What's it like to study agribusiness at Harvard

Agribusiness first came about in Harvard in the 1940s when the dean of Harvard’s Business School (who had spent time in the food and agribusiness industry himself) was concerned about the lack of co-ordination in the industry.

He thought opportunities might arise if modern business principles could be applied to agriculture and food. He brought in two faculty members – a former US assistant secretary of agriculture and a fresh PhD graduate, Ray Goldberg. In 1961, Ray started the school’s agribusiness seminar for executives. Fast forward 54 years and Mary Shelman, a Kentucky lady, is now head of that programme.

While Mary didn’t grow up on a farm, her Dad was a farm equipment dealer.

“So I grew up going with him. All of the relatives beforehand on both sides of the family were farmers ... both sides were too poor to actually ever own land so ... there were no family farms to inherit but I grew up going with him and going out visiting farmers and following him around. I was a real Daddy’s girl. Then he bought a couple of farms when I was in my early teens and so I ended up inheriting that land when he passed away, so I am a farmer now – at least I own farmland ... someone else rents it. We raise corn and soybeans, no animals involved thank you – unless you count the ones that roam naturally.”

Mary studied chemical engineering at university and then went to Harvard to do an MBA. While there she took an agribusiness class with professor Ray Goldberg and, not surprisingly given her background, this subject really appealed to her. She stayed and wrote cases for Ray Goldberg (her and Ray are still colleagues today) and made her way into the position she now holds.

Harvard doesn’t teach agriculture at undergraduate or masters level – in fact, Harvard’s agricultural education is confined to an agribusiness module on its MBA programme and to its agribusiness seminar. The agribusiness seminar is an interesting programme, not least because it costs $9,000 even though it only lasts three and a half days.

Approximately 250 people go through this programme every year. The flagship event runs every January in Boston when participants descend upon the business school campus – it has a waiting list every year.

A smaller off-site version of the programme also runs in a different international location in May each year (this year it was held in Capetown) where they have 50 participants.

But how does Mary justify the programme’s very high cost?

“Harvard Business School has always been based on the case method, which means that we don’t use textbooks or anything like that, so we work through the lens of cases.”

Mary notes that it’s not just big companies that come to study but individuals running farming operations too.

“It’s a huge investment for them,” notes Mary. She differentiates Harvard’s seminar from other courses where participants might learn how to do strategy and marketing: “What you get in the agribusiness seminar – every single year there’s entirely new content and, because of that, we’re always looking at what’s changing in the world. So this idea of thinking about what’s effecting business and positioning for the future – you can’t do that if you’re looking at material that’s years old. You’re not coming here to learn about this industry ... you’re coming in to get some insight into how consumers are changing. You’re getting an insight into how the retail distribution channel is changing ... we have people that come back every single year because every single year we have a new set of case materials.

“The other thing you get by coming here is a classroom of people where the learning is actually peer-to-peer because these are facilitated discussions. Fifty per cent of the participants are from North America and 50% are from the rest of the world.

“They’re on all parts of the supply chain – they’re from big companies, small companies and they’re producers. It’s that sharing of the richness of the participant group that you can’t get any place else.”

Mary Shelman knows a lot more about Irish agriculture than you might think. In fact, she says she loves to go to dinner at Bord Bia: “It’s my favourite place in town to eat. They always have the most fantastic food.”

Mary and a colleague were asked in 2010 by Bord Bia to come up with strategies to increase Irish food exports.

“We wrote a very short piece called Pathways for Growth that ended up being adopted and going into Food Harvest 2020 ... one of the things we talked about is fragmentation – there weren’t brands and that led to the creation of Origin Green as the national branding idea.”

One of the big limiting factors Mary Shelman sees in the industry globally today is the lack of trained talent to support this sector in the future. This is something that she helped ensure was highlighted in Pathways to Growth.

“We said that we need to make sure that Irish food companies have the best and the brightest and that the entire support of education is focused around entrepreneurship, so it wasn’t just traditional careers but it was also thinking more entrepreneurially. Big companies are often not very good at creating new products themselves, so a common pathway is for them to see something that’s proven itself on a local level and then that company will either acquire or partner and then put its resources to work and bring the product to a different level.

“I think it’s incredibly exciting the number of young people now in Ireland that I hear are deciding to choose to have a career in agriculture and seek further training in this industry.”

Mary herself teaches on the Bord Bia marketing fellowship, specialising in a module called leadership for growth in the food industry.

We asked Mary what she thought was currently the biggest shortcoming in terms of developing leaders in the agri-sector. She says she’s seen a big change in Ireland, even in the last five years.

“Five years ago I think there was a great brain and capital drain out of Ireland and part of the reason for that was because no one saw any future. How can you possibly invest if there’s no future? I had the great privilege of talking to the CEOs of all the food and beverage companies. One of the questions we asked them was if they had an extra $10 million of capital or $100 million dollars of capital, depending on their size, what would they do with it? Would they invest it in Ireland or would they invest it someplace else in the world?

“Not a single person at the time (five years ago) said they would invest in Ireland – because of everything that was going on. Now you look at it and you see what Kerry has done with its R&D centre ... you look at what Glanbia has done with its new dairy processing plant. There’s been a monumental shift in the way the prospects for the industry are viewed.

“Now you need the talent to back it up right and that’s coming now as well because the opportunities are now there."