Too often when farming, we lose sight of what is important. For instance, I worked with a farm that expanded their business from 500 acres to 3,000 acres of dehy alfalfa. The son, Kyle, was sleeping only a few hours per day in the shop while running the dehy plant overnight. In 13 days, he didn’t once go home to see his wife and kids who lived only 7 miles away. He had three kids under the age of 7. Kyle’s father acted surprised when he found out his daughter-in-law wanted a divorce. The family had a successful business, but it came at the expense of Kyle’s marriage.
The root issue this family had was that they focused on growing a successful business but didn’t focus on what it would take to grow a successful family. There wasn’t a mutual understanding about work-life balance between business partners.
In society, we have a divorce rate that is over 50%. The farming community has traditionally had a lower divorce rate due to rural cultural norms, but now that divorce is becoming more accepted in rural communities, the farming divorce rate is skyrocketing. Divorce threatens every farm’s insolvency, and more farms will go bankrupt within the next 10 years than in the last 100 because of it; it is an unspoken epidemic.
I firmly believe that a young farmer has to work more hours (3,000 or more a year) than his/her parents did to have the competitive edge in business. Equally, you have to invest more hours into having a successful marriage than Grandpa did.
Entitlement is the No. 1 mental barrier we have in farming, and is a springboard for so many other problems. We all know of neighbors who stop combining early because they think that the work can always get done tomorrow. We also know of neighbors who take their spouses for granted and don’t try to nurture the relationship daily. We’ve seen fathers who never play toy tractors with their kids in the sandbox, and then 20 years later, cry that “nobody is interested in the farm.” These are examples of entitlement. You and your partners have to assume you are underdogs and work daily to save both your farm and your marriage.
But how do you balance work with family life? Whether you are a farmer or software entrepreneur, hard work is the key to long-term success, yet family life is equally important. The challenge of work-life balance isn’t unique to farming. It is a challenge every business owner faces, and every business owner has a busy season where this is even more challenging. Whether you are the CEO of a software company who has to pull an all-nighter to fix a virus, or the owner of a lawn and garden store on Memorial Day, everyone struggles with work-life balance at some point.
The problem is that many farmers aren’t investing their time like it is money. We treat time as if it is an infinite resource, when in reality it is the most limited resource known to mankind.
Arnold Schwarzenegger once said, “You’ve got to sleep six hours, and that leaves you 18 hours in a day. You show me how you spend those 18 hours, and I’ll show you what your life will look like in 18 years.” Whether you are a governor, bodybuilder, actor or farmer, the rules are the same: We are all constrained by the same 24 hours in a day.
What is the point of a farmer spending 18 hours a day growing a successful farm if he doesn’t also grow a successful family or find happiness? Why be miserable? You have to really think through the time you invest into the business and then equally invest your free time into things you prioritize most in life.
The starting point for family harmony is to come to a consensus within the family about expectations. How many hours annually does each partner pledge to put into the operation? The average successful farmer works between 2,500 (50 hours per week) to 3,000 (60 hours per week) hours a year. This is factoring in two solid weeks of vacation.
This needs to be a deliberate conversation within the family. If Grandpa only wants to put 500 hours a year into the operation, that is fine. He has previously invested his hours into building the business. However, if you are in your 20s, don’t expect to put in a 40-hour work week if you want to be considered a partner in the business in the long term. If you want to be an owner, you have to take ownership because hard work is a common factor for any business.
In any entrepreneurial business where you have real responsibility, you have to work overtime during certain times of the year to be successful. The “buck stops here” has to be your mentality, and you need to do whatever it takes in order to get results. There are going to be times in the year when you can’t spend as much time with your wife and kids as you’d like. What is important is that you track this overtime, and in the weekly meeting discuss overtime hours with your business partners. Find consensus on when you can make up the time in a way that is fair to your partners and to your family. For instance, if you are a cash cropper and put in 120 hours a week in May while getting crops in, you might take banked overtime hours off in August to take your kids camping.
It is important to have this conversation with your partners. Don’t just pull out the trailer, load the kids up and leave for a long weekend without mentioning to your partners beforehand that you’re not going to be around. This exact scenario happens way too often. Instead, communicate with your partners at the beginning of the month about holidays and time off. If you are responsible for spraying crops, make sure that you aren’t taking extra time off during your busy time of year. Make sure you schedule it around your responsibilities. It is also a good idea to call your partners before leaving to double-check that they have all the information they need while you are away. Don’t just walk away and leave the farm in chaos.
In farming, we often obsess over the things we can’t control, like the markets, interest rates or the weather, but we don’t focus on the things we can control that impact success. The biggest thing that we can control is how we use each hour and what we get done daily.
If you can get your family to better communicate and plan for how to spend your time, you can quickly increase your farm’s profitability. I have seen several farms nearly double their level of profitability within a year because if you can get your family learning to better manage a finite resource like time, then managing financial resources is easy. I have seen many farm families adapt the slogan, “Invest time like it’s money,” and it changed their lives. Why don’t you?
