Taking stock of your life and farm business

The Irish Farmers’ Association (IFA) Farm Business Skillnet and Macra Agricultural Skillnet have partnered to provide business training in a three-part webinar series presented by Lynaire Ryan and Paul Bird, both with years of experience working with farmers in Ireland and New Zealand.

The intention is to provide support and motivation to farmers to evaluate their farm business and life direction in the midst of these challenging times. Attendees will be encouraged to examine their goals for the future, and evaluate their business and life.

What Makes People Lucky?

The first in the series will be motivational, titled ‘What Makes People Lucky?’ Often guilty of looking at greener grass elsewhere, farmers sometimes presume they were not as lucky.

This presentation will definitely have you thinking differently. According to Dr. Wiseman, author of The Luck Factor, people are not born lucky or unlucky, they make their own good and bad fortune. Lucky people use four basic principles to create good fortune for themselves.

The good news is that each of us can enhance our luck through practicing these principles. After a webinar that will be a little bit different, your luck might just multiply as you integrate these principles into your life.

7 Steps to evaluate your farm business

Another area in farming that can often be neglected is evaluation. Too busy to step back from the day-to-day tasks, we must be prompted to actually examine the business and how it is performing. As margins get tighter and economic challenges increase, we can no longer let everything else take priority. Our family farms must be profit-making businesses.

The second webinar in the series is titled ‘7 Steps to evaluate your farm business – Are you on track to achieve your goals?’ This will serve as a broad whole farm assessment tool. This session will cover an approach to evaluating seven areas of your farm business to ensure you have a deeper understanding of your current situation. Identify what to focus on to get to where you want to be.

Refresh your Direction

The final webinar ‘Refresh your Direction’ will bring the learning together. Having taken stock that we can influence our own luck and business performance, this will provide us with the platform to develop a small number of goals and actions for 2021 and beyond.

This series will predominantly appeal to established farm owners. It will be presented in an encouraging and exploring manner, to introduce and widen participants’ thinking about strategic management and business evaluation. It is not intended as an in-depth planning or financial evaluation webinar.

Farmers’ goals and values

Lynaire Ryan is an agri-business consultant in the New Zealand dairy industry, and along with her husband Richard Todd, an accountant, they run Business and Strategic Management courses for farmers. They work part time in New Zealand and Ireland.

In Ireland, they work alongside IFA and Macra Skillnet, Teagasc, individual dairy companies and many leading dairy farmers, with their company called Agribusiness Education. Paul Bird is a senior project manager for DairyNZ.

He is based in Auckland, New Zealand, married to Anne, who is from Cork and they have two children. For the past 27 years, Paul has worked with dairy farmers in New Zealand, Ireland and the UK. He has a special interest in business planning and evaluating farm businesses in line with farmers’ goals and values.

The sessions are in the evening from 7:30pm to 9:30pm. They are free to members of the IFA, Macra and those who have previously completed a Business Brush Up or Strategic Management Course with Skillnet.

Non-members can attend at a cost of €50. Further information and booking is available by visiting: macra.ie/skillnet.