Danny Klinefelter pulls back his cuff to reveal one of his prized possessions:   an understated Swiss watch with a simple brown leather band.

Except for two gold insignias on either side of its face, it looks like any other expensive men's watch. Yet to Klinefelter, it's much more. For him it means that the people who count professionally-past students and users of his Extension programs-think his efforts for agriculture have made a difference.

The Texas A&M Extension economist has devoted much of the last 10 years to helping a gifted and largely overlooked group in agriculture-commercial farmers-improve their odds of success. The program he developed for them-The Executive Program for Agricultural Producers (TEPAP)-recently earned him two highly coveted honors, including the watch given for distinguished achievement by Texas A&M's alumni.

What sets TEPAP apart from other management courses is that it teaches top producers to think like CEOs. Its two, week-long sessions challenge farmers to raise the bar in finance, personnel management, negotiation, business organization and national and international marketing. And it has won rave reviews from both its 300 graduates, and educators, alike.

"TEPAP is an excellent program that is unique and needed in agriculture," says faculty member and Purdue economist Mike Boehlje. "Other courses tend to be more operational - or tactical - oriented. The CEO skills it teaches are becoming increasingly more important to farmers."

A vision. That the program exists at all is a tribute to Klinefelter's vision and tenacity. When he worked in farm credit, he saw business send its managers to continuing education programs like Stanford and Harvard. But agriculture had nothing of the kind. "We had the Extension Service and training programs put on by input suppliers and commodity organizations, but they were geographically limited and heavily production - oriented. I thought they missed the boat for high-end sophisticated operations," he says.

So he set out to create a program that brought big-business skills to commercial farmers. He wanted to assemble the best faculty he could - whether from private business or other universities. Because of the considerable cost involved, producers would have to help foot the bill.

In his image. Just as a farm is the physical manifestation of the farmer, TEPAP is the embodiment of Klinefelter's beliefs, philosophies and strengths. It's also an offshoot of his lifelong curiosity about what makes operations successful.

An Illinois farm kid with allergies, Klinefelter opted to study ag economics rather than go into farming, his first love. During the farm crisis, he held several positions with the Farm Credit System. "As a lender, you see things about a business nobody else does," he says. "You see their finances, not just their tax returns, and you see what ideas work and what don't."

TEPAP students benefit from Klinefelter's ability to translate winning ideas from one segment of agriculture to another, as well as his skill at observing, synthesizing and adopting concepts from outside ag and bringing them to the farm.

It's a trait he sees in nearly all TEPAP grads. "Very few people come up with an original idea," he says. "The best business people I know see something somewhere and figure out how to take it, combine it with something else or change it to make it work in their operation."

Klinefelter is also in constant pursuit of excellence through continuous improvement. "Somebody once said, ‘To stay at the top, you must change faster than the market you operate in.' Your success will depend on both the rate at which you change and your ability to be comfortable with it," he says.

He routinely tweaks his program, culling topics and teachers the graduates say don't make the grade. "The thing I like is that he's fired a lot of his best friends," quips Larry Martin, TEPAP faculty member and director of economic research for the George Morris Centre, Guelph, Ontario. "I'm really smug because I'm going back for the fourth year." But Martin acknowledges the ax could fall at any time.

The goal of this effort is to craft a program to suit the needs of the risk-takers Klinefelter ministers to. He believes successful producers need to be only 5% better than average. An avid sports fan, he draws a parallel to baseball. "If you take two Major League ball players-one with a .250 lifetime batting average, another with a .300 average-the first is no star; the second is one of the sport's top 10 hitters. The difference between them is only one hit every twenty times at bat."

Klinefelter also knows networking is essential for success, so nearly half the time spent at the school involves rubbing shoulders with other participants. Because his course draws producers from North America, Canada and Mexico, the interaction revs the learning exponentially.

"It's a whole different class of businessperson," says Gregg Halverson, Forest River, N.D., potato grower. "The free flow of ideas is unbelievable. You don't expect large producers to share information, but they are more open than you can imagine. The associations you make give you a pipeline to fresh ideas on a year-round basis."

Seeing those networks develop and watching his grads improve their operations is probably what motivates Klinefelter most in his career. "Helping other people excel through the knowledge he can give them is a real joy for him," says his brother Kent, the operating partner of the family's 4,100-acre farm near Nokomis, Ill. "If a person is willing to invest the time, Danny is willing to give anything he's got to that person in knowledge or help."

By Joanne Spahr Welsh
Top Producer September 1998
Reprinted with permission of Top Producer