A member of our team said something recently that stuck with me: there's a shift happening in agriculture. A reordering of how people in this industry see themselves.
For a long time, the identity in agriculture has gone something like this: I'm a farmer. I was raised on a farm. I have a farm. And I run (own / lead) a business. The knowledge that mattered most was agricultural knowledge — how to grow, how to raise, how to operate.
That's starting to flip. Increasingly, the people who are thriving are the ones who've made the switch to: I run a business in agriculture and I own a farm.
It sounds like a small change in wording. It isn't. It changes what you spend your time.
I've Lived This Shift Myself
When Erin and I started People Spark Consulting, I thought of myself as a human resources consultant who also had a business. HR was my expertise. HR was my identity. The business part was how I delivered the expertise.
The real turning point for me was realizing what got my focus and my attention. I am a small business owner who specializes in HR and business consulting. Once I saw it that way, the job and my perspective changed. It wasn't just “get better at HR.” It was “get better at running a business” — sales, operations, finances, people decisions, growth — with HR as my area of expertise inside that.
Those are two different skill sets. We tend lean on our strengths (for me, that was in HR) and put less focus on the other skill set (for me, that was being a business owner).
Why This Matters in Agriculture Right Now
Agricultural knowledge — agronomy, operations, equipment — has always been the baseline. That's not going away, and it shouldn't. It's no longer sufficient on its own. The businesses pulling ahead are the ones being run with real business discipline: financial literacy, strategic planning, talent development, succession planning, marketing, change management.
None of that is “extra.” It's the job. It's just not the part of the job most people in ag focused on.
We See It in the Gap
This is what we run into when we start working with our clients. The investment in the “agriculture” side is way ahead of the investment in the “business” side. As an industry, we invest a lot in training our teams in the technical aspects of the job, like grading grain or product application. We have historically invested less in training our managers to lead. Both are important. Both bring substantial ROI to the business.
In agriculture, the data is sophisticated. The research is sophisticated. The tools and technology on the product and service side are sophisticated. That's where the identity has been, where the real work has been. We’re in agriculture, so that's where the money and attention went.
Meanwhile, the processes, policies, and structure that run the business — the systems for developing people, making decisions, managing change, planning for who leads next — are often years behind. Not because leaders don't care. Because it was never the focus of the job. It was the thing that happened around the real work.
The Question Worth Sitting With
If you lead an ag business — a grain elevator, a co-op, a feed operation, a seed company, a family farm — ask yourself which sentence you'd say first:
- “I'm in agriculture, and I run a business.”
- “I run a business, and it's in agriculture.”
Neither answer is wrong. The one you reach for first tells you a lot about where your attention has been going — and maybe where it needs to go next.
Because in the end, it's about how we define ourselves. That definition is the approach we take in our businesses — what we invest in, what we build, and what we let stay underdeveloped.