What is farm management?

Farm management is the work of running a farm as a business, and the discipline has organized itself around functions since Henri Fayol named them in 1916. The shorthand for it today names four. Planning decides what to produce and at what scale. Organizing decides who does what. Directing puts people to the work. Controlling checks whether what happened matches what was decided, and acts on the difference. Most farms run the first three every cycle and leave the fourth open.

This page spends most of its length on the fourth function, and not because the other three matter less. Control is the only one of the four that can tell you whether the other three produced anything, and it is the one this page argues gets skipped most often, on the farm and in the software the farm buys. That second half is a position, and it is marked as one further down.

Where the definition comes from

Henri Fayol wrote the definition the field still uses, in a paper published in French in 1916. His sentence is short enough to quote whole:

To manage is to forecast and plan, to organize, to command, to co-ordinate and to control.

Henri Fayol, Administration industrielle et générale, 1916, translated by Constance Storrs, 1949

Five verbs in Fayol, and current textbooks consolidate them into planning, organizing, leading and controlling, with commanding and coordinating folded into leading. The fourth verb survives every version of the list. Nobody has ever proposed a definition of management that leaves control out of it.

Fayol's own title carries a wrinkle worth knowing, because it explains why management and administration get used for the same work. The French book is called Administration. Its first English translation, in 1930, kept that word and came out as Industrial and General Administration. The 1949 translation that became standard changed it to General and Industrial Management. Same book, same author, two different words on the cover, decided by translators nineteen years apart.

Oliver Sheldon had already tried to separate the two words in 1923, and his split is the one most people are reaching for when they use both:

Administration is the function in industry concerned in the determination of the corporate policy, the co-ordination of finance, production and distribution, the settlement of the compass of the organization, and the ultimate control of the executive. Management proper is the function in industry concerned in the execution of policy, within the limits set up by administration.

Oliver Sheldon, The Philosophy of Management, 1923

Farm management as a taught subject starts in the same period. George Warren began teaching it at Cornell in 1907, and the textbook he published in 1913 sold over 90,000 copies and set the standard for teaching farm management for much of the ensuing two decades. What Warren taught was broad, and the field stayed broad: choosing enterprises, sizing the operation, arranging rotations, financing it, carrying the risk. The definition the FAO adopts is deliberately wide: the process by which resources and situations are manipulated over time by the manager, with less than full information, in pursuit of goals, a definition first proposed by Dillon in 1980 and adopted by the FAO as its own.

The function that decides whether the other three produced anything

Controlling, in Fayol's definition, is making sure that everything happens according to the rules that were established and the orders that were given. That is the whole of it. It is not a reporting activity and it is not a scorecard. It is the function that compares what was supposed to happen against what did.

Current textbooks break that comparison into four steps: establish standards, measure performance, compare performance to standards, and take corrective action. Some versions of the same list run to five, splitting the analysis of a gap from the act of closing it. The number varies by textbook. The sequence does not.

Robert Anthony founded the study of this as a field in its own right, at Harvard in 1965, defining management control as the process by which managers assure that resources are obtained and used effectively and efficiently in the accomplishment of the organization's objectives. Notice what that definition requires before anything can be measured at all. It requires objectives that were stated in advance. A number with nothing to compare it against is not control, and it is not management. It is a record.

Rurivia works on this fourth function, and states the four steps in the vocabulary of a farm rather than of a factory. The correspondence is deliberate and it is the point: the company did not invent a cycle, and it is not asking anyone to adopt a new one.

Three of the four functions are not what Rurivia does today, and saying so is not modesty. Choosing which crop to plant, sizing the operation, structuring the debt, hiring and directing the crew: all of that is farm management by the definition above, all of it matters, and none of it is what this company currently builds for. The narrowing is a commercial focus rather than a claim about the boundaries of the field.

The sentence almost everyone gets wrong

"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it" is the most repeated sentence in management, and it is usually credited to Peter Drucker. Drucker never said it. The institute that carries his name and holds his archive published the correction itself, in an article whose author had used the line at a conference and was set straight afterwards by the institute's own director.

What Drucker actually wrote about measurement is more useful than the sentence he is credited with, and it describes the last step of the control function rather than the second:

Work implies not only that somebody is supposed to do the job, but also accountability, a deadline and, finally, the measurement of results, that is, feedback from results on the work and on the planning process itself.

Peter Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, quoted at the Drucker Institute

Accountability, a deadline, a measured result, and that result feeding back into the next round of planning. Read the closeout row of the table above again. Drucker described it and the industry went on quoting him saying something else.

Deming is the other name the sentence gets pinned on, and there the misattribution is worse, because he was arguing the opposite. The W. Edwards Deming Institute keeps a page treating the line as a myth, which quotes him directly:

It is wrong to suppose that if you can't measure it, you can't manage it – a costly myth.

W. Edwards Deming, The New Economics

The phrasing everyone repeats traces back to a newspaper column rather than to a management text. Simon Caulkin wrote it in 2008, summarising a 1956 academic paper by V. F. Ridgway on what happens when managers reduce everything they care about to numbers. Caulkin's sentence has a second half:

What gets measured gets managed - even when it's pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organisation to do so.

