Loading...
The Rural Voice, 1991-12, Page 100M'N Martin Mills Inc. iiia in Lucknow Division v .0. > _ " ` - ,z« { db yam,-. 4 AND ' _,a av 1 i` COMPLETE LINE OF ANIMAL FEED VETERINARY SUPPLIES HOG — BROILER — LAYER 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