Life Lessons from the Farm about Running a Business

Ben and Arvid Huth spent their youth on the family farm observing and learning from the hundreds of daily life lessons. Today, in the midst of constant change, the value of those lessons is still consistent.

ARVID: The challenge we’ve been facing with coronavirus, or COVID-19, for the last several months is it’s been difficult. You know, in the 2008 housing market, our sales were down 20-30%, and then they slowly came back. Well, our sales for April (2020) were down 90%. That’s a whole different world from being down 20 or 30%.

BEN: It’s tough to be on a roll with everything just trucking and going and then all of a sudden everything comes to a screeching halt. And you, what decision do you make first?

ARVID: Farming itself has prepared us for life and business because every farm is its own business. There’s no question that at the end of the day that whether you’re a small farm or big farm, you have to make money. You have bills to pay.

BEN: Being raised on a farm and having a budget, and seeing my mom and my dad and how they would spend that budget… you only have so much money that you brought into the farm that you could use to buy tractors, fuel, seed and feed, and the things you need.

You had to stay within that budget.

And that budget was always fluctuating when you sell milk or you sell grain, that’s a commodity item. It’s going up and down, and some years, you know, we could spend more. Some years we couldn’t spend anything.

So things like that you watch and you learn from that, you know? When we need to get by, we do those same types of things but on a different scale. When you have to get by, you’re just forced to get by.

BEN: Growing up on a farm, I also think taught us to save for a rainy day. Don’t borrow money if we don’t have to. Ben and I don’t waste money on frivolous things. We don’t need to drive the newest vehicle. We get good mileage out of our trucks. We run the wheels off of them and in the end, that helps us run a more efficient business. It helps us to offer a better product to the customer at a more fair price.