Hiring a farm manager vs. appointing a steward.
The two roles look adjacent on an organisation chart and are almost opposite in what they optimise for. Choosing the wrong one costs years.
Two different horizons
A farm manager optimises the season. That is the job, and a good one is worth a great deal. A steward optimises the enterprise that outlives the season — succession, structure, capital discipline.
Neither is superior. But an operation that needs the second and hires the first will get excellent harvests and no institution.
How to tell which you need
If your constraint is execution — yields below what the ground should give, harvest planning slipping — you need a manager. If your constraint is that every consequential decision routes through one person, you need a steward.
Most operations we meet believe they have the first problem and actually have the second.
The hybrid trap
Writing one job description covering both is the most common mistake. The urgent work always crowds out the structural work, so the steward half of the role never happens and the hire is judged on the half that did.
If the budget only supports one person, hire the manager and buy the stewardship as a mandate with a defined end. Do not ask one person to do both and then wonder why only one got done.
What to look for in a steward
Judgement under ambiguity matters more than agricultural depth. The work is structural, and the hardest parts are the conversations rather than the agronomy.
Ask candidates to describe a plan they abandoned. The good ones have one and can explain what changed their mind.
How the two roles work together
The manager owns the season and the steward owns the decade, and the interface between them needs to be explicit. Without it they duplicate effort in the middle and neglect the edges.
A standing fortnightly hour, with the decision rights written down, is usually enough.
The first ninety days
A steward who starts by changing things has misread the job. The first ninety days should produce a diagnosis the operation recognises as accurate, and nothing else.
Written by
