Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Agribusiness managers who can manage people well can signifi cantly impact both pro-
ductivity and fi nancial success.
Human resources management
encompasses managing
two areas: the mechanics of the personnel administration, and the fi ner points of motivating
people to offer and contribute their maximum potential. Decisions here include how to
organize the fi rm, where to fi nd people, how to hire them, how to compensate them and how
to evaluate them.
Today's lean agribusiness fi rms continue to demand more performance from their man-
agers, sales force, and service and support personnel. For instance, in addition to superb
selling skills, sales representatives will be expected to have intimate knowledge of technol-
ogy and a fundamental understanding of the general management problems of their producer
customers. Service personnel must be able to maintain increasingly complex equipment.
Technical support staff will need to be experts at assimilating and using the massive amount
of production data that a large dairy farm or crop farm using site-specifi c management
practices will generate.
These types of demands will require agribusinesses to hire individuals with greater initial
skills as well as with the ability to grow into different jobs throughout the course of their
careers. Agribusinesses will need to be fl exible while providing continuing education and
development of key skills. Some examples of such skills are general business, negotiation,
problem-solving, technical, information management, and communication. Recognition of
raw ability, and then development and fi ne-tuning these skills and abilities will be the human
resource challenge. Managed well, that challenge will profi tably produce for the company.
And, this is the role of human resource management in the food and agribusiness fi rm.
Unique dimensions of the food and agribusiness markets
It may be easy to argue that management theory and principles are the same for any type
of business enterprise. The largest businesses in the country such as General Electric
and Wal-Mart and the smallest one-person agribusiness are guided by many of the same
general principles. And, in many cases, good management is good management, regardless
of the type of fi rm, or the market it is operating in.
Yet key differences between large and small businesses or between agribusinesses
and other types of fi rms arise in the specifi c business environment facing the organization.
While there are similarities, the markets facing General Electric's wide range of businesses
differ substantially. The automotive industry is different from the retail industry. Likewise
the unique characteristics of the food production and marketing system cause management
practices to differ for agribusiness fi rms. Our job is to better understand the similarities
and differences in the functions and tasks of a food and agribusiness manager compared to
other managers.
As a professional, the manager might be compared to a physician. The knowledge and
principles of medicine are the same, but patients differ in such vital details as age, gender,
body mass index, and general health. The physician's skill is to apply general medical prin-
ciples to the specifi c individual to create the optimal outcome for the patient given the unique
set of circumstances at hand. The manager, utilizing specifi c tools of marketing, fi nancial,
supply chain management, and human resource management, must attempt to solve the
problem at hand and create the best outcome for the fi rms long-term profi tability.
Food and agribusiness markets differ from other markets in at least eight key ways, infl u-
encing the business situation that food and agribusiness managers must practice. While one
can fi nd examples of other industries where each point is important (for example, seasonality
