Ukraine’s valiant defenders are creating lots of risk management metaphors for us to ponder.
Scorched Russian tanks with their turrets blown off could represent a lot of things.
How about:
- The vulnerability of the fearsome-looking to light, mobile, well-co-ordinated adversaries.
- The foolishness of relying upon old technology to face new challenges.
- The nightmare of being caught inside something that felt safe, but that you suddenly realize is a death trap.
The destruction of a Russian armoured battalion on both sides of a river it was attempting to cross could represent:
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- The foolishness of rushing into a high-risk endeavour without adequate resources, absent of thoughtful preparation and lacking brains.
- The folly of haste and desperation when the boss demands results regardless of reality.
And then there’s the sinking of the Moskva, the guided missile cruiser that was the flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet, due to some clever Ukrainian distraction with a drone and a homemade cruise missile hitting the Moskva’s blind side:
- A big asset can become an enormous vulnerability.
- When you’re transfixed by one threat you might be ignoring the one that’s going to destroy you.
- People can figure out ways to defeat you if they don’t assume you’re too powerful to beat.
Perhaps you’ll think this a bit of a stretch in terms of agricultural risk management, but when I look at Ukraine’s lightly equipped defenders grinding down the vastly superior Russian war machine, I see you farmers in your scattered thousands surviving the unforgiving decades of the past century and setting yourselves up to try to survive more. At the start of the Ukraine war, most of us wrote off the Ukrainians’ ability to fend off the Russians.
The forces arrayed against farmers can seem similarly formidable. Both the weather and the markets can destroy any carefully made plan and any reasonably arranged farm. In the long run, most prairie farms have failed.
On the day I’m writing this column, I have spoken with cattle producers about how they have coped with an unforeseeably bad spring calving season on the eastern Prairies, bringing calves into this world just as a series of terrible storms was hitting.
I’ve talked to farmers about how they’re doing last minute acreage flips between crops as they balance agronomic realities of late seeding with crop insurance deadlines.
And I’ve chatted with a farmer about balancing the need to avoid soil compaction with the necessity of running heavy machines across land.
In all these situations farmers are rapidly adjusting and adapting as present realities become clear to them. Battle plans don’t matter once the battle commences and the situation changes.
Governments and major companies have the power to persevere in stubbornness. They can indulge in reality denial, at least for a while. Governments can tax and legislate their way out of problems, even if that makes them unpopular. Major companies can just keep doing what they’ve always done if they have enough market share and market power, regardless of customer complaints, even if over time that erodes their brand and long-term prospects.
Farmers can’t do either of those things. They need to be flexible and adaptable, realize their limitations, and find innovative ways to stay alive even in the face of a terrible onslaught.
For the Russians, the war in Ukraine has been a demonstration of the traditional Russian approach of “if a hammer doesn’t work, use a bigger hammer.” If some tanks don’t take an objective, send more tanks.
Ukrainians don’t have the luxury to be that stupidly wasteful. Their existence as a state is at stake and they are limited in people and resources. They’ve got to figure their way through things and find some way to survive for the better days.
Like the odds for the Ukrainians, the odds for any farmer to survive in the long run might look doubtful to the outsider, but for those on the front lines, survival can bring flexibility, adaptation and a commitment to surmount the odds that can astound the most reasonable expectations.