Simon Caulkin, The rule is simple: be careful what you measure, 2008

A warning, cut in half, turned into its own opposite, and hung on an author who never wrote it. The reason this matters on a page about farm management is that the truncated version is what sells dashboards. If measuring is managing, then a screen full of numbers is a finished product. Under the actual definition that screen is step three of four, and the farm has bought a comparison nobody has acted on.

Field research on how farmers actually decide points the same way. Öhlmér, Olson and Brehmer followed working farmers through their decisions and found that they prefer feed forward and compensation over post-implementation evaluation, along with quick and simple analysis over detailed and elaborate analysis, and continual updating over fixed plans. Read that as a design requirement rather than as a curiosity. A variance that surfaces after harvest has missed the only window in which anyone could have done something about it, and the farmer who ignores the end-of-cycle report is behaving rationally.

Two things worth measuring about a farm's management

Rurivia measures any domain of a farm on two dimensions, and they are independent of each other. The first is how good the evidence is. A claim can sit on five rungs, and each rung is a less noisy signal about what actually happened than the one below it.

Notice that the top rung stops short of saying the bank accepted the file. Whether a third party accepts a dossier is that party's decision, and a company that promises acceptance is promising something it does not control.

The second dimension is whether the loop closes, and it has four states, which are the four steps of the control function once more. A domain sits at whichever state it has reached. Most farms reach the second and stop, which produces history rather than control. A variance with no closeout does not count, and neither does a closeout with no named owner.

The four movements, and why the shape keeps reappearing

Plan, execute, check, act. The cycle is old and it was not discovered once. Shewhart described it for industrial quality in the 1930s and Deming carried it into management practice. Johnson and colleagues arrived at nearly the same structure from the other direction in 1961, by watching farmers rather than factories, and identified six steps of decision making: problem definition, observation, analysis, decision, action and responsibility bearing. Two independent routes to the same loop is a better argument for the loop than either one alone.

You rarely write the first standard

Everything above assumes a standard to compare against, and the common impression is that setting that standard is a big project the farm will get to when there is time. Most of the time it is not: much of the standard is already written, dated, and not by the farm. The machine's manual sets the service interval in hours, the label sets the rate and the pre-harvest interval, the permit sets the day it expires.

Setting the standard, to begin with, is less about writing than about gathering what already exists and putting it next to what happened. Out of that come concrete places to start, each comparing a record the farm already keeps against a standard that already exists, and each holding the same on three hectares or three thousand:

The six axes a farm gets managed along

Any domain of a farm falls into one of six areas, and the same four steps apply inside each. The split is not academic. It is how the work divides in practice, and how this library is organised.

Planning is where standards get declared, which makes it the axis every other one depends on. Nothing above the second rung of the evidence ladder is reachable without it.

Production covers the standards around field work: windows, rates, sequences, the machine's service intervals. The standards here mostly already exist, written by a manufacturer or a regulator.

People covers who was supposed to do what, when their training or medical certification expires, and what a labour inspector will ask for. This axis carries the heaviest documentary pressure and the heaviest privacy obligations.

Marketing covers adherence to a selling policy the farm itself declared. Checking whether you followed your own rule is safe ground. Being told when to sell is advice about the price of an asset, and this company does not give it.

Finance covers cost traced to a document rather than to memory, and the gap between what a cycle was expected to cost and what it did.

Sustainability covers permits inside their validity, traceable origin, and packaging with a documented destination. Concrete objects with dates on them, which is the only form in which this axis produces evidence a buyer will accept.

What farm management is not

Two different exclusions get confused with each other, and they are not the same kind of thing. One is about subject matter and is permanent. The other is about what this company builds today.

The left column is a statement about the field and it will not change. The right column is a statement about a product roadmap and it will. Worth being precise about the left one, though, because the shorthand invites a misreading. The exclusion is technical production, not agronomy as a discipline and not agronomists as readers. Farm administration is taught inside agronomy programmes, and a large share of the people managing farms trained as agronomists.

One more thing this page does not do, and it is a promise the company refuses to make. Rurivia does not promise better yield, a better price, or a percentage of cost saved. Rain and the market decide part of the result and neither one answers the phone, and a company that charges for outcomes it does not control is charging for weather. The manifesto makes that argument at length.

And one exclusion that is not on the list, because it is a misreading rather than a limit: the size of the operation. Management is not what a farm starts needing once it grows. Where the room for error is narrow the requirement is larger, not smaller, because the mistake a big operation absorbs into the year's result a small one absorbs nowhere. What changes with size is the shape of the instrument, not the need for it.

Where to start, depending on what you already have

If nothing is written down anywhere, the first question is not what to plan. It is what you would declare if someone asked you today. The planning axis takes that on one decision at a time, and none of it asks you to buy anything.

If the manual, the label and the permit folder are already on the shelf, the standard exists and it is waiting to be compared against what happened. The finance axis opens with the fuel invoice against the hour meter, a check that runs on records the farm already keeps.

If you would rather read first, the library is organised along the six axes above, and every technical claim in it points to a document you can open yourself. Each piece carries its sources, what it covers, what it deliberately leaves out, and the date it was last checked against them.

A farm that reaches the fourth step in one domain, once, has done something most operations never do in any domain. Worth noticing how narrow that first win is, and how little of it depends on buying anything.