Always be on the lookout. If you don’t have your eyes open and checking for possible new opportunities, they aren’t necessarily going to present themselves at your farm office. Some ways to keep a good lookout? Talk with others in your area who have their eyes out for the same types of things, or read or listen to news about new advancements that could be applied to farming. You could talk with others who have operations you admire (doesn’t need to be in your geographical area) to ask about new things they’ve recently tried or are trying out.

Make sure it fits. There are any number of new ideas and approaches out there when it comes to pretty much every aspect of farming. But the process of evaluating those new things is critical – it has to be right for your operation, not right for the other farmer down the road. This starts with having a clear handle on your farm’s future vision, mission and major goals for the near term. The opportunity you’re evaluating needs to be a clear fit within each of those categories – it must advance your operation closer to where you want to be in the future.

Implement as a trial, then evaluate again. If the new opportunity is something that can be implemented in your operation on some sort of trial basis, this can be a good chance to get an idea of whether something truly works for you before going all in. Some opportunities, such as land purchases, simply don’t lend themselves to a trial period – so spending time to do feasibility studies on that potential purchase is important. But many other new ideas can be brought into your operation on a trial basis first – and farmers have been doing field trials for ages. Consider other areas of your operation where you can use a trial first, and then re-evaluate potential fit using what you’ve learned.