This column appears in the May 2017 issue of Potato Grower.
Everyone in the fresh produce business understands that supply dictates price; oversupply kills price, and balanced supply stabilizes price. Since potato growers own the supply side of all potato sectors—seed, fresh, frozen-process, chip and dehydrated—everyone in the potato business knows that those same growers, by virtue of owning supply, also own price. One could even say that since particular growers in a particular region supply a particular sector that those growers make up that sector’s supply team.
Question: What metric explains how well each region’s supply team is succeeding in its particular sector? The answer is price. If price in a particular sector happens to be inadequate, the team supplying that sector needs to ask itself if everyone on the team is doing his job. And what is each person’s job?
Bill Belichick just won his fifth Super Bowl as coach of the New England Patriots. Asked once why each of his Super Bowl-contending teams had only a handful of players left from the previous Super Bowl team, Coach Belichick answered (paraphrasing), “Each member of a football team has a particular job to do on a particular play. We never stop looking for a player—team member—who can do that job better. We don’t care who the guy is. We don’t care if he’s famous or not. The degree to which players do their jobs is the degree to which our team will win. Once a player knows what his job is, I only have to say three words to him: Do your job.”
If Belichick took over a potato-supply team—grower suppliers of a particular sector in a particular region—the first thing he would identify would be the team’s objective. What is the team’s goal? How does the team score? Once clearly identifying the goal, the second thing Belichick would do would be to assign each team member a job.
Jobs on the offensive side of a football team are: quarterback, fullback, halfback, center, guard, tackle and end. Other names are given to the above positions according to where they line up on a certain play, but this list pretty much covers it. Guards, we know, line up on either side of the center, poised to protect the backfield during the upcoming play. Imagine that just as the center snaps the ball to the quarterback that the guards on either side of him suddenly spin around and, rather than protect the quarterback, tackle him instead. What chance would that team have of succeeding with two team members switching sides and killing the play’s chance for success? Is this analogy starting to make sense? What growers in a region would purposefully oversupply the market and kill price, their own price included?
What do you think Belichick would say was each grower’s job?