Farming on a small family farm can be a very cyclical way of life. A ten-minute hailstorm can wipe out a year’s worth of work. Cycles are 12-18 months, and can stretch into a 24-30 month downturn with two years of bad weather in a row. I draw the analogy to the current economic downturn as this–it’s the weather.  In bad-weather scenarios, the wisest path can often be to dress and act accordingly.

In my experience, farmers (I include my mom, Fern, who’s 82 and still living on my family’s farm back in Indiana, still going at a pace that would be considered ‘active’ for someone half her age) are some of the most improvisational people you’ll ever meet. Here are three ways that family farmers typically deal with or hedge against the down cycles:

1) Improve infrastructure. There’s always a fence that needs mending, an implement that could use some re-tooling, an out-building in need of paint.

2) Diversify the portfolio. The farms that best weathered the bad weather had multiple revenue streams: A range of crops and livestock; they produced non-farm income by taking jobs that helped support and maintain the family farm lifestyle. Could mean doing mechanics’ work; could mean playing with a dance band, or auctioneering. I never knew a farmer that didn’t have multiple ways of earning money.

3) Education. The farmers that are most resilient were always learning. Reading, networking, experimenting with new (and old) agri-tech, expanding their horizons — those were habits. One’s mind, like everything else on the farm, had the obligation to grow.

In what seems like a lifetime ago, I worked on the film Country, which stars Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard. It was interesting in a clinical kind of way to be on location outside Waterloo, Iowa, helping tell a story about a family farm that was floundering and doomed. As part of my work, I did video interviews with half a dozen Iowa farmers, some of whom had lost their farms, others who’d figured out a way to survive and and, in some instances, thrive during an economic downturn that put the squeeze on them like other business sectors are getting squeezed today. Along with observing Lange and Shepard, who were falling madly in love at the time, canoodle steamily on exterior sets where the winter temperatures were well below zero, the farmer interviews were the most compelling part of my Country gig.

What I learned about those farmers was an affirmation of what I already knew: The farmers who survived and thrived were nimble, flexible, idiosyncratic in their approach to their business. They were not bound by scripted behaviors–doing things the same way their folks and grandfolks had done it. The farmers who stuck to the old script? Those were the ones who lost their farms. The farmers who got creative and responded to the changing times by changing their behaviors are the ones who lived to farm another day.

I remember talking about this with Wilford Brimley, an actor who was just coming into his own at the time Country got made, at age 65, after many, many years of effort to succeed in his chosen profession. Forty years of taking bit parts, working odd jobs like blacksmithing, and dealing with a level of rejection that most businesspeople cannot even fathom let alone tolerate, had steeled Brimley to the point where he had little sympathy for family farmers or anyone else who gave up–on anything. “These people losing their farms,” he said to me at the time, “are the same ones who’d be losing the dry cleaning store if they owned that.”

Brimley made two points with that statement. First, that a good part of success is simply never giving up. In Iowa, where ‘they’re so by-god stubborn they can stand touching noses for a week at a time and never see eye to eye’, the survivors and thrivers at the time were just as all-around relentless as Wilford Brimley. Second, Brimley’s statement highlights how there are qualities inherent in businesspeople who can navigate through the turbulent waters of a down economy that set them apart from those who get swamped. It doesn’t matter whether your profession is farming, acting or dry cleaning. These qualities can all be grouped under the rubric of…(guess what?)…improvisation.

Tags: Country, Diversification, Downturn, Economy, Education, Farmers, Farming, Improvisation, Infrastructure, Iowa, Jessica Lange, Sam Shepard

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 8:09 pm and is filed under Creativity, Entrepreneurship, Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.