Risk Management for Ag Families: An Outreach Education Model for Improving Family Business Success

Did producers benefit from the risk management training program? Overall, responses to program evaluations indicate a positive impact on knowledge levels relating to risk management and the importance of incorporating family aspects into risk management decision making. Moreover, responses to the follow-up questionnaire indicate that respondents had taken steps to adjust their risk management, as it related to training provided in the workshop series. Every respondent indicated specific areas which they had evaluated in the two months since the workshop series to reduce production, marketing, family finance, and business financial risks. More than half the respondents reported evaluating overall risk management and strategic plans and 78 percent reported evaluating their production risk. What sessions or points within each session were most helpful? The specific financial definitions such as the Accrual Adjusted Income statement may have been clarified in the Surviving Ag session; however, producers who participated were already well educated in most of the financial areas discussed. For example: most participants already prepared budgets before training, and the vast majority of participants demonstrated general financial competency. Family Finance session responses showed general movement from “Agree” to “Strongly Agree” for statements regarding general knowledge. Questions regarding a pre-formed process for family finance and financial management showed significant improvement in attitude. These results indicate that a major impact of this session was to evaluate family financial management as an important component of a risk management plan for agricultural families. The Risks in Family Business workshop elicited the most positive responses of the four risk management workshops. This seems to follow findings in Fetsch et al. (2001) that human relationship risks in the management of the farm business were ranked as being a high priority amongst survey respondents. Overall, workshops incorporating family relationships with risk management concepts seemed to show the greatest increase in knowledge. Given the importance of family business and the prevalence of family involvement in farm businesses, it is somewhat surprising that most agricultural risk management education curricula do not seem to integrate traditional risk management concepts with family systems concepts. This paper presents a case for doing just that. We propose a conceptual model to guide curriculum development for extension programs on agricultural risk