As the farm’s leader, your decision-making process and the types of questions you ask yourself when making decisions can become a major asset to your farm business. I believe that when farmers are intentional about working to get better at decision-making, they ultimately improve their operations.

Where the farm operation is at right now is the outcome of all the decisions that the leaders have made prior to today. The farm leader’s key decisions truly define the future direction and potential of the operation.

I want to share six questions with you – a starting point when you need to make a decision for your farm. Taking time and committing to answering these questions can help lessen anxiety or even boost confidence in a particular direction. These questions are best targeted for the larger decisions you encounter in your operation, but can be used for any decision.

Define the problem
Question One: What’s the issue that I’m trying to solve? What’s going on here – what’s the real problem? It’s important to start by defining the actual problem, to get at the root cause. Otherwise, potential solutions – that look good on the surface – might only address symptoms of the problem, not the root cause.

This can often occur in agronomic situations. In the field, a farmer might observe some symptoms of nutrient deficiency, which leads him to believe that’s the problem. In reality, the root cause could be any number of issues – a pH issue, compaction, chemical carryover, a sidewall issue. There can be a whole host of things contributing to the symptom we’re seeing in the field. This can happen in our farm businesses, too.

Related:3 ways to stay plugged in to the farm business

Objectives and alternatives
Question Two: What’s the objective? What’s the outcome you’re trying to achieve? Being able to clearly establish a key objective helps paint a picture of what you’re trying to work toward. On one hand, there’s the problem – what you’re trying to move away from. On the other hand is your objective, or what you want to move toward.

Question Three: What are the alternatives? It’s important to be able to create some good alternatives to the first couple solutions that come to mind. It’s easy to come up with two different possibilities and think we just need to decide between them. But maybe the best solution actually isn’t either of them! Get thinking creatively – come up with three to five different ways to approach the problem, and evaluate each.

Keep questioning
Question Four: What are the consequences? If you choose a certain alternative, what will you then not be able to do? Weigh out the consequences of each alternative and the impact of those consequences.

Related:What does the banker want?

Question Five: How will I establish the things that I don’t know right now? Often, when you’re making a decision, it’s more like an educated guess. You might only know around 60% of what you’d ideally want to know. Ask yourself: Am I aware of the things that I need to know but don’t know right now? What might those things be? Who can I talk with to uncover those things?

Question Six: How much risk can I bear? New decisions or opportunities can also mean new risk for the operation. As the farm’s leader, you need to have a clear understanding of how much risk you can take on – and how much is too much. The risk-bearing ability of the operation and risk level of the decision need to be properly matched, so any potential consequences wouldn’t be too high for the farm to handle.

These six questions can be a good starting point as you’re working through a major decision. If you’d like some more perspective on any of these questions or others as you consider a decision, get in touch with our advisors.

Read the current issue of the Smart Series publication, bringing business ideas for today’s farm leader. This issue includes perspectives on what to do when a landlord asks for higher rent, how to find the right new employee, a farm business checklist for the spring season, and more. Get your free online issue here.

The opinions of the author are not necessarily those of Farm Futures or Penton Agriculture.

Frye is president and CEO of Water Street Solutions. Email questions to [email protected]. All questions and responses will be printed or published online as anonymous