The beginning of the end for consumerism, and new beginning for resource conservation?

This item was commissioned originally and will be first published by Feed Compounder magazine (May 2011 issue) on its Screenings page, though the views expressed are exclusively the author's. While aimed primarily at readers in the animal feed industry, I hope the content is also relevant to farming and other areas of UK agri-business. However, if you think it's bo!!o**$ please let me know.

Front runner in the 2011 ‘Most Telling Sound-Bite Of The Year’ was heard at a recent Guild of Agricultural Journalists’ press briefing, when the Agriculture & Horticulture Development Board’s chief scientist Prof Ian Crute pointed out that “we have to learn how to run civilisation on real-time photosynthesis”.

Prof Crute is a member of the expert group that oversaw the UK Government Office for Science’s Foresight project. The report—The Future of Food and Farming—was published in January from which the main point will be familiar to this journal’s well-read readers: A perfect storm of climate change, rising demand for food, and restricted availability of land, water, fuel and other key resource.[1]

The political significance of the report was highlighted at the GAJ briefing by Norfolk MP and chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Science & Technology in Agriculture, George Freeman.[2] He said that because the Foresight report was commissioned by the government, it had to be followed up with action. It returned farming to where it should be, he added, at the fulcrum of numerous key areas in politics and society. “From sideline to mainline” was my personal interpretation, noted at the time.

Motivated by the upbeat mood at the GAJ meeting, I’ve been reading the report’s executive summary and am grateful that bigger brains than mine are engaged in turning its worthy words into deeds. It’s a classic example of eating an elephant, which I hope can be done a spoonful and a time, though co-ordinating all the essential spoon-holders presents a gargantuan challenge.

Among these, one that sticks out like a dog’s what’sits is the observation: “Most of the economic value of food, particularly in high-income countries, is added beyond the farm gate in food processing and in retail, which together constitute a significant fraction of world economic activity.”

As I see it, in the real world, most brainpower and energy follow the money, where the objective is the employer’s financial success rather than society’s gain. For example, it’s much easier for an entrepreneur to get rich making people fat rather than making them thin. Similarly, the Foresight report’s mantra of ‘more from less’ is anathema to most agri-supply companies economic interests, who offer variations on the theme of ‘more from more’.

One place where new brainpower and energy is needed desperately, but where money is tight, is down on the farm. In all sectors of livestock and crops, there is a wealth of as-yet unapplied knowledge that is already proven scientifically to produce more from less. On page 34 of the executive summary, you will find a list of 12 “cross-cutting” (WTF does that mean?) actions for policy makers, number one of which is “spread best practice”. It explains how “this will require significant investment… to ensure that food producers… are equipped with the necessary skills to meet current and future challenges”.

But as every feed specialist in the country knows, for every willing recipient of wisdom and helpful, profitable advice, there are several who can find insurmountable obstacles to adopting change-for-the-better, no matter how compelling the case appears to be to its proponent. Can we force feed them with Foresight’s “necessary skills”? Of course not. But can we afford to wait for them to come round eventually or retire either?

I’m not seeking to be critical here to the Foresight report. On the contrary, when our grandchildren look back in 2050 from their perspective as one of 9 billion people, I really hope and expect that it will prove to have been a game-changing catalyst. But here and now I am concerned that the lucrative areas of processing and retailing already attract more than their fair share of intellectual food production horsepower and I’m struggling to see how this will change.

One possibility, of course, is that the Foresight report heralds the beginning of the end for unbridled consumerism, and a new beginning  for a societal paradigm that concentrates on conserving rather than consuming resources. In this brave new world, retail sales growth will cease to be a measure of a country’s success, with a consequent impact on retailers. Being denied the growth they pursue so aggressively and have come to expect, Tesco for example may develop their business activities instead into the food supply chain and even into farming itself, perhaps helping to solve the necessary skills problem along the way.

