Have a Goal to Be a Better Leader in 2023? Here are Steps to Take

Fri, 21 Jul 2023 18:13:30 GMT

What makes an effective leader? How do great leaders narrow their focus and make the most of each day?

When you think about some of the most effective leaders you’ve met, have you noticed how they can seem to make the complex simple? Or how these great leaders can often distill their areas of focus down to a handful of priorities?

“Having interviewed dozens of turnaround CEOs I have seen this narrowing of focus with most of them,” says Mark Faust, president of Echelon Management . “They have a handful of priorities for the business’ growth, as well as a handful of priorities for their own leadership behaviors and role focus.”

Mark Faust will be speaking at the 2023 Top Producer Summit , which takes place Jan. 23-25. Register now!

Listen to him discuss the event with AgriTalk’s Chip Flory:

The first step in transforming your farm, Faust says, begins with you:

Are you willing to spend even a fraction of one hour a day to think about your strategy, like a good leader?
Are you willing to recruit the retired and outcasts, to build a great team?
Are you willing to build up a culture of hope, focused on an empowering vision and intensify their focus on winning not just for themselves, but the team, their community and their world?

“Your focus within your role as the leader has an amazing power to accelerate your organization’s growth,” he says. “A leader, just like a company, has a singular point of strength, that if intensified, gives the highest return on effort of anything else you could focus upon.”
Faust says the steps for a “Leadership Transformation” are:

Create a Vision of Your Role. You need to become the best version of yourself as leader.
Prioritize the top one to three organizational objectives with which you should be most involved.
Identify one to three of your organization’s greatest constraints, empower people, and kick off innovation efforts to ameliorate or eliminate those constraints.
Ask for feedback. Share with one to three of your team members your ideas, objectives and strategy. Ask: How am I doing as a leader? What is one thing I could do better to focus? Do not respond, just take notes and say “Thank you!”
Engage an outside third party from either your board or a strategic growth advisor to hold you accountable

“You can begin at any point in the year, but the power of this is that by improving yourself first, others follow,” Faust says.

Register for the Top Producer Summit!

Climate-smart ag initiatives: Commodity markets for a sustainable future

Fri, 23 Sep 2022 20:41:45 GMT

USDA unleashed a flurry of activity this year with the announcement of the $1-billion Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities Program, which aims to accelerate sustainable agriculture practices through producer incentives and premium markets for food that is produced sustainably.

Click here to watch the full 2022 Sustainable Produce Summit On-Demand.

Driven in part from downstream demand from consumers, retailers and food companies, production systems must be able to measure and monitor on-farm activity to create transparency and authenticity behind climate claims. Input companies and technology providers play a role in supporting producers for practice change and also helping CPGs and retailers understand production systems to reinforce and validate their consumer marketing.

How will the government’s $1-billion infusion influence how growers operate and drive premium markets for sustainable produce? That was the focus of The Packer’s panel discussion “Climate-Smart Ag Initiatives: Commodity Markets for a Sustainable Future” at the Sustainable Produce Summit on June 2.

Read related: Produce industry experts tackle zero food waste at SPS

“There’s no question that $1 billion in research funding is going to have impact,” says Tom Stenzel, principal with consultancy The Stenzel Group. “In the specialty crop industry, our land base is small compared to the row crops, so the majority of that funding is going to go to those areas. I think we have to know that. But we’re adamant that we want the fruit and vegetable sector to also get some of those government funds to do research in our space.”

One of the challenges that specialty crop producers face is setting standards for diverse growing operations in varied geographies and growing environments.

“We’re not a monolithic industry,” Stenzel says. “Soybean growers across the country can benefit from almost everything done for soybeans. For us, strawberries are different from citrus are different from bananas. And that makes it very hard in the fruit and vegetable sector to develop standards across the entire industry. So, I think what you’re going to see play out is each individual commodity group having to define for itself what are the best practices? What are the measurement criteria, and then how do you communicate that forward?”

Communicating those standards is crucial for food companies and retailers to earn the trust of consumers. In many ways, specialty crop producers have been on a journey toward regenerative agriculture for years, and there is an opportunity to help consumers better understand how production systems have evolved through criteria that can be measured and validated.

Input companies and other suppliers to growers can help construct messages around growing practices to create more transparency for consumers, says Rob Gibson, global portfolio manager for Certis Biologicals. He says biological controls, for example, once were relegated to small farms that were predominantly focused on organic production, but today about 90% of the company’s products are applied on conventional acres as part of an IPM program, and larger farms are investing in regenerative practices.

“About a month or so ago, I witnessed a 1,500-acre regenerative ag farm, and the guy was really into bios and how they worked, and when you looked at the farm and how clean it was and all the sustainable practices he was using, I immediately thought this can work [at scale],” Gibson says. “These commodity markets are driving the need for biologicals and other sustainable or climate-smart products because consumers are asking for it. This next-gen group of farmers are looking to know: How does their purchase of a product impact the environment? And then, how does regenerative ag play into the benefits [with consumers] that they’re looking for when their product goes to the grocery store and other shops? We continue to work in those integrated pest management programs and get into the spray tank mixes with these other chemistries and help reduce the amount of synthetic chemicals going into U.S. soil.”

Companies that are close to producers are in a good position to generate fact sheets on growing practices to help quantify sustainability metrics and messages to which consumers can relate. In the case of biological products, fewer “pounds on the ground” of hard chemistries, safer products for workers, and tank mixes that reduce sprayer passes all have quantifiable benefits that resonate with consumers.

“One way that we help communicate down the chain is through offering certifications,” Gibson says, adding that certifications and fact sheets on product benefits can help growers be confident in their use and confident in the climate claims they are making with their produce.

Third parties might be best suited to help growers to manage the data needed to verify climate claims. While a host of data is being collected at the farm level, synthesizing it into actionable claims might require purpose-built infrastructure that is objective and trusted.

“I think we’re at the infancy stage [for data reporting and verification],” Stenzel says. “For an individual grower to be able to measure even their own capacity, that’s the first step. Then you’d go to the next level of how do you aggregate that across a commodity? Who trusts who in our industry to share sensitive data? That’s going to be a big challenge. There will probably have to be a third-party data management system that ultimately aggregates data and then shares with customers that are authorized to view the data. We have some models in the food-safety space with third parties aggregating and sharing data. I think there will need to be a middleman between the grower and the end buyer to help aggregate the data in a way that’s then useful to all parties.”

Read related: These are the winners of Sustainable Produce Summit Marketing Awards