The Rural Voice, 1991-12, Page 100M'N Martin Mills Inc.
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TURKEY — BEEF — DAIRY
VEAL — FISH — PET FOODS
Martin Mills Inc.
Lucknow Division
Lucknow
519-528-3000
or
1-800-265-3006
6 THE RURAL VOICE
FARMERS ARE MISSING AN
IMPORTANT BUSINESS SKILL
Keith Roulston, a newspaper publisher
and playwright who lives near Blyth,
is the originator and publisher of The
Rural Voice.
For the 20 years I've been covering
farm meetings I've been hearing that
farmers must start thinking of their
farms as a business, not as a way of
life. I haven't always agreed, but it
seems to me if farmers are going to be
businesslike, there is one key area they
have forgetten to look at.
It's always said that a farmer has to
be good at so many things on his farm.
He has to be a mechanic, a vet, a busi-
nessman, a plant scientist, and a chem-
ist, among other things. All small
business -people need the same kind of
flexibility — not just the skills of their
primary source of income, but the
buying skills of a purchasing agent,
the financial skill of an accountant,
and the people skills of a personnel
officer. But none of those skills will
be any good if they don't have the
marketing skills to get customers
coming in the door in the first place.
Few people can just announce they're
open, put a sign out front, and then sit
back and rake in the money.
But the problem of farming in this
century has been exactly that — mark-
eting hasn't been part of the business
for 99.9 per cent of Ontario farmers.
For the most part, farmers just pro-
duce their product, deliver it to an
agent, and hope for the best. It's the
way farming has gone for as long as
anybody alive can remember. Even
organizations like marketing boards,
where farmers have some control, turn
their marketing over to professionals
who live in the city, and may not
know a cow from a bull.
Imagine if any other business, such
as General Motors, was run that way.
GM would produce the cars, then
truck them off to dealers, and leave it
up to the dealers to try to sell them.
GM would then sit back and take
whatever the dealer was willing to pay
for them. It would be up to the dealer
to do the advertising — all GM could
do was hope they did a good job.
Imagine how a store would func-
tion if it didn't advertise, didn't put
out fliers, didn't employ someone to
design nice displays for the windows.
However, farmers have surrend-
ered most of this part of their business.
Marketing is one of the most
important skills of business. Every
business tries to make people think
what they have to offer is a little
different, a little better than what
anybody else has to offer. Marketing
is so important, that most franchise
operations, and most buying groups,
don't leave it to the weaknesses of
individual franchise owners to screw
up. If you buy from a particular
hardware supplier, the buying group
automatically charges a percentage of
each order for group marketing
through flyers, newspapers, radio, and
television. In one case, the company
even redesigns the store in the proper
colours, and arranges the shelves in
the way that their research tells them
will get the best results. The mer-
chant gets the bill whether he wanted
the work done or not. These people
realize how important marketing is.
(By the way, I can recall the
suggestion a professor made a couple
of years back that franchising might
be the way of the future for farms.
Didn't he have it backwards? In the
real world, the car producer tells the
dealers what to do, so shouldn't it be
farmers that are franchising processors
and sellers, and not the other way
around?)
The future for farmers is going to
be in marketing skills: whether it is the
individual farmer who has a unique
product filling a marketing niche
(from pick -your -own asparagus to
ostriches), or the group of farmers
who get together in marketing groups
to promote their product and get the
best price for it. Forgetting this most
important business skill today will
only lead to disaster.0