This might appear a fanciful notion, but until recently who’d have thought they’d become a second-hand car dealer (I kid you not, see www.tescocars.com). So surely it’s not inconceivable that Tesco agronomists could advise on crop protection strategies, which www.tescoagchem.com would fulfil and qualified Tesco farm technicians apply. Likewise, Tesco nutritionists could develop feed programmes, with off-farm materials delivered by www.tescofinefeeds.com to be fed by qualified Tesco farm technicians.

Clearly, it is naïve to expect this to achieve ‘more from less’; but it could help attain the important stepping stone in that direction of ‘more from the same’. Consider for a moment how this differs from what Genus RMS technicians do right now? What if farm vets decided to place qualified livestock technicians on clients’ farms, paid for via a share of improved financial performance? Indeed, the management at Bill’s Fine Feeds plc have been asking, “if vets could do this, could we too?”

In the veterinary world, compliance with prescribed medication is a significant issue (actually, the big issue is non-compliance, when medication is not administered 100% as prescribed). Similarly, how often are your company’s carefully defined programmes followed only partially or inaccurately? So at BFF plc, they’re recruiting agriculture graduates with strong practical skills, and training them up as livestock technicians to work alongside customers’ farm staff. Of course, they have to overcome various combinations of resistance, suspicion, envy, enmity or apathy when they first arrive. But if they’re any good and have been trained well, then helping the farm team to improve results and sharing the credit fairly soon overcomes these understandable and natural initial obstacles.

Imagine what might be possible in a typical 250-cow herd, for example. By improving dry period nutrition and transition management, then fresh cow care and re-breeding practices, it’s not out of the question that herd calving interval could be improved by 30 days in the course of a year, worth £90/cow or £22,500/year. On top of this, routine locomotion scoring and early intervention could reduce lameness incidence at a gain of £323 per case saved³. Among 250 cows, it’s not unrealistic to aim for a 50 case/year reduction, worth another £16,000/year. In the parlour, better routines and defences against mastitis could reduce the incidence of clinical cases from a typical 60 per 100 cows/year to 30. So 75 fewer mastitis cases at an average saving of £110/case yields another £8,250. So if each technician looks after just four such farms, they could realistically generate £190,000/year of improved productivity from the three elements described. At a 40:60 split with the farmer, that could produce £76,000 of revenue for the provider of the technician…plenty to pay them well and make a margin…and keep a good customer’s loyalty. Simples.

References

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[1] Foresight. The Future of Food and Farming (2011) Executive Summary. The Government Office for Science, London.

[2] George Freeman MP, 17 March 2011. Remarks to Guild of Agricultural Journalists briefing. National Motorcycle Museum, Birmingham. Author’s notes on file.

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming, viewed 21 March 2011. “Between 1979 and 1982, Ford had incurred $3 billion in losses…By 1986, Ford had become the most profitable American auto company. For the first time since the 1920s, its earnings had exceeded those of arch rival General Motors (GM). Ford had come to lead the American automobile industry in improvements. Ford's following years' earnings confirmed that its success was not a fluke, for its earnings continued to exceed GM and Chrysler's.”

[4] WE Deming (date unknown). Cited by Dr Johan Dreesen*, 8 November 2010. Opening address at Pfizer AH international veterinary symposium. Rhodes, Greece. *Group director ruminants, Pfizer Animal Health EUAfME.

[5] WE Deming, October 1992. Opening address to four-day seminar. General Motors Technical Center, Warren, Michigan, USA. Cited by  Scott M Paton, October 1992. Four Days with W Edwards Deming. The W. Edwards Deming Institute®. Viewed 15 March 2011 at http://deming.org/index.cfm?content=653.

[6] Margaret Nuttall*, January 2011. It's a load of old tripe! Burnley Historical Society newsletter no 112. Viewed 15 March at tp://www.burnleyhistoricalsociety.com/page10.htm. *Community history manager.

[7] Dr Johan Dreesen*, 8 November 2010. Opening address at Pfizer AH international veterinary symposium. Rhodes, Greece. *Group director ruminants, Pfizer Animal Health EUAfME.

If only clients would simply do as they’re told

This article was commissioned from me by the editor of Pig & Poultry Vet magazine.

