Learning from your mistakes

As farmers, we should make every effort to learn from our mistakes. In fact, we should go out of our way to turn our errors to our advantage.

- Bill Kerr

Some mistakes are very obvious; for example, not reading a crop product label properly and spraying herbicide instead of fungicide. This is an error likely to be made only once.

Other mistakes are more subtle, and we need to train ourselves to observe them (and indeed every aspect of our farms) in order to improve production.

When I ask farmers where they would have been if they had known five years ago what they know now, they usually reply that they would have made a lot more money. They don’t realise that I’ve asked them a trick question; they wouldn’t be anywhere if they hadn’t made, and learnt from, their mistakes.

COMMON ERRORS