Is Your Backup Quarterback Ready?

Profile Picture of Post's Author Jesse Petersen | Posted March 5, 2023

Recently my favorite professional football team had the opportunity to play in the conference championship game. My team and their opponent seemed evenly matched as the game started. Anticipation was at an all-time high, but just a few minutes into the game our starting quarterback became injured. The backup came into the game and soon it was clear that the team was not prepared with another effective option to get the win. Just like that, the millions of dollars and thousands of hours that were expensed for a championship season were all for not. It was clear that the team was not well enough prepared for this difficult, but yet still predictable, situation.

Life on the farm isn’t far off from the game that I just described. We put in countless hours and large financial investments to hopefully see our farms succeed. Is our backup ready? This message has never been more relevant than now for those of us located West of the Rockies. We are experiencing a higher-than-average snow year and a bit colder than average as well. We’ve seen everything from equipment freezing up to employees that can’t get out of their driveways due to high levels of snow. It is easy to blame the elements or to blame the salesman that we feel didn’t provide us with the right equipment, but will it change anything? We are the individuals that have the opportunity to decide if we will be better prepared for the next challenge or if we will find ourselves caught in yet another difficult self-fulfilling catastrophe. From my experience this winter, I would say that those that did succeeded were also more prepared by having these three things in common.

  1. Learn from others. Those that experienced fewer headaches in the cold season took the time to visit with others in the industry during the warmer months. Whether it was visiting other dairies as they designed their own barns for the winter cold or talking with their trusted advisors to prepare for bitter rough lower milk price, those farms learned more from the examples of their peers.
  2. Keep things simple. Many of the better prepared dairies found ways to simplify their operations. For some, it was as simple as setting an auto backup that they never had to think about so that everything was stored when the computer gave out to the cold. For others, it was a simple premix that saved time on an already chaotic day and helped reduce error when the lead feeder couldn’t escape the snowbank in front of his home.
  3. Grow leaders. One of the mantras at GPS is inspiring change, growing leaders. Strong leaders educate and excite those around them. They also teach through example. During these challenging times, we saw farms that had grown leaders that could take over when leadership was unable to be in their usual position. Maybe they didn’t do as good of job as the star quarterback, but they did enough to carry the farm to the next round.

Unfortunately, no farm can be perfectly prepared for every situation. You will see that in the three points of emphasis above I never said that those farms escaped perfectly without any bruises. However, we can be primed with the necessary tools to keep the negative encounters from hindering us to win the big game. The team that eventually won the “big game” also had a quarterback injury during its playoff run. The difference was that the backup quarterback was able to do enough until their star quarterback was ready the next week. The difference in preparation will have one team remembered for history and the other team will one day be forgotten.

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