Is Your Business Prepared for a Crisis?

A crisis can destroy a business’s reputation and bottom line. A crisis can come from anywhere:  a surprise EPA, OSHA, or other regulatory inspection, a natural disaster, or a man-made catastrophe like the West, Texas fertilizer plant explosion last year. Though a business owner can never anticipate every crisis, there are certainly steps you can take to minimize the damage to your company.

It's Time for Real Property Law to Join the 21st Century

A farmer uses GPS to plant this field,
but his deed uses old metes and
bounds to describe it.  

I handle a number real estate transactions each year.  It is not uncommon to find an error in the property description located in a deed.  Often somewhere in the chain of title, someone made a typo which was then passed on from deed to deed to deed.  Attorneys call such mistakes "scrivener's errors."   These errors still occur today because the way property is described in deeds and other real estate documents has not changed much in past two centuries. Witnessing how much technology has improved farming in the past decade has made me wonder--why isn't the same technology being used to improve how we describe property boundaries?

Book Review: The John Deere Way

My last stop before heading to the lake for summer vacation was to the local half-price bookstore.  I was delighted when I found a previously-owned copy of The John Deere Way by David Magee, a book that promised to dive into the corporate culture of one of America's oldest corporations, Deere & Company. This book is a few years old already, but for the most part the topics are still relevant today.  Here is my book review.

Agricultural Leadership is Hard Work

During our Indiana Ag Leadership class trip to Liberia, West Africa recently, I saw something that has stuck with me since I arrived back in Indiana. At a United Nation's peacekeeping outpost in Ganta, Liberia--manned completely by Bangladeshi troops and engineers--I noticed a large saying hand painted on the side of a building. I could only make out a few words, but I wrote those down. When I returned to Indiana, I Googled the phrase to see what it said.  Here's what I found:

It is not enough to talk about peace. One must believe in it. And it isn’t enough to believe in it. One must work at it.

Indiana Ag Leadership Program Wrap Up

The previous five posts chronicled my journey with the Indiana Agricultural Leadership program to The Netherlands, Belgium, and Liberia. From an agricultural standpoint, the contrast between northern Europe and West Africa could not be more extreme.  Northern Europe has highly developed agricultural systems; West Africa's agriculture is rudimentary by comparison. Now that the trip is a few weeks behind me, I thought it worthwhile to provide some big picture deductions after observing these two different places in our world.

The Challenges Facing Liberian Agriculture

The last leg of our Indiana Ag Leadership class was to Liberia, West Africa. What we saw was dramatically different than the highly structured and sophisticated agricultural systems of Northern Europe.  Liberian agriculture struggles in every area where EU agriculture thrives.  The root causes are many.  After a week traveling across the country, I am no expert in Liberian agriculture, but I hope these observations are enlightening to those who may never get to travel to Liberia or similar places.  My analysis below means no disrespect to the Liberian people, many of whom work hard each day just to obtain food and water.  The people I met were very friendly and welcomed US visitors with open arms.

The European Union's Common Agricultural Policy

Our Indiana Ag Leadership trip to northern Europe included a visit to the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium. The European Commission is the executive branch of the European Union (EU). One of the main topics of discussion was the Common Agricultural Policy, or "CAP," the EU's version of the US Farm Bill.  The CAP has been an essential part of EU policy for decades and, like the Farm Bill, periodically undergoes reform.  The post explains some of the differences and similarities between the CAP and most recent Farm Bill.

The European Union's Reluctance to Embrace GMOs

One of the questions that was frequently asked by our Indiana Ag Leadership class in Europe was why the European Union (EU) has not embraced genetically modified organisms (GMOs) like farmers in the US.  The answers were very interesting.

A fact I did not know prior to our recent trip is that many EU countries do allow importation of GMO corn and soybeans from the US.  Such products are used as animal feed, even though the same products could not be sold on the shelves for direct human consumption (unless the proper labeling was attached). Thus, milk on the grocery store shelves in EU member states may have come from cows fed GMO corn.

Three Agricultural Lessons from The Netherlands

The Netherlands is a country roughly the size of New Jersey yet is the second largest agricultural exporter in the world behind only the USA. That statistic is made even more remarkable when one considers that The Netherlands has over 17 million people and much of the country is below sea level. Our Indiana Agricultural Leadership class recently toured parts of The Netherlands to examine how the country maintains such productivity.  Here are my top three observations:

Indiana Ag Leaders to Visit Dutch Farms, European Union and West Africa

I am fortunate to be part of the Indiana Agricultural Leadership Program (or AgrIInstutitue).  In the next few weeks, our class will be travelling to The Netherlands, Belgium, and Liberia, West Africa.  While in The Netherlands we will tour a dairy farm, the flower market, The Hague, and one of the world's largest ports, Rotterdam.  Our Belgium visit will take us to the European Union (EU), where we will meet with world ag leaders.  Our stop in Africa will be in the country of Liberia, on the central western coast.  We will work with organizations teaching and developing agriculture in that country.

Our trip was recently written about in The Liberian Observer, the newspaper of the capital city of Monrovia.

The Economist is Right: Farming as Rocket Science.

Like many farm kids, I grew up learning how to build rockets.  Though miniature in size, the same components that made NASA rockets fly worked with our model rockets too.  The rockets contained real engines, cargo bays, and parachutes that would deploy (if everything went right) on descent.  I never thought that building rockets had anything to do with farming, but a recent article The Economist has changed my mind: 

Tomorrow's Farmers: Cutting a Wide Swath

Instead of agricultural law, I'm going to break with the theme of this blog and write about a recent observation.  I've been blown away in the past few weeks with a number of America's young farmers.  They are a different breed. They understand the challenges ahead.  And their contribution to agriculture in the next 50 years is going to be huge.