Purple Pitchfork - Blog

All I Can Do

3/17/2016

Three thoughts on life:

A complaint is just a project waiting for definition;
Always ask yourself, “What’s my end game?”’ and
All I can do is all I can do.

These are three hard lessons to learn, and even harder lessons to accept. Trust me. I speak from experience.

Given some developments in the non-Purple Pitchfork areas of my life, I’m taking a hard look at these lessons, and I’m making some adjustments to Purple Pitchfork, at least for the time being.

I’m going to take a break from writing essays for this weekly newsletter. As much as I enjoy doing the work, and as much as I’ve heard that you value it, it’s more than I can do right now. I expect that I’ll still kick out the occasional essay, perhaps with some longer pieces, and maybe things will change again in a way that allows me to resume the weekly rhythm of writing.

We’ll still be in touch with podcast information. And I’m still planning to get a podcast out every Thursday, too.

Target Fixation

3/10/2016

If you've watched your kids play soccer, you've watched the forwards shoot the ball straight at the goalie. Not just once, but time and time again.

It's an easy mistake to make. Your hands - and your kids' feet - are hardwired to your eyes. If you're looking at the goalie, that's where you're going to shoot the ball. The best shooters learn to look at the part of the net that's empty.

When the pressure's on, whether it's because everything's suddenly gone sideways or because you've got the opportunity to meet a big goal, it's easy to focus on the obstacles. Unfortunately, that's also the best way to let the obstacles get the best of you. Look for the path through, and keep your eye on that.

Hiring Potential Winners

3/3/2016

Ken Blanchard (no relation) says that there are three basic approaches that you can take when hiring employees:

Hire a winner.
Hire a potential winner.
Prayer.

Hiring winners is unlikely – even the pros don’t succeed consistently. And there just aren’t that many winners out there.

Prayer is probably not the best strategy when it comes to hiring, and I don’t advocate it as a strategy.

But potential winners are out there. They usually cost less to hire than established winners, and they’re easier to find. And you can train them to win on your farm, in your systems, instead of on somebody else’s.

Three Characteristics of Potential Winners

Potential winners possess three basic characteristics: good character, potential, and fit.

You can train somebody to do a job, but you’re unlikely to change their fundamental character. When I hired employees at Rock Spring Farm, I looked for applicants who were honest and eager, and who cared about their work. Were they polite and forthright in their communications? Did they dissemble when asked uncomfortable questions? Did their resume line up with their references? At their interview, did they show up on time and wear clean clothes? Were their communications free of spelling and significant grammatical errors? Were they responsive to communications and did they follow up in a timely fashion?

You want people who have demonstrated potential, so we looked for applicants with experience that showed they had hustle and determination. For our harvest crew, we didn’t seek people with experience picking vegetables – in fact, unless an applicant had years of experience, we generally considered working on other vegetable farms to be a liability rather than an asset, as workers with some training generally had to unlearn one way of doing things so that they could learn to do it our way.

Some things we found, year after year, that pointed to potential: experience in food service, whether it was cooking or serving; running cross country; getting excellent grades; participation in non-sports extra-curricular activities; musical excellence; completing a term of service in the Peace Corps; and outdoor leadership training.

For workers at a higher level we looked for the basic skills necessary for those jobs. For crew leaders, we wanted to know if the applicant had experience telling people what to do? For a machinery operator, we wanted to know if they had they driven a tractor on a vegetable farm? We didn’t need for them to have lead crews on a vegetable farm, or driven our tractors and our implements – we could train them to do that. But without the basic skills, potential would have been lacking in these more advanced positions.

The best applicant won’t succeed unless they fit in with the rest of the crew, and with the boss. If I didn’t like somebody, I didn’t hire them. If I didn’t think my crew would like them, I didn’t hire them. I know the personality traits that I can handle spending time with, and I never felt like it was my job to fight an uphill battle with myself to make the position work for somebody.

Winnowing

To find potential winners at Rock Spring Farm, we winnowed in four steps:

A self-winnowing process, where we provided information about the farm, our mission, and our values;
A simple test to determine some basic character and potential;
A written application;
An in-person evaluation and calling references.

To encourage potential applicants to self-winnow, we provided ample information on our website about the job and our expectations regarding it. I didn’t take the try-to-scare-them-away route; instead I played on the upsides of working at Rock Spring Farm:

GET DIRTY, HAVE FUN, EAT WELL!

