Investing in continuous improvement and continuing education

Continuing education and continuous improvement means investing in yourself, your employees and your business by gathering knowledge and applying it effectively. Balancing time spent working “on” your business (i.e., management activity) against the time working “in” your business (i.e., labour) is often dictated by the emergent need, preference and paradigms. What does this look like?

For example, restoring water flow in a frozen water bowl is a much higher priority than completing routine maintenance on aging infrastructure. Simply replacing the old water bowl with a new version of the same style indicates there may be a paradigm in play—you may use Brand X water bowl on your operation because it’s what the local agriculture supply store carries. Deciding to install a windbreak to protect the water bowl to reduce the chance of freezing would be an example of an incremental improvement.

Taking time to research advancements in watering appliance technology before replacing infrastructure is a very specific example of continuing education that leads to operational improvements.

This type of education often happens through Internet searching, attending a tradeshow, through peer-to-peer interactions or combinations these.

Another example of education and improvement is a surprisingly simple one: record keeping. Capturing calving data and entering it into a program is a necessary activity (labour) to develop reports that are subsequently used to make decisions (management) regarding bull purchases.

This information can then be used to identify what characteristics or criteria would be beneficial to further improve your herd’s genetics.

Spending time calculating your bull battery’s collective expected progeny differences (EPD) as it shifts with additional data (more calves) and is adjusted for bulls that are culled allows you to evaluate prospective new herd sires in the sale catalogs with an additional level of scrutiny.

To phrase it another way, entering the data is $25 per hour work that allows $250 per hour work of identifying prospective new herd sires to take place, leading to $5,000 to $10,000 (or more) purchases that have $50,000 or greater impacts on revenue.

Attending educational events, seminars, webinars, workshops is often considered something that would be nice to do— if there was time. Alter the paradigm and think about attending educational events as an investment that increases your knowledge base. If you learn just one thing every day over the course of your lifetime, you will build up a lot of education.

Learn about upcoming events by visiting the Agricultural Events Calendar, contacting your local Regional Services office or by calling the Agriculture Knowledge Centre at 1-866-457-2377.