Why the performance of your rural business comes down to the performance of your people

By James Brouff, Founder and Group Managing Partner, Bullagreen Rural Specialists

In March 2025, more than 30 rural and healthcare organisations joined forces to publish a joint statement calling on the federal government to invest $50 million over five years to address what they described as a mental health crisis in Australian agriculture. The coalition, led by the National Farmers' Federation and now endorsed by 60 organisations and individuals, put a number to something the industry already knew.

One Australian farmer dies by suicide every ten days. That's up to twice the rate of the general working population.

Close to half of Australian farmers have had thoughts of self-harm or suicide, according to the National Farmer Wellbeing Report commissioned by Norco and the NFF. Nearly two thirds have experienced anxiety. Almost half have felt depressed.

These statistics sit in the background of every rural business conversation about performance, productivity and growth. Because the people running these businesses, and the people working in them, are operating under a level of sustained pressure that most performance frameworks weren't designed to account for.

The rural businesses that are pulling ahead in 2026 are the ones that have connected those two things. That the performance of the business is inseparable from the capability, structure and culture of the people running it.

Why the rural workforce challenge is structural, not cyclical

The surface-level labour picture for agribusiness has improved somewhat since the acute shortages of the COVID years. There were 239,324 active working holiday visas in Australia as of September 2025, a record high. SEEK job advertisements in agriculture have returned to pre-pandemic levels.

But as Agricultural Appointments noted in its 2026 workforce analysis, the numbers look better on the surface while structural problems continue to worsen quietly underneath.

Total agricultural employment across the four quarters to September 2025 was 354,600 people according to ABARES Snapshot of Australian Agriculture 2026, down 9.1% from a decade earlier. Hours worked in agriculture hit their lowest recorded level in August 2025. The median age of Australian farmers is now over 53, more than a decade older than the rest of the workforce. In the beef industry, the median age exceeded 60 at the last two censuses.

The average capital value of a farm is around $3.3 million. That barrier to entry means the younger cohort with the means and inclination to enter the industry is smaller than it needs to be. The older cohort stays on longer. The workforce ages. The structural pipeline narrows.

For regional businesses that depend on skilled people, this environment means the window for attracting, developing and retaining good team members has become narrower and more competitive. Businesses that treat workforce development as an afterthought are feeling that pressure. Businesses that treat it as a core operational priority are pulling ahead.

Leadership development: the gap most rural businesses don't talk about

In most rural businesses, the people in leadership roles got there because they are exceptional operators. They know the land, the machinery, the seasonal rhythms, the animals, the markets. That knowledge is genuinely valuable and hard won.

But technical competence and leadership capability are different things. The skills required to run a cropping program or manage a cattle operation are not the same skills required to build a high-performing team, have a difficult performance conversation, develop a team member's capability over time, or create a culture where people want to stay.

This gap rarely gets named directly in rural businesses. It tends to show up as something else. High turnover. Team members who aren't performing but the issue keeps getting avoided. A culture where the standard is set by the owner or manager and everyone else just tries to keep up. Decisions that should be made at an operational level keep getting escalated because people don't feel empowered to make them.

Leadership development in a rural context isn't about putting managers through a corporate training program. It's about building the specific capabilities that make a difference in how a regional business actually operates. How to have clear, direct conversations about performance and expectations. How to develop team members rather than just directing them. How to build accountability without creating a culture of fear. How to lead through the stress and uncertainty that is a normal feature of agricultural business.

These are learnable skills. But they need to be developed deliberately, not assumed to arrive with experience.

Workforce capability uplift: building the team the business actually needs

Australia's agricultural sector is changing faster than at any previous point. Precision agriculture, data-driven decision making, evolving regulatory requirements, new market access conditions, sustainability reporting obligations. The capability required to operate a modern rural business at a competitive level is genuinely different from what it was ten years ago.

At the same time, CSIRO research has found that over a four-year period, around 40% of those employed as skilled agricultural workers left the sector. Between 2011 and 2016, the number of filled high-skilled agricultural positions increased by around 4,600, but the number of workers exiting the sector was around 9,600. That gap has not narrowed.

In that environment, waiting for the right person to arrive from outside is a high-risk strategy. The more reliable path is investing in the capability of the people already in the business.

Workforce capability uplift isn't a single intervention. It's a considered assessment of where the gaps are between what the business needs its people to be able to do and what they can currently do, followed by a targeted approach to closing those gaps. That might involve structured training programs, mentoring arrangements, role redesign to develop capability through stretch assignments, or a combination of approaches tailored to the specific business and team.

The businesses that do this well don't wait until a capability gap becomes a performance problem. They assess proactively, develop continuously, and treat the capability of their team as an asset that requires the same level of attention as their land, their equipment and their finances.