April 2011

By Phil Christopher, BSc Agric, freelance writer

Recognition appears to be growing in the veterinary profession that social science and soft skills have a place alongside ‘proper’ science and hard evidence in the work of today’s fully rounded farm practitioner. At the 2007 British Mastitis Conference (BMC), the agenda headline for the first session of the day was ‘Motivating Change’.[1] At the 2009 Cattle Lameness Conference, the best poster presentation as voted by attending vets was about using ‘social marketing techniques’ in veterinary work with farmer clients.[2]

Of course, there is no shortage of research-proven clinical techniques and protocols with which most clients, if only they would do as they were told, could improve animal health and performance. However, in one of the BMC papers, Theo Lam from the Dutch Udder Health Centre said the vet’s problem was effective knowledge transfer to clients rather than knowing clinically how to solve the animal health problems on their farm.

He said farmers were no longer obedient to, nor impressed by, veterinary surgeons, and that explaining the clinical rationale to a piece of advice was often not enough to get it adopted. “Veterinarians need the skills to motivate farmers, to transfer knowledge, and to sell this advice as a product,” he states.

In search of answers, Lam says farmers are no different to people in other walks of life in that their ability to learn, and presumably apply that learning for their own good, can be enhanced by having information presented compatibly with their preferred learning style. Of course, any person’s preference is an unconscious, undefined concept unless they happen to have undergone learning style analysis as part of a training course or personal development programme.

His BMC paper refers to a model proposed by American social psychologist David A Kolb, whose theory is that an individual’s ability to learn will be enhanced by strategies that conform to their preferred learning styles.[3] For UK application, this was refined and published as The Manual of Learning Styles by Honey and Mumford,[4]which according to co-author Peter Honey offers four learning styles as “a convenient way of describing differences in learning preferences."

Like any categorisation, he cautions that they are a convenient over-simplification but nevertheless provide a useful starting point for discussion about how people learn, and therefore how to help other people learn more effectively.

A formal way to identify someone’s preferred learning style is using Honey & Mumford’s DIY questionnaire and score chart.[5] As far as I am aware, this model has never been used and published for a sample of UK farmers. However, according to Theo Lam’s BMC paper, a learning styles study among New Zealand beef and sheep farmers found 50% with the ‘reflector’ preference. “However, if one really wants to reach as many people as possible, all learning styles need to be given attention,” he says in the paper.

In practice, this theory may explain, for example, why farmer meetings attract what is often felt by organisers to be a disappointing response. In Honey & Mumford’s work, they describe ‘activist’ and ‘pragmatist’ preferences as gregarious and therefore more likely to attend gatherings. It also validates the use of the written word, on paper and screen, editorial and advertising, parochial and national, for reaching people with ‘reflector’ in particular, but also ‘theorist’, preferences.

With persuading clients to take a specific course of action in mind, an interesting question that arises is: What’s the difference between advising a course of action and selling it? One slightly provocative answer might be, lower and higher uptake respectively. As a receiver of advice, there’s an option to take it or leave it. When you buy an item, or buy into a concept, a higher level commitment to action is involved.

Someone with plenty experience of selling to livestock farmers is founder-principal of Precision Prospecting, Jim Williams, who uses a ‘Five Meaningful Encounters’ model in his company’s work for agri-supply companies.[6] “No matter how well they know a salesman, people rarely buy at the first time of asking,” says Jim Williams. “There has to be a warming up and courtship process and this usually takes several steps, five minimum.”

He explains that a typical sales campaign may start with an introductory personal letter accompanied by an advisory newsletter, mailed to a carefully selected group of potential users of the product or service on sale. Step two is a call a couple of days later from Precision Prospecting’s experienced, predominantly female, farming-savvy tele-sales team with the proposition. To those who agree to considering the proposition, step three is a letter or e-mail confirming it in writing and offering more persuasive detail. Step four is another phone call seeking an appointment for the client company’s representative to call and, at step five, the salesperson does their stuff and asks for the order.

