The numbers seem stark – barely one in five farmers has a written business plan.
An extensive survey of 500 Ontario farmers conducted last year, which mirrors earlier research, found only 22 per cent of them had a written business plan. Still, most of the other 78 per cent had thought about it.
“Even those most pessimistic about the value of a business plan would say they were curious and thought maybe they might be beneficial,” says Colin Siren, of Ipsos Forward Research, which conducted the survey for the Agricultural Management Institute (for more, go to agriwebinar.com and search ‘ami’).
So why not have one?
“Most said they didn’t have time or didn’t become a farmer so they would have to do all this paperwork,” says Siren.
This edition of the Canadian Farm Manager features three farm families who found the time to create, and profit from, business plans.
The stories of the DeRuycks, Bishops, and Broughtons are all different, and not meant to be statistically representative. In fact, there may be no such thing.
The study did find farmers with business plans share some characteristics. For example, they’re more likely to have increasing farm sales and were found to be more business-oriented, open to opportunity, and confident about the future. But you couldn’t define them by traditional methods of classifying farms, such as by sector, size, gross revenue, or debt.
Even Siren says numbers don’t really tell the story. It’s when you meet and listen to them, as Siren did while conducting more intensive focus groups, that you can clearly see a common link among the people that the survey dubbed “the planners,” he says.
“These people had a different way of speaking about their business and a different way of looking at opportunities,” says Siren.
“They were people who embraced change and were more likely to view their farm as an opportunity, more likely to be looking at diversification, and more interested in new ways of doing things. When you meet these people, the benefits of planning really become apparent.”
Siren also noticed one other common trait among the group – having seen the results that come from planning, they want to do more of it.