Are you looking for an exciting workplace, an opportunity to stimulate your mind and exercise your body? Rock Spring Farm is at the forefront of the organic market garden renaissance in Northeast Iowa and Southeast Minnesota. Our diversified organic vegetable and herb farm offers the chance for motivated individuals to enjoy the outdoors and be a part of developing a sustainable agriculture in the Upper Midwest.

We hire our largest work crews from June through August, but we are always interested in talking to qualified individuals for our year-round vegetable and herb growing and packing operations.

When it comes to farm work, we live by the motto, Eat Well, Get Dirty, Have Fun. Rock Spring Farm enjoys a diverse workforce with plenty of respect and a positive attitude. We believe that good work, done mindfully and well, has the ability to transform ourselves and our world.

Local organic farms change the food system by becoming robust businesses and consistently providing large amounts of high quality organic food to their customers, with whom they build strong, professional relationships. We are looking for employees who embody this attitude.

We outlined the characteristics of the people we wanted to work with: hardworking, communicative, reliable and responsible; punctual, and arrive for work ready to work; have reliable transportation; receptive to feedback and adjustments for work processes; and so on. By outlining our principals, and the traits we looked for in successful employees, a certain percentage of potential employees simply walked away.

Finally, we encouraged people to look around the website and get familiar with the farm, then click on a link to find the instructions for applying.

Clicking on that link and following the instructions was a test of basic character and potential. Could an applicant follow instructions? Did they want to? I was always surprised at the number of people who couldn’t follow these simple instructions:

HOW TO APPLY

To apply for a position at Rock Spring Farm, send an email to farmteam@rsfarm.com with the following information:

Your contact information.
A letter of interest.
Your resume and/or qualifications for the position you are applying for.
The names, relationship, and contact information for three references.
The dates you are available to start and an end date, if any.

We only accept applications via email; mailed or walk-in applications not accepted.

See how I did that? If an applicant can follow directions, I’ll know in short order. And if they can’t, I’ll know that, too.

Because handling employee applications appropriately says a lot about a farm, I wanted to portray that we, too, had good character, so I replied promptly with a boilerplate email that let people know that I had received their application, and what the process would be going forward.

With an application in hand, we now had the tools we needed to evaluate the applicants. Applications and attachments were printed and stapled together. At this point, we made quick judgment as to how well the applicant demonstrated their character, potential, and fit, and wrote a rating of 1 – 5 on the front page of the packet. I used a spreadsheet to track information about applicants, including start and end dates, ratings, and communications.

When we had received enough applications that we felt good about, top applicants were called with an invitation for an in-person interview. Interviews were conducted with an outline in hand, and started with a discussion of our farm, including our marketing strategy, production highlights, and standards for work. Questions referred back to these, with an effort to flesh out their potential and their character traits. This was also the point at which I could fundamentally determine if I liked somebody. Overall, I felt that engagement in the interview process, combined with a demonstrated interest in the farm, were far more important than the answers to any specific question.

I conducted interviews in the farm office in private, then sent applicants out to where work was taking place to spend a few minutes talking with other employees or my farm manager. It was important that the applicant’s potential teammates have the chance to make their own impressions, and relay them back to me; they often picked up on things that I missed in the more formal interview.

Ratings were made again on a scale of 1 – 5 on the applicant tracking spreadsheet.

At this point I would contact references for those applicants I was still interested in. In general, I didn’t feel like I got great information from references; most managers and supervisors were reluctant to provide detailed information. I found that it was most beneficial to focus on facts (dates of employment) and tone, more than anything else. Most potential winners had somebody who was strongly in their corner; my mis-hires almost never did.

Successful applicants were notified by phone, with a follow-up email to confirm details, and their acceptance or rejection of the position noted.

At the conclusion of the hiring process, we notified unsuccessful applicants by email: Thank you for applying for a position with Rock Spring Farm for the 20xx season. We had a number of qualified applicants this year, and have filled all of the seasonal positions that we have available at this time.

By using defining success and implementing a system to achieve it, we were able to substantially improve our hiring practices while not getting bogged down in the details and guesswork of trying to separate the potential winners from the applicants that were unlikely to succeed.

Winnowing Employees

2/25/2016

For every twenty applicants to Harvard, one in five meets the basic qualifications to attend – the grades, the test scores, the determination, the extra-curricular folderol that indicate a reasonable likelihood of success.

But past that initial winnowing, the admissions staff does not have consistent success in picking the winners and losers. Admitted students drop out or fail, and students who are turned away go on to achieve success in equivalent venues – and in life.

The same thing happens with recruiters for professional sports. Nobody who gets into the NFL or the NBA lacks the skills to play the game at a high level, but once that basic requirement is met, recruiters have an inconsistent record when it comes to selecting the players who will take a team to the championships.

