Mind Your Farm Business — Ep. 76: The power of peer groups
Peer to peer learning is incredibly useful in any business, and agriculture is no different. Put simply, peer groups allow for the collective sharing of great ideas. Perhaps just as valuable, they also allow for the collective learning of hard lessons, so that peers within a group don’t have to make the same mistakes.
Evan Shout, president of Maverick Ag, says that when farmers see themselves as entrepreneurs with common challenges and problems to solve, they can begin to really leverage the experience of others through peer to peer sharing.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re a 5,000-acre or a 10,000- or 20,000-acre farmer, the issues are still the same, there’s just a few more zeros behind the answers,” Shout says. “[A peer group has] literally given a whole group of guys the chance to speak up, the chance to be heard, and have some of their peer group actually who’ve done it before, or who are having the same issues, collaboratively come up with solutions.”
