Patio Pondering: Silos are for Livestock Feed, NOT People
A cloudy, cold morning here in NE Indiana with bouts of light snow punctuates that we are in the heart of winter. This morning the coffee hits harder as I gaze over the patio, and so did a conversation I had the other day at the Fort Wayne Farm Show. Funny how a quiet sunrise with a hot cup of coffee can resurrect the things we would rather ignore.
I ran into an old hand at the Fort Wayne Farm Show, a feed-industry salesperson who has been doing the dance longer than most. It did not take long before our conversation drifted toward the frustrations of being the face of the company while having almost no control over the parts that matter. Delivery delays he could not fix. Commission structures that shifted without explanation. Accounts reassigned because he did not fit neatly into some internal team structure. None of that surprised me. I have heard the same complaints my entire career in the feed business.
What caught my attention was not the complaints themselves, but the pattern underneath them. Take trucking, for example. He was frustrated about getting product where it needed to go, on time. As we talked, it became clear he was a victim of his own competence, ordering early, ordering big, and covering for weaknesses upstream. In other words, he made it look easy. And when something looks easy, internal leadership assumes it must not be that valuable. That is how being good at your job quietly turns into being an easy target.
The more we compared notes, the more obvious it became that his experience is not unique and it is not limited to one company or one corner of ag. I have heard the same story across species, across sales structures, and across management styles. The details change, the pattern does not. Companies punish competence, reward compliance, and silo people instead of leveraging them.
That is where our conversation hit home for me, because that is exactly what I have been wrestling with, the problem of being more than one thing. I am not just a Swine Nutritionist. I am not just a researcher. I am not just a farmer. I am not just a consultant, writer, or podcaster. I cross disciplines because agriculture forces us to, and because that is where the real value sits. But outside the farm gate, most companies do not know what to do with people who do not fit into a single category. They prefer tidy silos over messy talent, and then they lose talent because people either leave or never quite fit those silos in the first place.
My friend and I took different paths, but we ran into the same wall. The minute your skill set stops being easy to label, organizations stop knowing what to do with you.
Makes you wonder how much talent we bleed in ag because we expect people to be simple when the job is not.