A COURSE geared for farming families who are striving for business growth, sustainability and succession planning is getting ready for it's fifth round, offering families or individuals the chance to create and achieve their vision for the future.
The Planfarm Academy, which started in 2018, was developed in Western Australia and is one of the country's leading agri-related learning platforms, providing a gateway to professional development for farm businesses and agribusiness professionals.
The Business of Farming course runs over eight weeks with 20 online video modules along with worksheets, plus three group video conferences during the course.
The design of the course uses the 'flipped classroom' approach and is popular with farmers who are spread far and wide, allowing time, travel and cost to be minimised.
Planfarm project consultant Peter Newman said they encouraged families to do the course together as most farms were family businesses.
"The first exercise is for farmers to develop a vision and some goals towards that vision which is arguably one of the most important parts of the whole course," Mr Newman said.
"When you get multiple family members to sit down and write a vision for the future together, that's really powerful and the rest of the course then helps them work out how to get there."
The course offers modules around business analysis, including financials and metrics for measuring business performance, as well as grain and livestock markets.
There's also outside help from Thorntons Accountants and Business Advisors which provides modules on tax, while a lawyer presents on the legal side of succession planning.
Mr Newman said the idea for the course started when the Grains Research and Development Corporation-funded Planfarm to conduct a scoping study to see if there was a need for business training for farmers.
"About 95 per cent of the people surveyed said they wanted and needed the course to be available," he said.
"We decided to develop the course ourselves so we could build it from the ground up and get to include exactly what we thought was important for farmers to know."
So far, the Business of Farming course has had more than 160 farm businesses go through it, while Planfarm's newest course, Introduction to Agronomy, has had about 80.
The new course is for people who have had no formal training in the field of agronomy and was developed to help farmers gain a greater understanding of broadacre farming agronomy.
Mr Newman said the course was delivered by Planfarm's experienced agronomists, covering the foundations of agronomy.
"A lot of farmers learn from experience and are very good at it, but they haven't had the opportunity to have formal agronomy training," he said.
"The course offers the foundation of agronomy, mainly around soil, nutrition weeds, pests, disease, pasture management, technology and crop establishment."
Together, the two courses give the opportunity for people to become as good at the business of farming as they are at farming itself, while gaining a greater understanding of broadacre farming.
Mr Newman said to be a successful farmer, people have to be really good at operations, agronomy and business.
"We don't have an operations course as farmers are experts at that and we wouldn't want to pretend we can provide assistance with it," he said.
"Some people are good at all three, but farmers need those strengths and if they have a farming business that might be strong in two of those aspects and not the third, we're trying to provide training for them to up-skill in the area they need."
The next Introduction to Agronomy course starts next Tuesday June 2, while the Business of Farming starts in July and both courses have been reduced in price due to the COVID-19 pandemic.