On many farms, this isn’t an issue openly discussed in the community, but it’s the white elephant in the room.

In farming, we have a culture of putting out the white picket fence and hiding our mistakes. Instead, we need to flip this attitude around and, instead of sweeping our mistakes under the rug, get really good at finding flaws and fixing them.

Ask any athlete … what do you do during the off-season? It’s the answer to that question that determines if they are a professional athlete or have a day job.

I once had a new client, an engineer, who suddenly had to take over the management of a sizable hog farm in a very tough financial position after his dad died of what was suspected to be a suicide.

I once dealt with an 82-year-old man who drove into town – without a license – and changed his will just to prove he still mattered.

A farm had been losing money for years, and only its rising land values kept the bank complacent. The wife, Ida, laid down the law that either the farm started making money or it was to be sold, even if she had to file for divorce. She loved her husband, Jack, but she didn’t want to spend her retirement years penniless because her husband had an addiction to machinery and wouldn’t listen to their vet.

Thomas Henry Ford created a system wherein he paid five times the standard wage to attract the best of the best. The flip side of this policy was that if you didn’t meet his standards, you got fired. Under Jack Welch’s leadership in the ’90s, General Electric fired their bottom 10 percent of performers every year. It created a culture of “Whose head is on the platter this week?”