The Ultimate Machine

Extracted from the Farm Tender weekly Newsletter - Sign up and get the email every Wednesday morning before 5 am. www.farmtender.com.au

By Dwain Duxson

We all love to succeed at things. It's a bit of an ego thing. But, failure is always there and presents itself every day, we don't like it, but it's probably the thing that makes us better and more successful in the long run. It's also how we learn, and that's important.

In a work and business sense, you fail often enough, and you lose your job or go out of business. But then again, failing can make you a better employee or a stronger business. It's about what you learn and how you evolve that can turn failures into something much stronger.

In Farming, failing is regular, not in an overall sense because not many Farmers go broke, or if they do, it can take 20 years too. Failing is regular because we are dealing with natural systems that dictate to us more than we dictate to them.

That's why Farming is the ultimate failing Machine.

Experimenting and trying new ways to do things is rife in Farming. We are always trying to tweak the model to get a better result or adapt to those natural systems I was talking about.

As Farmers, most keep our failures close to our chest. The early adopters in Farming are the ones that embrace failure, they know that they are going to fail many times, but they know they have to, to get ahead.

Over the years, we have all learnt that if we want to grow better Crops, we have to conserve moisture. 30 years ago, it wasn't about that, it was just about growing a Crop, and if conditions went against us, it failed. It's now got to a point where conserving moisture is the most important thing in our Cropping programs.

Similarly, in Livestock production, if we don't containment feed our Breeding Stock during a drought, we are more likely to lose them or cause damage to our Land. In the past, we either lost them or sold them off because we couldn't afford to feed them. Or if they did stay on, our Land gets degraded enough that it takes years to recover.

These two examples are classic learnings from failure.

I love how Farmers are talking about the next drought. Why? Because they are ready as they have ever been for it. Some will even embrace it and see it as a challenge.

And hey, a drought can reset things for better times ahead. Look what the last drought did for Cattle prices. When it rained, the price shot up and kept going up for a couple of years, it's corrected a bit now, but it's probably found a new level, and the last drought was a big part of that.

In our Farm Tender business, we have had many failed products. We tried Car Broking, a Ute buying service, we tried a buy it now for Farm Merchandise, we had a Farm input buying service that failed, we have never been successful at Livestock, and I went to the US and tried to replicate the business there and failed.

We have exhibit A live on the website at the moment. Check out "One Minute Invoice" in our tabs at the top of the page. It has had about 20 people sign up in 6 months, and we will ditch and stamp it with "failed". I love it though. And we will replace it with something else that might just be one of those nuggets of gold.

Who knows....

End of message.