I recently had the privilege to attend LAUNCH Festival in San Francisco, an event for technology startups, and I came away with some new ideas and views on how to attack problems that I myself and the dairy industry face.

A popular thought in the ag world is that we need to be concerned about how to increase production in order to feed the projected 9 billion people on the earth by 2050. Much research has been put into how to increase production, which has yielded spectacular results in many different commodities.

While I know some of you live in areas that are flourishing, there are many of us who live in areas that are simply withering on the vine, which at some point will make it difficult for us to attract new talent if our businesses are to continue to grow.

As we wrap up the fall harvest and start to prepare for next year here on our dairy farm, I have been doing some reflecting. There are a couple of practices rather common in agriculture we as farmers should maybe push back against. These practices are:

Two recent small experiences in my life have made me realize the need to be paying attention to the disruptors that we will be facing in agriculture as we move forward producing food for the world.

On our farm, we have an excellent team, many of whom have been here for more than 10 years; however, as we are starting to plan the next stage of our farm, updating our now 25-year-old parlor and freestall barn, we need to think long term about our team.

In a time when there is large amounts of concern in the agricultural industry due to low commodity prices, regulatory pressures and attacks against the technologies we use, it is easy to become discouraged. Lately, I have been taking the opportunity to step back. I have tried from my limited view to see the changes that are happening around us and have come to the conclusion that we are living in an era that history may look back on and view as the most disruptive in human history. I feel that depending on your attitude, it can be either extremely frightening or extremely exciting.

As I have been working on and finalizing our 2016 budget for the farm over the last month, I have been very pleased with our numbers. Despite that 2016 is going to be a tougher year cash flow wise due to low commodity prices, we are actually sitting in a pretty good place and are going to have the ability to do some debt reduction that will allow for us to be able to take advantage of opportunities as they present themselves over the next three to five years.

When my brother and I returned to the farm from our off-the-farm experience, we knew that in order to allow the farm to support three families instead of one, we needed to make some changes.