The relevance of this model to veterinary practices is that an adaptation has been used successfully by the progressive pro-active livestock practice, Lambert Leonard and May (LLM), to promote the adoption of better animal health strategies to clients.[7] The focal point is a ‘commitment meeting’, usually a pub lunch, attended by a group of clients most of whom are non-users of the strategy, technique or treatment being promoted, together with one or two committed users.

Non-user clients are selected for invitation using practice records to identify that they would indeed gain from adopting the proposition. To persuade target clients to attend, bearing in mind that reflectors and theorists among them may not be habitual meeting-goers, repetition is essential. They would be invited by letter and in person by their regular vet, supported by phone contact from the office, possibly more than once in each case.

“As far as possible, we don’t leave things to chance,” says LLM partner James Allcock. “The aim is for farmer targets for each initiative to receive the same message from several different sources, which of course means getting our story aligned among practice colleagues.”

At the meeting itself, the programme includes evidence and experience of the gains to be made from adopting the proposition together with some essential theory and instruction. In addition to this, our source says there is one more compelling secret weapon: “Once you’ve persuaded clients to attend, then social pressure comes into play,” he explains. “It is human nature to want to conform and most people will fall into line with their peers.”

In practice, the process is even more effective with seven encounters than five. Many who attend these meetings need to go home and convince other participants in the farm business, so it’s important they get help with this and with countering any buyer’s remorse in the aftermath of making an important decision.

Amid the day-to-day individual consultations between veterinary surgeons and clients, often the least difficult bit of the job is identifying the problems and action needed to overcome them. The tough nut is getting action, particularly to achieve full- rather than partial-compliance. Often, clients require some education—remember Theo Lam’s knowledge transfer bottle-neck—with the vet ideally placed as personal tutor. With gregarious clients, involving them in problem-solving groups with like-minded farmers may be effective. For those who rarely attend meetings, then good old-fashioned individual consultation supported by good documentation to help theorist and reflector clients come to their own conclusions is likely to be more successful.

So how do you and practice colleagues identify different client types? (i) You could buy the Honey & Mumford materials and do a learning styles analysis with each one, but in reality…? (ii) Otherwise, it’s down to each vet’s skill in observing and reading people: Do they experiment with new ways of doing things? Are they gregarious or not? Do you see or hear evidence that they read the printed material you give them? Do they read a lot? Do they take a long time to make decisions, possibly based on seeing lots of evidence first?

There are clues on every farm, and in some respects the successful advisors of the future—vets included—will be those who can develop the soft skills involved in reading people and handling them accordingly as much as their ability to perform clinical diagnoses and prescribe effective solutions. Maybe the time is right for including more soft skills and social science in veterinary surgeons’ original training and ongoing CPD.

References

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[1] British Mastitis Conference 2007. Proceedings. Institute for Animal Health, The Dairy Group, ADAS.

[2] Helen R Whay et al, 2009. Managing cattle lameness: A novel approach using social marketing techniques. Proceedings of the 2009 Cattle Lameness Conference, 25^th March 2009. University of Nottingham.

[3] David A Kolb (1984). Experimental Learning. Prentice-Hall, New Jersey. Cited by Theo Lam et al (2007). Making changes in improving udder health: A veterinary perspective. Proceedings of the British Mastitis Conference 2007. Institute for Animal Health, The Dairy Group, ADAS.

[4] Peter Honey & Alan Mumford (1982). The Manual of Learning Styles. Peter Honey Publications, Maidenhead. www.peterhoney.com.

[5] Peter Honey & Alan Mumford (2000). The Learning Styles Questionnaire: 80-item version. Peter Honey Publications, Maidenhead. www.peterhoney.com.

[6] Jim Williams (2009). Personal communication. Telephone conversation/interview took place Friday 12^th June 2009. Precision Prospecting, Framlingham.

[7] James Allcock (2009). Personal communication. Interview took place Friday 13^th February 2009. Lambert, Leonard & May, Whitchurch.