Training and education programs: practical, applied and built for regional realities

The challenge with most off-the-shelf training in Australia is that it wasn't designed for the context in which rural businesses operate. Generic leadership programs that use metropolitan examples, compliance training that doesn't reflect the realities of agricultural operations, and development programs that assume participants can take multiple days away from the business are genuinely difficult to apply in a regional context.

Effective training and education for rural businesses needs to be practical rather than theoretical, applied to the specific conditions of agricultural and regional work, and delivered in a way that works for the operational demands of a farming business.

It also needs to be connected to real outcomes rather than completion certificates. The measure of an effective training investment isn't whether people attended. It's whether the business is operating better as a result.

For every graduate entering agriculture there are reportedly four job vacancies, according to research cited by CSIRO. Given the pipeline constraints, rural businesses can't rely on the formal education system to solve their capability challenges. The businesses that build their own internal development pathways, adapted to their specific context and people, are the ones that build genuine capability advantage over time.

Team structure and performance: the organisational design conversation most businesses avoid

Growing rural businesses have a common pattern. The informal structures that worked well at a smaller scale start to create friction as the operation grows. Roles that were clear when there were three people in the business become ambiguous when there are ten. Decision-making that worked through direct owner oversight becomes a bottleneck. People end up doing work that doesn't match their skills, doesn't have clear accountability, and doesn't have a clear pathway forward.

This is an organisational design problem, and it's one of the most common constraints on the growth of regional businesses that doesn't get addressed because it's not as visible as a finance problem or an operational problem. It shows up indirectly. Turnover goes up because people aren't clear on what they're responsible for. Performance drops because accountability isn't clear. The owner or manager becomes the bottleneck for every decision because no one else feels empowered to make them.

The solution isn't complexity. It's clarity. Clear role design that reflects what the business actually needs rather than what the current people happen to be doing. Clear accountability structures that allow decisions to be made at the appropriate level. Clear performance expectations that everyone understands and that are reviewed regularly.

This kind of structural work doesn't require a large investment. It requires stepping back from the day-to-day operation and looking honestly at whether the way the business is organised is actually set up to support where it's heading.

Culture and succession readiness: the people dimension of the transition plan

The succession conversation in Australian agriculture tends to focus on the financial and legal dimensions. Who gets what. How the debt is structured. What the tax implications are. How the entity should be held.

Those are genuinely important questions. But the conversation that happens less often is the capability and culture one. Is the person or people taking over the business actually ready to lead it? Do they have the management and decision-making capability the business needs at its current scale and complexity? Is the culture of the business one that will support retention and performance through a leadership transition, or is it so dependent on the outgoing generation's personal authority that it will struggle without them?

Culture and succession readiness is the work of making sure the answer to those questions is yes before the transition happens, rather than discovering the gaps after it.

That means developing the capability of the incoming generation deliberately and over time, not just assuming that years of working on the farm translates into readiness to run it. It means building a team culture that is resilient enough to continue performing through a leadership change. It means having honest conversations about where the gaps are and what it would take to close them.

The NFF's research found that close to half of Australian farmers have felt depressed, and 45% have had thoughts of self-harm or suicide. Those statistics sit inside businesses that are also trying to navigate succession, growth, and an increasingly complex operating environment. The capability and culture of the people in those businesses matters more than almost any other factor in determining whether the transition strengthens the business or creates pressure that undermines it.

What taking people and performance seriously looks like in practice

The businesses that manage this well don't necessarily have formal HR departments or expensive external consultants on retainer. What they have is intention and consistency.

They have clear role design that reflects what people are actually accountable for. They invest in their leaders' ability to lead, not just operate. They develop their team's capability proactively rather than reactively. They build a culture where people understand the direction of the business and feel their contribution matters. And they bring the capability and culture conversation into succession planning early, rather than treating it as something to address after the financial and legal work is done.

The cost of not addressing these things is real and measurable. Turnover in a rural context is expensive and time-consuming. Underperformance that isn't addressed affects the whole team over time. A leadership transition that happens without the successor being genuinely ready creates risk that no financial structure can fully protect against.

The agricultural sector employs around 354,600 people and contributes to gross production forecast to reach $90 billion in 2024 to 2025. The businesses that perform best over the next decade will be the ones that treat the development of their people with the same strategic seriousness they bring to their land, their finances and their operations.

Bullagreen People & Performance works with rural and regional businesses on leadership development, workforce capability, training and education, team structure and performance, and culture and succession readiness. To start a conversation about where your business is and what would make the most difference, reach out directly.

M: 0461 374 585 | E: rural@bullagreen.au | W: bullagreen.au

General information only. This content does not constitute professional, legal or financial advice and has been prepared without considering your objectives, financial situation or needs. Please seek appropriate professional advice for your individual circumstances. If you or someone you know is struggling, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 or the TIACS free counselling service on 0488 846 988.