Myth: Farming involves mostly manual labor with no higher education needed.
Here’s the thing, farming is a business. Farmers are entrepreneurs. More and more people who are farm business owners have attended college and received an associate’s or bachelor’s degree in business of some sort.
On our farm, all of the guys who are involved have graduated college with 4-year degrees. Not that a degree makes all the difference, but what does make a difference, is their continual effort to learn and improve.
They have learned a lot from how dad and grandpa did things, and those lessons are valuable. However, without making changes and improvements for themselves, the farm business wouldn’t be able to grow and prosper.
My favorite conversations with my husband involve talking about things like soil biology and interactions with different nutrient levels and ratios. We have these in-depth conversations about what we’ve been learning and how we can implement changes to be better. We talk about the business side of things, along with marketing and ways we can be more profitable.
There’s a lot that goes into efficiently running a farm business. It’s a whole heck of a lot more than driving a tractor in circles around a field. Stick around here long enough, and we’ll show you some of the pieces to this puzzle.
Also I’m sure there has to be some level of providing your own maintenance on your equipment or you’d never survive. Maintaining equipment takes intelligence of a particular kind. I wish I’d have learned more about maintaining general automotive issues and household appliances back when it was readily available. it is a dying art.
Yes, we do all of the maintenance on our equipment aside from things where expensive computer technology is required or tools that we can’t afford to own. So we do most of it ourselves, and you’re right… we wouldn’t be able to survive without that knowledge because hiring out maintenance is very expensive!