AdAgrA Conference 2024: Growing Better

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Institutional Agriculture

Daniel Nicholls

Making Yourself Replaceable

I am the agriculture director at Holbrook Indian School in Holbrook, Arizona Okay, here we are all right, I'm gonna have a quick prayer.

We will get started Father in heaven, thank you again for the privilege to be here and to share these thoughts that you've given me.

And I pray that this would be a blessing and useful to those who are in attendance and to those who will listen in the future.

Lord, I seek wisdom I do not have and I ask for your spirit to be in attendance not only for myself but for any who would listen.

And we are grateful for the blessing that this conference has been and will continue to be, and look forward to seeing what you will do through our time here.

And we're grateful that we can offer our gratitude and ask for these gifts that you delight to give in Jesus' name.

All right, so making yourself replaceable.

All right, first of all I want to assure you that you are a unique individual and no 1 could possibly replace you in the heart of God, to your friends, your family.

What do I mean by making your sale for placeable?

So as per usual at the conference here, I'm going to ask any questions that you may have to just try to remember them for the end, write them down.

I strongly encourage, if nothing else, having a note-taking device for that reason, that you can remember what your questions were.

And if they have not been answered by the end, I'll be happy to answer them.

I'm especially wanting to give some extra time for this presentation if you have questions.

That being said, I probably will ask you a couple questions.

What do you think I mean about making yourself replaceable?

We had 1 answer already and that was what did you say position?

Yes Not letting everything revolve around you.

Preserving the vision that was established.

So, yes, what he said was when a new person at an academy type situation, when a new person comes, sometimes the farm struggles.

The new person struggles to learn what Brother Jonathan said over here, which was?

Institutional farms have a unique situation in that the farmer can change while the farm continues on or tries to continue on.

And that is any projects that you are in the middle of, they don't go away.

The new farmer inherits them, no matter how much was communicated to them about the goal and objective of that project.

So any subtleties and nuances about the farmers markets that you were going to, your new farmer may not know what those are and if they are not communicated in some way, they will have to learn them the hard way.

Customers don't go away when the farmer goes away, or at least we hope that they are not going to go away when your farmer goes away, because they are there for the vision and mission and what your school, your institution, your health, your lifestyle center, whatever institution you are at, whatever value your customers were getting, hopefully was more than just the beautiful face of your farmer.

This is a unique situation in agriculture, and it's unique to Adventism, and it's unique to institutional farms.

To my knowledge, this does not happen anywhere else, at least not in a market garden situation.

When you have large, huge industrial farms that have a position of farm manager, that's a position where hiring and firing happens.

People come, people go in that position, but the owner, the overall company structure generally doesn't change.

And we're going to bring that into this a little bit here too.

But this is not just about the change of position either.

If you implement, and if you have already started implementing this, Praise God, I want to hear from you, and I want to get your thoughts.

But if you choose to implement the things we're going to talk about today, you are not only going to benefit your institution in the long run when the time comes that the Lord calls you elsewhere.

Even while you are there, you are going to see the benefits of what I'm going to call replication of productivity.

This is a subject I discussed at length with a good friend of mine.

This good friend of mine had a carpet cleaning business.

He got into what they called the restoration business.

So they started doing repairs from floods, fire damage, things like that.

And they would come in, rip out all the old rotten drywall, floor joists, everything, put it all back together.

And then he got some special certifications to do biohazard cleanup.

So he would actually do things like cleanup murder scenes.

And it turns out there was great demand because there was very, very few people who could do it.

He was getting calls from people hours and hours and hours away to do this kind of work that apparently only he could do.

I cannot accomplish the volume of work that I have on my own.

You need to know what to say no to, right?

That's something that we're going to encounter.

You need to know where to draw the line and what to say no to in order to maintain your ability to be fully present and functional for your students, for your lifestyle guests, for your family, who should be the first people on that list.

So he was he was saying no, but he didn't want to continue saying no, and he realized that if he were able to hire people, that that would give him not only the ability to say yes to these jobs, because he believed his job was in ministry.

Christopher Carey

Farm Synergy: Finding More Missional Value

This session, this seminar, it's going to be Farm Synergy, Finding Your Missional Value.

We're located in Fletcher, North Carolina, just a stone's throw from Asheville.

This is a lighter session, I would say, in some ways, in some ways not.

My hope is that you'll leave the seminar encouraged with ways to develop your farm impact by engaging others in the joy of your ministry.

So a lot of it I'm going to be focusing on engaging others.

Just different ways, fun ways, ways you can gauge others in the farm and with what's going on.

If this is not what you're looking for, it's a beautiful day outside, so don't feel bad.

That's our two-foot rule that we have here going on.

Our Father God, we just thank you so much for this opportunity to come together.

We thank you for this beautiful day that you've given to us and the Ad Agra Conference.

We ask for your blessings on all that's going on here.

