Continuity Planning for Agribusinesses

业务连续性计划对于农场和牧场至关重要，他们可能面临从恶劣天气事件到供应链中断的风险。建造effective business continuity plan可以帮助阿勒businesses prevent long-term loss of income, protect employee safety and get back to business sooner after a disruption.

Even if your business isn’t directly impacted by a storm or other significant natural event, you could still be affected and in need of a continuity plan. Risks include supply chain disruption, such as if your suppliers or distributors are impacted by an event and can’t supply the products you need for production. Your continuity plan can include contingency suppliers and back-up plans for equipment, gas, food and shelter for animals, fuel, packaging materials and other business critical items.

Here are some steps to developing an agribusiness continuity plan:

1.确定威胁或风险

业务连续性计划并不适合所有尺寸。最有效的连续性计划将确定您的农场，牧场或葡萄园面临的特定风险。您需要考虑并评估所有有可能根据历史，地理，组织和其他因素引起业务中断的风险领域。
“Every business has choke points or critical control points that could potentially fail,” said Scott Humphrey, a Travelers Risk Control professional. “Does your agriculture business have contingency plans in place to handle them?”

Identifying, exploring and planning for these threat scenarios can help to make your business more resilient and better prepared to handle these risks.
权衡每个事件的可能性与其对您的业务的潜在影响，以及您准备响应。
考虑是否有权利insurance coverage for your businessand a合同风险转移计划in place. This is especially important for agribusinesses that hire third-parties to perform work on their farms and ranches, such as seasonal hired labor for harvesting or activities that bring the public onto the premises.

2. Conduct a Business Impact Analysis

确定员工，设施，设备和计划对您的业务生存至关重要。哪些功能和流程（如果中断或丢失）可能会影响您将农作物或牲畜推向市场的能力？考虑恢复关键操作的谁以及需要什么。然后，您可以优先考虑事件发生后还原每个项目的需求。

一项识别可以帮助生产和分销的替代资源的业务连续性计划可能是宝贵的资源，因为您在发生意外事件后重新上网。
It’s more than just equipment and facilities that can be in short supply. Agriculture businesses also need field workers to harvest and employees who are trained to run increasingly technical equipment.
确保您的连续性计划中包括的其他设施和人员事先意识到该计划并能够激活该计划。
通常，与邻近农场的农业行动的各个方面达成“握手协议”，例如每个人都有坚果加工设施的农民同意每个过程，如果一个人失去了使用其加工设施。但是，更正式的书面协议可以帮助加强这些协议并给予安心。

3. Adopt Controls for Prevention and Mitigation

Instituting a business continuity plan can help your business identify, prepare for and recover from an unexpected event, but it can also help reduce the impact of an event.

Prevention and mitigation planning activities can help identify and remedy conditions that could lead to a fire or explosion from unsafe storage of fertilizer, for example. They can also include moving critical equipment to higher elevation in flood-susceptible areas.
确保您的business continuity planaddress emergency response, public relations, resource management and employee communications.
After a storm or other incident, you’ll want to make sure you check on employees that may have been affected as well.

4.定期测试，锻炼和改善连续性计划

As your agriculture business evolves and new risks emerge, your business continuity plan should be updated to keep pace with those changes. Test and update it regularly, at least once a year and any time critical functions, facilities, suppliers or employees change. Train employees to understand their roles and responsibilities in the plan as well.

Advances in technology are revolutionizing farming. Update your agribusiness continuity plan to include potential new technology that might not have existed when your plan was originally created, such as mobile milking stations that can be brought in when other equipment is offline.
It’s also important to be aware that newer technology presents new risks that should be accounted for in your plan.
Consider conducting hypothetical walk-throughs of different disruption scenarios, simulations and discussions with employees. A well-thought through plan can help your agribusiness get back up and running after an event.