; it beats owning land any day.

MARKETING. Zig Ziglar used to say that nothing happens until you have a sale. You can make it, package it, label it, and put it on a truck, but until you have a buyer, you don’t have a business. How true.

You can give farmers all the land in the world and even free money, but without market savvy they’ll get churned up by the commodity system. D. Howard Doane, author of the iconic book Vertical Diversification, pointed out that since the farmer is the one on the end of the value chain, he’s the one most susceptible to being whipped around. The farmer isn’t on the handle of the whip; he’s out on the end.

We farmers love to produce more, produce cheaper, and produce higher quality; we seldom get as excited about branding, story telling, running websites, and hawking our stuff. I’ve watched many struggling young farmers develop production skill but fail at finding a market or developing a market that would pay a decent price. Probably the most common misconception among farmers is that those who appear successful at marketing have some sort of magic sauce. I can assure you that they don’t; they work at it harder than others. They wrestle with exactly the right words in messaging, the right logo, the right one or two-word description of their product.

I heard a marketing guru recently say that if you can’t reduce your product to a one word description, don’t bother trying to sell it. That’s a tall order. As we enter the sound bite age, we all have about five seconds to keep would-be buyers from clicking away from our website. Does it say why rather than what and how? Simon Synek said almost everyone knows what they do; some know how to do it; only a handful know why but that’s what your customer needs to own.

To all you big-hearted, caring investors, it’s not the land. To all you aspiring dreamy-eyed wanna-bes, it’s not the land. It’s mastery, management, and marketing. Allan used to say that anyone who could make a place beautiful would never lack for land. Beauty flows naturally from mastery, management, and marketing. That’s our SGF mission.

Joel Salatin is a full-time grass farmer in Swoope, Virginia, whose family owns Polyface Farm. Author and conference speaker, he promotes food and farming systems that heal the land while developing profitable farms. To contact him, email [email protected] or call Polyface Farm at 540-885-3590.