I'm a great believer in serendipity and synchonicity, both of which mean things happen for a reason, so keep your eyes and ears open. I sat next to this man Ian Crafter in a flight from Melbourne to Sydney one day. I didn't say anything to him until we were 15 minutes from landing, but it turns out he's got a property not far from where we are here at Uamby and it turns out he's part of a farmers' "self help and mutual mentoring group" management group. Now the odds of sitting next to someone from our neck of the woods are slim. The odds he'd be part of management group when we are badly in need of business disciplines and looking for a solution that didn't involve 'consultants who really don't know much about farming' were slimmer.
Well, we joined this fellow's management group and attended our first meeting yesterday in Dubbo (the largest regional centre in the central west of the state). It's called Edge Management and it was started by a group of innovative farmers in 1992. It has around 30 farm families as members, divided into 5 or 6 "boards". Each board acts as a peer advisory panel for each member. They hold 4 meetings a year, at which each member presents their business plans and reports on progress, seeks advice or ideas from their peers, and swaps stories. Board members often become close friends. You're never working with people from your own district and there is strict confidentiality. The sessions are facilitated by experienced facilitators, in our case David Duffy and Jenny Webber.
The Edge system is all about systems - there are systems for everything managerial, such as planning new enterprises, prioritising workloads, succession planning (bringing the kids into the business and then retiring) and the like.
Again, like the Catchment Management Authority farm systems training program we were selected for, the calibre of the people on our tentative "board" is stunning. These are "smarter-than-your-average-bear" farmers, Boo Boo. All of them have far larger properites than we do (which means nothing because you can't compare properties further out on the plains with those closer in on the tablelands like ours). But they are all successful and plugged in and professional. I hope some of that rubs off on us... we're freshmen in this farming game, nowhere near to turning a profit. (That's because we bought a run down property and are restoring it to optimum production - note: not maximum production. We are conservation farmers. We grow healthy soil, we don't mine it.)
The members of the group were selected via Myers-Briggs testing to get a good range of leaders, thinkers, carers and doers. (more of the personality tests in a later blog.)
I couldn't take photos of the group as I don't know them well enough yet - later. Here's a photo of the white board instead.
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