Farm Management

What is Farm Management?

Farm management is an umbrella term, covering a wide range of topics associated with running and maintaining a successful agricultural operation. Decision making, implementation, long term business strategy, sustainability, leadership, and organization management make up a large part of farm management, but the daily operations of running a farm like production practice activities, managing employees, applying pesticides,  and harvest inventory tracking, make up a large component as well. Farm management’s goal, then, is to maximize production and profit in a given farming operation.

Farm Business Management

Business management is just one aspect of farm management, and a strong farm management strategy will include a business plan that takes into account the long term goals and risks related to your organization. A quality business plan should include a vision, mission, and a detailed breakdown of the resources needed to meet your goals.

Solutions for Farmers

Farm management companies may offer consulting services, site assessments, and even on site training to help growers improve their farm management strategies. Such strategies range from employee leadership training, to more traditional cost benefit analysis to maximize profit.

While there exist a variety of courses and training programs for farm management, many growers opt instead to invest in farm management software systems that can help them to collect data and track the metrics they need. Farm or agriculture management software are digital tools that help growers centralize their records, improve their productivity, and make better decisions for their farms. High quality farm management software will allow growers to better record, monitor, and view data in meaningful formats, and should provide users with farm analytics and reports at various stages of production.

Farm management has become more and more data centered, and being able to understand your data is just as important as having it recorded. Consolidating data into reports, creating long term plans based on trends in yield and revenue, and having data ready and available at audit time are all crucial aspects of a farm management strategy.