We ask your blessings on each individual and we pray for their ministries and that will be a blessing to all those that they come in contact with.

We thank you and we pray this in Jesus' name, amen.

If you're just coming in, you have no chance to step away after I gave what our goal is gonna be for this session.

But I'll just say it again for the few people that are coming in.

We're going to talk mostly at the level of just engaging people in your farm.

And I think when people engage with your farm, there's things that happen you can't even quite put your finger on.

And if you do it in a way and you understand who you are and where you're coming from, it has a bigger impact in ways that we may not even know.

And I'm gonna start with my first picture.

This was my introduction to Fletcher Academy.

I was driving a big 26 foot U-Haul and we have a steep, there was a steep driveway where we were staying and 1 of the employees there at Fletcher Academy said, hey why don't you see if we can't make that truck up up that driveway and there was no way that you see you see the ink the the ledge the cantilevered back end of that truck there's no way it's gonna go up a hill it just hit the ground and And so then I went down this road called Hutch Mountain Road and said okay, I'll go down this road and turn around well, I I lost my I There is no there.

There is no shoulder and my my front tire just got a little bit off the ledge, off the edge of the road, and I was struggling.

I was struggling for a good 50 feet to bring it back on, and I was pulling, pulling, pulling.

I couldn't get up over the ledge and pretty soon the back end just starts swinging behind me.

And then it came slowly to this position, stuck up in the air like this, and I had to step down quite a ways to get out of the cab.

And by the way, the interesting part of this, this is where we have started the farm.

And I always felt like God was saying very strongly, start here, Chris.

And by the way, this goes to the missional value.

You know, it was a little embarrassing for me at first.

And I laughed at the time, actually, nothing I could do.

And I was just thanking God that it didn't tip over.

This, by the way, is full of my belongings, my wife's belongings.

You can imagine her, what were you doing, Chris?

I was like, well, I wasn't fishtailing or doing anything fun, I just was trying to drive.

And pretty soon we had, I don't have a picture of it, we had, oh my goodness, it seemed like half the school showed up just to see what was going on.

And I was like, and you know what it turned out to be?

It turned out to be a connection and an icebreaker that I never would have had with the entire campus.

I got to meet everybody within that short amount of time.

It was almost as if God had used it to break, you know how you build rapport with people and connections with individuals?

Well, this I had instant connection, instant rapport with everybody there.

Pretty soon 2 tow trucks came by, the road was blocked off, police were there.

1 of the tow trucks got stuck in trying to get me out.

Then they had to call the other tow truck to get that tow truck out.

That's how they ended up having 2 tow trucks there.

So it was a carnival, really is what it was.

It was something that I used and was able to talk with people.

And I'm not saying this is what this session is about, but in a way it is.

It's about really using everything that you have at your means and connecting with individuals in your mission what we are doing.

By the way, they did get me out and sent me a big bill.

That was where I had to explain to my wife.

Sorry So I first want to start with it's all about mission.

Let's make sure that we're grounded there first It is all about mission Number 1 do all that are engaged know your why?

And I know you've heard this in a lot of other sessions, I really got to talk about it again.

I'm gonna say it again and again and again.

I see it when I go to other institutions.

And it's really the, it really creates a schism between what people are trying to do and misunderstandings, confusion, consternation on people's side.

So make sure you have a well-crafted mission statement.

That would be a question to ask as you're going through that.

And if it doesn't match what you have now, maybe it's time to revisit your mission and go through a process.

And I'm happy to talk to you about that outside of this session right here.

And how are you sharing your mission with others, of course, in action and in words?

So next 1 I'm going to talk about is mindset.

And by the way, I gave a heads up to some of the others.

I'm planning, this is going to be a little unusual session.

And we're going to take about 15, 20 minutes.

And we're going to ask people to share how you're doing and what you're doing in bringing more connections to the community, more engagement, and getting more value out of your farm than just the vegetables.

You got to know your why and what's all going on.

Is it only growing vegetables or is it growing character?

Let's make sure you're on the right page, right?

Series

Institutional Agriculture

Making Yourself Replaceable

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Breakout Session 4

Methods Without Madness

59m

Session 3

Pick, Pack, and Wash: Challenges and Solutions

1h 2m

The Business of Farming

03 Business Basics

48m

Plenary

Youth, Education, and Agriculture Panel

58m

Soil Health

6- Good Information, Good Decisions, Good Outcomes

1h

Home Gardening

Every Seed Sown is a Harvest

49m

Plenary

Agriculture As Evangelism

1h 20m

Business & Ministry

Hosting Interns

1h 5m

Short Course: Beginning Market Farming

Beginning Market Farming- Part 1

44m

True Education and Agriculture

Institutional Farming: The Why

1h 2m

Special Interests

Cover Cropping: A Tool to Rebuild and Restore Your Soil

1h 12m

Morning Devotional

Morning Devotional: Thursday

28m

Sound Doctrine