Foreword:
A friend of mine shared this article with me when it first came out in January 2020. I have shared some of it with a few of you here in British Columbia, but I always thought it would be great to share the whole article with everyone. The author, Kevin Deknudt, and Marc Juan, editor-in-chief at PLM magazine, have both graciously allowed me (with help from google) to translate and share this article with you. They also wanted to share their greetings to you out on the West Coast reading this and they are happy to see this article being talked about 4 years later.
To me, this was one of the greatest detailed articles I’ve read out there to help you understand the full extent of what makes another farm successful without having to step foot on it. We have all seen the quick screen shots shared on social media of some amazing numbers but it’s always hard to fully decipher what we are really looking at and what is behind those numbers. I’d like to suggest a certain mind frame when going through the article and the numbers. I think we often look at something that is different, in another area, or even our neighbours and we either try to quickly discredit certain aspects or we try to justify our own performance or lack thereof by saying things like “this wouldn’t work here because…” or “they’re doing well here but look at this number…” As if the point was to show that you can do one thing but not the other. Try to read this and think: How could we make this work here, how could we achieve similar results, what would we need to do or change to achieve these numbers, we’re doing better at x but how can we keep x but also achieve y and z. Try to see this as an opportunity to either take one idea and adapt it to your situation or an opportunity to challenge the why and the how of your own on-farm performances and processes.
I’d like to commend Kevin Deknudt on this great article and the team at PLM for allowing us to share this with you all.
PLM is a paper and digital dairy magazine based in France. The article shared here is about a farm in North East Quebec. I encourage you to see the virtual 360 tour of the farm and more information on their website at the link below.
-Denis Langlois
Read the translated article here:
In case you didn’t know, although it is a French website, you can quickly and easily get it translated by a simple click of a button. See screenshot:
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