Defining foresight activities and future strategies in farm management: empirical results from Finnish FADN farms

Abstract

Increasing farm sizes, stronger market orientation and meeting consumers' expectations call for managerial skills and stronger future orientation in farm businesses. We scrutinise in this paper what kind of future goals and foresight approaches farm management entails. As part of strategic management, we approached planning practices according to their time-scale. Three managerial and foresight dimensions of future orientation were defined based on literature; they were then used when constructing a questionnaire. Data were gathered from two sources: from a farm survey and from the annually gathered Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) database in Finland between 2004 and 2008. The farm survey data were analysed through factor analysis and k-means cluster analysis. According to our analysis, farms were grouped into three future-oriented farm groups. The FADN data also gave an opportunity to examine economic and structural development in the defined farm groups. According to our results, the three farm groups differ from each other in terms of future orientation and in terms of structural and economic development.