CONFIDENTIAL: Bill's Superior Animal Feeds 2011 strategy

This item was commissioned originally and first published by Feed Compounder magazine (January 2011) on its Screenings page, though the views expressed are exclusively the author's. While aimed primarily at readers in the animal feed industry, I hope the content is also relevant to farming and other areas of UK agri-business. However, if you think it's bo!!o**$ please let me know.

18 December 2010                                                                                          [c.1,600 word body text]

New year resolutions

Hot off the Wikileaks website, here are some extracts from the 2011 business plan from Bill’s Superior Animal Feeds Inc, for your eyes only, of course.

[1] Measure the company’s carbon footprint. Amid December’s second white-out in as many weeks, climate change remains plausible though global warming less so. However, ignoring this local blip, one of Bill’s rules that actually can apply to many aspects of life is “if you’re not sure about something that could be important, assume and plan for the worst. Then if it does happen, we’ve done our best; and if it doesn’t, bonus.”

So with global warming in mind, Bill gives it the benefit of the doubt and assumes it is taking place, though whether you take this view or not, I’m told that reducing your personal and business carbon-footprints alike makes good financial sense. None other than Peter Willes, one of the Nocton partners, said just that at Reaseheath College’s sustainable dairying conference last month. Incidentally, he and one other speaker were beacons of excellence in an otherwise sea of mediocrity and self-interest on the platform.

According to Willes, reducing one’s carbon footprint requires and indeed drives the elimination of waste. In whatever form we buy it, carbon is expensive. So by reducing carbon leakage, you need to buy less and therefore save money…simples. It may even be the case that this feature’s sponsor offers a service in this arena, though of course neither they nor your correspondent would be so crass as to promote it overtly here.

[2] Get out more. Luck = preparation x opportunity. See Screenings, November 2010.

[3] Measure the company’s true business potential. In less than five minutes, the UK populations of dairy and beef cows by county can be found on t’interweb. Indications of other farm livestock numbers by county are also available. So there’s no excuse here at BSAF Inc for not knowing how much potential business is out there. We think we know our market share and we think we know who’s who among our rivals. But are we right, assumption being the mother of many **ck ups? This is the year to commit £10-15k to an independent analysis of our market potential, our current standing relative to competitors, and our current standing as seen by customers and prospects. Be prepared, dear colleagues, to face some home truths.

[4] Buy a farm. If Bill’s Superior Animal Feeds Inc’s balance sheet isn’t strong enough to finance this, what have we been doing the past 10 years? By putting our money where our mouth is, or walking the walk as well as talking the talk, we demonstrate unique commitment to customers, indeed we become one of them. Land is a finite resource and they’re not making any more; on the contrary, it’s being consumed by urban sprawl. And driven by population growth, economic development, limited water availability and climate change, there’s a seismic global shake up coming in the economics, politics and distribution of food, out of which farmers can become masters of the universe where food is valued, rightly so, more highly than possessions.

At the Reaseheath conference, Peter Willes also voiced his faith in the strategy of buying land. No matter how you managed them, he suggested that dairy cows would always need about an acre of land each. And even in most difficult trading years, he said land-owning farmers still did ok through growth in the capital value of agricultural land.

Of course, managing a farm presents many challenge, but so does running a Superior Animal Feed company. Clearly, we will need to invest in the right people and management systems (including Lean Management…see point 5) as well as land and livestock. How different is that to what we’re already doing? Exactly.

[5] Make friends with Mr Tim Wood and, in parallel, approach independent agricultural economist Dr Kay Carson about (i) how the principles of Lean Management could be used to improve BSAF Inc profitability; and (ii) how its farm application on which she is working could be made available to our customers as a benefit of placing their feed business with us.

Dr Kay was beacon number two at the Reaseheath event. Shortly after an audience member had claimed, in posing a question to a previous speaker, that the average cost of producing milk was 28p/litre, she said a net margin of 10p/litre was the realistic target on the Lean Management’s monitor farm in Cheshire. By the way, her co-beacon Mr Willes also stated that his current three-herd, 1,000 cow set up in Devon was making money at the current milk price.

