PROTECTING YOUR INVESTMENTS— RISK MANAGEMENT
By Suz Trusty
Te events of 2020 brought a new urgency to the need to protect your investments, as unforeseen events suddenly erupted. Te Covid-19 pandemic, along with the erratic strategies governmental agencies adopted in their attempts to control its spread, impacted natural grass sod producers around the world.
Weather events increased the pressure. Te National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported a record-breaking twelve named storms in 2020, including six hurricanes in the U.S., with Hurricane Laura alone causing $14 billion in damage across the Gulf Coast. Drought-related wildfires raged across urban, suburban, and rural areas in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Te derecho storm of August 10, 2020, smashed through the Midwest affecting parts of Illinois, Ohio, Minnesota, Iowa, and Indiana. According to (NOAA), the derecho caused damage estimated at more than $7.5 billion and impacted 37.7 million acres of farmland.
As the Farm Journal’s AgWeb Daily reported in December of 2020, “… devastating weather events caused headaches for farmers in many ways, including loss of crops and lower yields due to crop quality issues, extended harvest time, potentially the need for specialized equipment to pick up downed corn and other crops, increased fuel and labor costs, and other unanticipated expenditures that could turn a banner year into a financial disaster in the course of a few weeks.”
Tis long list of extreme weather events, combined with ongoing weather challenges nearly everywhere—and the roller coaster of Covid-19 impacts, make 2020 a year many people would like to forget. Instead, it is even more important from a business standpoint, that you analyze the previous year—the good and the bad. Go even deeper than simply reviewing the successful and less successful results of the year’s production and sales by evaluating what impacted those outcomes. Te lessons learned from the 2020 impacts can help you implement positive changes to improve your operation’s efficiency and help you more effectively protect your investments.
Review Your Emergency Plan
While owners and managers can plan ahead somewhat when tracking active hurricane patterns and the predicted paths of wildfires, other weather events, such as a derecho or tornado offer little advance notice.
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Are you prepared if an emergency weather event strikes your company? If you have an Emergency Plan in place, have you reviewed it to include any changes made to adapt to the Covid-19 situation?
While every business is different, in most natural grass production operations, staff members will be spread across large sections of the farm working on mowing and other maintenance procedures, harvesting, loading, and managing customer pick-up areas. Depending on Covid-related procedures, some operational procedures and customer service personnel may be operating in the company office while others may be working remotely from home. If the company makes deliveries and/or offers installation services, other staff members will be offsite, driving trucks and working on customers’ properties.
Does your Emergency Plan account for all these personnel? And, if it does, do all staff members know the proper procedures to follow and what their responsibilities are in executing those procedures?
Do you have a designated structure where all onsite workers can shelter in place? Do equipment operators know what to do with their machines in these situations? Do you have a plan in place to provide offsite workers with sufficient warning time to get out of a storm’s path or find adequate shelter nearby? Have you assigned responsibilities to crew leaders to make sure each crew member responds appropriately—and quickly?
Does your Emergency Plan include what to do following a storm that causes significant damage? Are procedures established to contact all employees to see if they are okay or in need of assistance? Who is assigned to make those contacts and to whom and how do they report the information they gather? Who shuts down the electrical power, heating or air conditioning systems, and water supply? Who secures sensitive documents? Who connects with customers about the status of ongoing or upcoming projects and potential delays or other scheduling adjustments?
Who contacts insurance providers to report the damage and file damage reports? Are you prepared to submit the relevant information for those damage reports? Have you documented your physical assets, including all equipment and vehicles? Have you documented all improvements made to your property and structures? Have
TPI Turf News May/June 2021
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