Grainswest - Spring 2023

Spring 2023 Grains West 28 and once Farmer Coach launched, he immediately signed up. The young farmer said continuous education is very important to him. His approach to farming is in lockstep with typical Farmer Coach clientele. “I’m extremely competitive,” he said. “That competitive drive and will to win makes me never OK with the status quo.” Today, Galbraith said he carries a progressive mindset and employs farming practices to match. “Every decision is a business decision. That goes into a lot of our decision-making: how can we do better every year? So, we set goals and when we get them, we celebrate them. And when we don’t, we ask, ‘Why didn’t we hit these goals?’” When he went through his first Farmer Coach seminar this past November, he wrote out one-, three- and 10-year plans for the family farm, where his parents are semi-retired, and his younger brother Jason has recently joined the operation. “That was very good to put that all down on paper,” he said, and noted it was the first time he’d ever thought of the farm in such a long-term way. Galbraith even appreciates that the program forces him to leave the farm. Too often, he has put his head down and done the work but didn’t take stock as goals were achieved. Failure to take a breather on occasion is a common problem among farmers and a contributor to burnout. “This is teaching us how to set those goals and acknowledge them, and when they’re hit, then reset goals instead of just pushing the goalpost.” He recalled having to answer 27 key questions at TEPAP about his farm’s health, addressing everything from accounting and HR to agronomy and marketing. While he and most of his fellow participants “failed” the self- guided survey, he was surprised to see the progress he had made five years later at Farmer Coach. “I thought we’d come a long way since,” he said. “There’s a lot more stuff we’re doing, but we haven’t hit the finish line with a lot of these things. It just reiterates to yourself that, OK, we have got to get back into some of these higher level management ideas and processes to really move forward on things stuck at 80, 90 per cent done. We need that last bit.” THE FARM FAMILY COACH Family relationships are complex at the best of times, so how do farm families navigate something as complex as farm transition? They call Elaine Froese. She carries conflict mediation certification from Mediation Skills in Winnipeg, and certified coach designations from the Hudson Institute of Santa Barbara (2003). The author of five books on vital farm topics, Froese has helped farm families through transition, divorce, mental health crises and more for the past 30 years. The Boissevain, MB, consultant has never been busier. This is due in part to the normalization of mental health conversations and a general effort to destigmatize mental illness. “Our specialty is helping farmers find harmony through understanding,” said the 66-year-old. She is the first to admit she’s not a therapist, nor a psychologist. What she is, however, is a good listener who asks, “really hard questions.” “Coaching is about helping create the next steps of learning, experimenting, networking and training of where you want to go as a family, and where you want to go as management and where you want to go in ownership.” The lion’s share of Froese’s work relates to farm transition. Negotiation of the family-management-ownership “Coaching is about helping create the next steps of learning, experimenting, networking and training of where you want to go as a family, and where you want to go as management and where you want to go in ownership.” —Elaine Froese FEATURE