This week Paul Neiffer has a conversation with Kristjan Hebert, managing partner of Hebert Grain Ventures in Moosomin, Saskatchewan.
In 2009, Hebert and his wife, Theresa, combined their 1,200 acres with 4,500 acres owned by his parents, Louis and Karen.
This year the operation will farm around 27,000 crop acres. The mix can include canola, malt barley, yellow peas, hard red spring wheat, rye and oats.
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Massive growth doesn’t happen by chance. To sustainably expand, Hebert followed three principles:
- People are an investment not an expense.
- Technology is an optimizer and enabler.
- Working capital and risk management are the engine.
As Hebert looks back at his farming career, he says one of his top mistakes was expanding the operation before expanding his team.
“I’d try to find expansion, and then once that was found I’d go find people,” he says. “That’s a pretty good way to create insanity. So, we’ve switched that philosophy pretty significantly in the last 10 years. Now we find good people or good people come to us and we make room for them. Then we go find expansion.”
Even though Hebert says his labor costs per acre are higher than many other farm operations, the strategic shift was vital. This focus is supported by a constant focus on financial metrics.
“We are calculated risk takers, so even though it seems sometimes we might expand pretty hard or pretty fast, we have a pretty good understanding of how it will affect our operation overall,” Hebert says. “We have monthly dashboards on all of our key metrics.”
Hebert says his team analyzes everything from debt service to working capital levels to expected margin by crop to hours worked. They also have an instant record of how much of each crop is forward sold.
Now Hebert says expansion opportunities more frequently come to his team versus them chasing opportunities. They carefully assess each one.
“If the calculated risks feels right and our team is excited for it, we’ll take it on,” he says. “But we also say fairly often that we want to farm our newest acre every bit as good as our first acre. And when we can’t do that, then we’re going to pass it up.”
All decisions at Hebert Grain Ventures are guided by the operation’s legacy statement: “To leave the dirt, financial statements, team members, community and industry in a better state than the last generation.”
