Meaning of Agribusiness Management

Agriculture can be leveraged for societal progress through effective agribusiness management. As earlier noted, for agriculture to yield prosperity, it has to be managed with modern-day business ideology. In this article, we shall intimate ourselves with the meaning of agribusiness management.

It is, therefore, necessary to understand the concept of management as an art and science, in the light of modern-day agribusiness organizations.

Read Also: Debeaking of Birds, the Need for Debeaking and the Ideal time for Debeaking the Birds

Background To Agribusiness Management

The success of any human endeavour depends greatly on the quality of decision making associated with the nature of complex processes surrounding related activities. Thus, individuals are always confronted with sensitive and non-sensitive decisions making on human and material resources towards achieving their overall interests or goals. The most important goal of every agribusiness is profit maximization.

The human resources needed to achieve the goals of an agribusiness include labour (energy and ideas), while the materials include the inputs needed by the organization. A crop enterprise will need seed, land, agrochemicals, labour, and equipment.

Also, a livestock farmer needs the animals, the feed, and the pens, and so on, as well as labour. In the same way, the aquaculture producer needs the fingerlings, pond, feed, water source, as well as labour.

Similarly, a processing firm will need the raw materials, labour, power/fuel, and equipment. The material and human inputs need to be effectively harnessed for the success of the organization.

The functions of planning, monitoring, supervision, coordination, and others are required for this harnessing to take place. Without these functions, the inputs, if employed at all, will be haphazardly employed, leading to the non-actualization of organizational goals.

Consider a cook (manager) who has all the ingredients (inputs) needed to prepare a pot of soup. Such a cook will need to plan well and coordinate the ingredients effectively to prepare a good pot of soup.

The possible difference between the tastes of many pots of soup made by different cooks with the same access to all the needed ingredients is due to the differences in the cooking (or managerial) abilities of the cooks.

Thus, for an agribusiness to be successful, the management has to be effective and efficient. We now proceed to define management and note its position in the success of agribusiness enterprises and, by implication, national development.

Read Also: 15 Medicinal Health Benefits Of Echinacea purpurea (Purple Coneflower)

The Meaning of Agribusiness Management

In agribusiness, the decisions on agribusiness resources are made on what we want to achieve, how we want to achieve it, and a review of the outcome. The efforts of ensuring that instructional objectives are set up, executed, and evaluated describe what is called the management process.

Different definitions and explanations of management abound; Kay (1986), Adegeye and Ditto (1981), and Dessler (2008), but Ebong (2007) asserted that agribusiness management could be defined as the active process of decision making to ensure planned and controlled use of available human and material resources to achieve the profit motive of the practitioners.

For instance, the decision on how to produce, what commodity to produce, where to produce them, the quantity of input to employ in their production, whether these inputs should be owned or rented, and the level of the output to produce, are important decisions that determine the success or otherwise of any agribusiness organization.

In responding to these questions, the strategies of the agribusiness manager entail the use of material and human resources. This presents management as an art and science of using people and materials to achieve organizational goals and suggests that the success or otherwise of an agribusiness is determined by the quality of its management.

A key to the successful management of agribusiness is accepting responsibility for leadership and making business decisions through the skillful application of management principles.

The peculiarities of agricultural commodities make its management a bit different from those of other businesses. Klonsky (2011) and Ebong (2007) submitted that management of agribusiness is extremely seasonal and its products are perishable commodities.

In this article, it has been learnt that because of the need to elicit prosperity from agribusinesses, management of agribusiness must be approached as a systematic component of agribusinesses.

Do you have any questions, suggestions, or contributions? If so, please feel free to use the comment box below to share your thoughts. We also encourage you to kindly share this information with others who might benefit from it. Since we can’t reach everyone at once, we truly appreciate your help in spreading the word. Thank you so much for your support and for sharing!

Read Also: How to Grow Your Business Quickly and Easily

Frequently Asked Questions

We will update this section soon.