Of course, the concept of lean manufacturing or lean production as pioneered by the Toyota motor company will already be familiar to many readers. Its goal is ensuring that all a company’s expenditure is on things that customers are willing to pay for; it seeks to eliminate expenditure that does not contribute value, as defined by customers’ willingness to pay for it, to the company’s output. It’s about creating more value that customers will buy, requiring less work and using fewer resources.

In Toyota’s hands, lean manufacturing is reported to be based upon eliminating the seven deadly sins of unnecessary Transportation (off site), Inventory, Movement (on site), Waiting, Over-processing, Over-production and Defects. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our new ally and guru for 2011, Mr Tim Wood.

Although here at Bill’s Superior Animal Feeds Inc we don’t manufacture monogastric feeds, we know that pig and poultry producers have been friends with Tim Wood for many years. Unsupported by UK or EU subsidies, harsh free-market realities have meant that staying in business depended on driving unnecessary costs and avoidable losses out of the business. Those realities are now just as applicable to our dairy and beef producing customers. So if we can help them adapt their businesses to be more sustainable long term, without spending any money on things they don’t value of course, then we can gain a competitive advantage over our rivals. Incidentally, Dr Kay also offered a good definition of sustainability in a farming context, which was “sufficient profitability with minimal environmental impact and high animal welfare”, sufficient presumably for re-investment and a satisfactory return on investment for shareholders.

With thanks to the Lean Enterprise Institute (http://www.lean.org/whatslean/principles.cfm) for the bullets points and graphic that follow, here is a process for the adoption of lean principles, which the website says is “easy to remember, but not always easy to achieve:

·      Specify value from the standpoint of the end customer by product family.

·      Identify all the steps in the value stream for each product family, eliminating whenever possible those steps that do not create value.

·      Make the value-creating steps occur in tight sequence so the product will flow smoothly toward the customer.

·      As flow is introduced, let customers pull value from the next upstream activity.

·      As value is specified, value streams identified, wasted steps removed, and flow and pull introduced, begin the process again and continue until a state of perfection is reached in which perfect value is created with no waste.”

Simples (again). Thank you Tim Wood and Kay Carson.

[6] Not unconnected philosophically from number 5, teach everyone who works here at BSAF Inc, and anyone else who’ll listen, the principle of leaving everything slightly better than you found it. For example, pick up one piece of litter as you walk down the street; if everyone did this, we’d live in a tidy world, we’d not need as many street cleaners , and out council tax and business rates might be lower. Or even wash up your own cup and one or two others at the sink in the mill kitchen. Incidentally, it is Bill’s belief that all parents who aspire to make the world a better place for their children should begin by teaching them this rule and embedding it for life into their fertile subconscious psyches.

[7] Invest more in the company’s telesales team. The obvious purpose is to make sure all Bill’s Superior Animal Feeds Inc’s customers get a reminder call or text message when their next order is due, then further telephone calls from us to take the next order then confirm delivery and the customer’s satisfaction thereof. But the bigger picture is to make the telesales team an integral part of winning new customers. BSAF Inc’s move in this direction is based on the Five Meaningful Encounters model, as mentioned in this feature (attributed to Jim Williams of Precision Prospecting) in the June-July 2009 edition of this esteemed journal.

To recap, the essential components of this system include a database of customers and prospects, a capability to produce effective personal letters and advisory newsletters, an opening gambit, a defined step-by-step process, and close integration between the telesales and on-farm sales teams. The main principles are (i) a minimum of five worthwhile encounters need to take place between a potential customer and feed supplier before it’s worth asking for an order; (ii) that a well trained and suitably equipped telesales function is capable of contributing meaningful encounters, particularly in taking the relationship from cold call to warm, at much lower cost that the on-farm team; then (iii) the on-farm team is thereby accelerated towards the point at which they can ask for orders with a realistic prospect of getting yes as the response. The Lean Goal is minimising the cost of (a) getting the opening order with a new customer, and (b) generating repeat orders where little or no sales support is needed by customers.

Happy new year and best wishes for a successful 2011.