Stay Informed

Indiana Farm Bureau has been working on a new strategic plan that will act as a road map to guide INFB into the future.

We couldn’t have done it without your help. We collected data in new ways and from some new sources and had more input than ever before. We listened not only to our most active members but also associate members, farmers who are not active or are not members, and agricultural stakeholders. The ways we collected data included:

• More than 1,000 survey responses.
• Two all-day “activation sessions” for county Farm Bureau leaders.
• District and county meetings hosted by district directors.
• Listening sessions with state committees.

Early on, the board of directors decided that we needed help to guide us through this process, and we chose Aimpoint Research, a global strategic intelligence firm specializing in agriculture and food issues.

Aimpoint understands Farm Bureau and agriculture, and part of its role has been to help us ask the hard questions that we need to answer in order to move the organization forward.

The new strategic plan points us in the right direction to remain relevant, to innovate and to grow.

One theme that has surfaced through all the research is the importance of working together. At its core, that’s what Farm Bureau is all about. It’s the foundation of our organization. Yet there is a reason working together has been identified as a key focus going forward.

Many who work for Aimpoint have a military background. As we talked about our vision for the future, they assigned the term “unity of effort” to what our leaders were describing.

For me, I needed to understand how this term applies within Farm Bureau and helps us deliver on our mission. Once I did a little research, it became clear that “unity of effort” means “working together,” which is what our founders envisioned for Farm Bureau in the beginning. Working together is an approach that focuses alignment on a common purpose and shared values.

The foundation of our new strategic plan will be built around how we achieve more through working together and how we put that into practice to achieve our goals.

On the farm, I know I can’t do everything myself. I depend on my wife Joyce and son Ben to help keep the farm going when I can’t be there. That’s working together in its simplest form – we all have a role to play in accomplishing a single goal.

The same principles hold true when working together to build a better Farm Bureau.

The world is changing, and agriculture is changing with it. The Indiana Farm Bureau of the future needs to be responsive to that changing environment.