Organic farming has gained traction in recent years as more and more people embrace healthy eating. With the growing demand, organic farmers must develop important skills in order to grow their organic farming businesses. If you’re already doing organic farming or plan to build a career as an organic farmer in the future, here are 7 tips to help you succeed in your venture:
- Be A Good Manager
Whether you’re running a big organic farm or a small one, having good managerial skills can enhance the success of your venture. Developing management skills enables you to manage the resources you have on your farm including farm workers, networks, shareholders, customers, and finances well.
- Maintain Organic Integrity
If you choose to become an organic farmer, you need to stick to it to the latter in order to be successful. In very simple terms, organic integrity is about adhering to organic standards throughout the production, handling, and even sale of organic products. Visit northern livestock supplies.
When you have organic integrity, you’ll be able to maintain your organic certification and build a brand that customers believe in. It also accords your credibility, allowing you to better discuss organics with customers and other stakeholders.
- Develop Organizational Abilities
Succeeding in organic farming takes good organizational skills. Organic farmers have to maintain a wide range of records regularly and in an accurate manner. Some important documents you’ll need to organize include certifications, invoices, labor contracts, invoices, and payroll.
Since certification plays a critical role in organic farming, misplacing these documents isn’t an option if your plan is to become a career organic farmer. As your venture grows, you may need to hire people to keep your paperwork organized. However, you’ll need to handle this task at the beginning.
Additionally, keep in mind that time is of the essence with organic farming. Organic food doesn’t always have the longest shelf-life, meaning you need to get your produce from farm to plate as quickly as possible. If you grow rice, for example, it’s important to organise rice transportation quickly after harvest to ensure your rice doesn’t go bad. Because you can’t use pesticides in organic farming, the sooner you get your rice out of the barn and into the mill the better, but this can take some significant organisation so you need to be prepared!
- Improve your Body Fitness
As an organic farmer, you spend most of the time standing, moving, pulling, or lifting stuff. Some days are spent in a truck, supplying products to clients in different cities. Other days are spent on the firm checking on crops. The days you spend on the truck driving may feel relaxing, but they can affect your body.
Besides farming tasks being physically strenuous, they are often undertaken under different conditions like cold, rainy, or hot environments that increase stress levels. Most organic farmers also work for long hours and only take a few days off. To withstand this working environment, you need to be physically fit and healthy.
- Develop Business Skills
While practical farming skills like taking care of animals and growing crops are critical to have, you’ll need business skills to succeed as an organic farmer. Like any other enterprise, running an organic farming business involves handling financial issues, marketing products, dealing with financial institutions, interacting with sellers and buyers, and a lot more.
Having skills such as budgeting, bill management, recruitment of staff, record keeping, business planning, and marketing among others will enable you to handle the business aspect of your enterprise. Although most of the farming activities like growing and harvesting are practical, you’ll be spending most of your time handling the business aspect of your firm until you’re able to hire someone to help you out.
- Build Your Interpersonal Skills
As you build an organic farming enterprise, your success will largely depend on how well you interact with people. As a business owner, having good interpersonal skills will enable you to engage potential consumers. This is particularly important for you as an organic farmer because many people don’t have information about organics and you’ll need to interest them in your products to grow your business.
Further, there’s a host of other people that you’ll need to communicate with including agricultural managers, employees, other farmers, certification agents, among others. Building communication skills, having the willingness to hang around people, and horning your debating skills will go a long way in making you a successful organic farmer.
- Be More Analytical
Learning how to manage livestock or grow crops is something anyone can do. However, the thing that separates an organic farmer from any other farmer is the ability to analyze issues and conduct their tasks well. In a dynamic farming landscaper, you need to apply analytical and critical thinking skills in order to assess and monitor the quality of your livestock, crops, and soil and address any problems that arise promptly.
Learn how to think on your feet. Having excellent analytical skills enables you to collect new information, analyze difficult situations, and craft an out-of-the-box plan to address them because some organic farming problems can’t be solved using textbook knowledge.
Final Thoughts
Organic farming isn’t just about growing crops or taking care of livestock. A lot more goes into making an organic farming venture successful. Besides the seven tips discussed above, being able to operate the complex machines on your farm, staying open to learn new ideas, and maintaining a cool head under pressure can enhance your success as an organic farmer.
