Links to jump to pages of individual chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27
Section 1. Introduction to farm management |
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| Chapter 1 | Managing the Farm in an Integrated World Economy. This chapter discusses our changed and changing world, the farming environment, and the major opportunities and challenges that many farmers face. |
| Chapter 2 | Management. This chapter is an overview of management that looks at goals; management activities; farmers as general managers; the management functions of planning, organizing, directing, and controlling; business functions; strategic versus operations management; human resource management; management skills inventory; and decision processes. |
| Chapter 3 | Business Plans. This chapter introduces the business plan, its basic outline, and an example business plan. |
Section 2. Basic lessons from economics and policy affecting farming around the world |
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| Chapter 4 | Lessons from Microeconomics. This chapter includes covers lessons and points from microeconomics a farm manager needs to know in order to understand his or her business and the business decisions of others. |
| Chapter 5 | Lessons from Macroeconomics. This chapter summarizes important lessons and points from macroeconomics that are key to understanding changes and trends in the national economy and the rest of the world. |
| Chapter 6 | Government Policies Affecting Farming around the World. To help farmers understand events and discussions in other countries, this chapter is a summary of major types of policies and their impact on world farming and trade. |
Section 3. Strategic management and marketing |
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| Chapter 7 | Strategic Management: Planning. This chapter introduces strategic management and then concentrates on strategic planning: identification of stakeholders; management values; and vision, mission, and objectives. |
| Chapter 8 | Strategic Management: External and Internal Analysis. This chapter explains external analysis of the competitive environment, including Porter's five forces, and internal analysis of the farm's operating environment with an assessment of the farm's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. |
| Chapter 9 | Crafting Strategy. This chapter shows how strategy is crafted by starting with a description of generic strategies and continuing with complementary strategic actions, specific strategies for specific situations, tests for evaluating strategies, improving strategic planning, using scenarios in crafting strategy, and incorporating risk management into crafting strategy. |
| Chapter 10 | Strategy Execution and Control. This chapter includes developing an organization, motivating people, allocating resources, strategic project plans and programs; the balanced score card; monitoring key indicators; corrective actions; and strategic product versus strategic process. |
| Chapter 11 | Marketing Basics. This chapter is a summary of marketing basics. |
Section 4. Financial analysis and management |
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| Chapter 12 | Financial Statements. This chapter introduces and explains the main financial statements: balance sheet, income statement, statement of owner's equity, and statement of cash flows. It focuses on the format and structure of these statements as described by the Farm Financial Standards Council. |
| Chapter 13 | Financial Analysis. This chapter contains the core of financial analysis, including the major measures of financial position and performance for solvency, profitability, liquidity, repayment capacity, and financial efficiency. It also explains the processes for initial analysis, benchmarking, enterprise analysis, and diagnostic analysis. |
| Chapter 14 | Financial Management. This chapter is an introduction to financial management covering the time value of money, estimating the discount rate, sources and uses of capital, calculating loan payments, estimating the cost of credit, preparation of the cash flow budget, and financial control. |
Section 5. Farm planning and quality management |
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| Chapter 15 | Enterprise Budgets: Uses and Development. This chapter describes how enterprise budgets are developed from whole-farm records and from economic engineering. It includes examples of crop and livestock enterprise budgets. |
| Chapter 16 | Partial Budgets. This chapter describes how partial budgets can be used to analyze changes in the plan and includes several examples. |
| Chapter 17 | Whole-Farm Planning. This chapter includes enterprise selection, development of the whole-farm budget, and projection of the cash flow budget and pro forma financial statements. |
| Chapter 18 | Operations Management for the Farm. This chapter is a summary of lessons from operations management and includes process mapping; improving processes; and scheduling operations using sequencing and dispatching rules, project management, and input supply management. |
| Chapter 19 | Quality Management and Control. This chapter starts with defining quality and includes product and process quality, the costs of quality, quality management, lessons from the quality gurus, total quality management (TQM), ISO 9000 standards, hazard analysis and critical control point (HACCP), developing process control systems, and tools for process improvement. |
Section 6. Capital asset management |
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| Chapter 20 | Investment Analysis. This chapter covers investment analysis (or capital budgeting) including economic profitability versus financial feasibility and several examples of investment analyses. |
| Chapter 21 | Land Ownership and Use. This chapter covers land use and control, including ownership, leasing and renting alternatives, and some points and procedures for rent negotiation and determining a fair rent. |
Section 7. Risk management |
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| Chapter 22 | Risk Management. This chapter explains the sources of risk and the basics of risk management: making risky decisions, payoff and regret matrices, decision trees, probability of success; and scenarios for risk management planning. The chapter includes an appendix on estimating probabilities. |
| Chapter 23 | Production Contract Evaluation. This chapter expands on risk management by looking at production contract evaluation, including the types of production contracts, a process for evaluating production contracts, and a production contract evaluation checklist. An example contract is included at the end of the chapter. |
Section 8. Human resource management, business organization, and succession planning |
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| Chapter 24 | Human Resource Management. This chapter introduces human resource management, starting with a discussion of human and employee needs as well as future labor force diversity and then describing the basic steps of human resource management: assessment of needs, job descriptions, matching employees to jobs, recruiting, interviewing, hiring, training, motivating, leading, directing, evaluating performance, and compensating (cash wages, benefits, incentives). The chapter ends with some ideas for improving communication for family and non-family management and employees and improving labor efficiency. |
| Chapter 25 | Business Organization. This chapter introduces the business organization chart, board of advisors, legal business structures (sole proprietorship, partnership, general and limited partners, limited liability partnership, subchapter-C corporation, subchapter-S corporation, limited liability company, joint ventures, cooperatives) and some legal and tax implications. |
| Chapter 26 | Farm Transfer and Succession Planning. This chapter introduces the concepts and basic tools for succession planning on farms, starting with a discussion of the farm business life cycle (entry, growth, and exit) and some ways to start farming, and then looks at the process of farm succession: transferring between generations, farming together or separately, multi-person operations, and communications among stakeholders. |
Section 9. Farming in the future |
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| Chapter 27 | Farming in the Future. This chapter includes some possible views of farming in the future. The chapter discusses specialization, moving up and down the supply chain, contracting and vertical integration, redesigning the production system, and the need for broader management skills. |
Economics of Farm Management in a Global Setting, Wiley 2010 |
ISBN: 978-0470592434 |