Think about that for a moment. For admissions staff and professional sports recruiters, selecting winners and losers is a full-time job, one that’s backed up by a lot more data than we usually have on potential members of our farm crews. And they still can’t consistently pick the winners and the losers.

My conclusion: When you’re hiring employees, it doesn’t pay to spend the time and the effort looking for winners. Expecting to outperform Harvard admissions staff and NFL is folly.

What if, instead, you focused on that initial winnowing to ensure that applicants meet the basic requirements to succeed as part of your farm team? Then, put the effort you would have put into additional winnowing into training and developing the staff you hire to provide them with the skills, information, and perspective they really need to succeed in your unique circumstances.

(HT Seth Godin)

CSA Marketing Triangle

2/18/2016

Mark Boen says CSA members want three things: choice, convenience, and connection to the farm.

Which is why he’s moving away from CSA as a way to market his produce.

The choice, convenience, connection trio of the CSA is similar to the contractor’s trio of fast, cheap, and good. Everybody wants all three, but you only get two at most.

It’s your job to decide which ones you’re going to promise. Making the right promise will be key to retaining members.

Urgent or Important?

2/11/2016

Fixing the sheep fence is important before the sheep are out on pasture.

Fixing the sheep fence is urgent when the sheep are eating your beets.

Changing the oil and performing other maintenance on the tractor is important.

Fixing a broken tractor becomes urgent when rainclouds are on and the crew is ready to go out to the field for transplanting.

Spending focused time with your kids is important.

Dealing with a meltdown is urgent.

Getting the flame weeder set up and ready to clean the weeds off of the carrot field the day before the carrots germinate is important.

Flaming on the right day is urgent.

Eating well is important.

Being hangry is just ugly.

Importance tends to bleed over into urgency as time passes. And it tends to ramp up the work and the stress level and the expense. Not fixing the fence before the sheep get out means that you not only have to fix the fence, you have to put the sheep back in.

Plus, you’ve fed the sheep on relatively expensive beets. Just be glad they didn’t find the radicchio.

When you take care of the important things, the urgent things don’t show up as often. And it almost always takes less time. Taking two extra minutes to make sure the fence is hot and tight means that you don’t have to chase the sheep.

Don’t Be a Wreck

2/4/2016

Usually, you can see the potential for a wreck well before it happens - whether you are driving your car or managing your farm finances. On the farm, keep an eye out for these signs of a potential financial wreck:

The checkbook doesn’t stretch enough to pay the bills.
If you can’t pay your bills and ongoing expenses, you’ve got trouble. This includes living expenses as well as ongoing farm expenses. And while it seems obvious, it’s easy to ignore and think that things are going to get better on their own.

Carrying open accounts past 60 days.
Carrying open accounts with vendors can be a smart way to manage cash flow, but if you have to stretch your payables too far, that’s a sign that something’s wrong with your cash flow. Carrying open accounts for too long can make you an undesirable customer to important input suppliers, setting you up for future problems.

Forgoing necessary inputs.
This seems like a no-brainer, but too many farmers skimp on feed, water, fertilizer, and other necessary inputs because they don’t have the cash to pay for them. As a result, crops and livestock don’t perform as well as they should, so income goes down, and then, next year, you’ve got even less money to pay for the necessary inputs. And the cycle repeats itself, getting a little worse each time.

Selling inventories.
To create short-term cash, you might be tempted to sell input inventories that you will have to replace later. The same thing is true when it comes to selling CSA shares in the fall to generate fall cash-flow - you’ll likely find yourself in the same situation next year unless you make some changes to your operation. This is almost always a losing proposition.

Accepting lower-than-market prices.
If you have to sell your products at lower-than-market prices to generate short-term cash, that’s a sign that things aren’t going well. You should be selling products to make money, not just to plug cash-flow holes.

Avoiding the Wreck

If you identify hazards early enough, you can take actions to avoid them. But it’s important to act fast.

Talk to your lender immediately.
No, really, don’t wait! Most borrowers hide financial problems from their lenders until it’s too late, but hiding problems from partners – whether they’re business partners or personal partners – is never a good idea. Remember, in most cases, the bank simply does not want your farm – they will work with you to figure out how to avoid having a bad loan on their books. And it’s easier to make adjustments when the crisis point is further away, rather than waiting until you’ve washed up on the rocks.

Change the amortization on your loans.
Cash flow isn’t everything, but it is an important thing. Changing the term of a loan can be a win-win for you and the bank, since they don’t end up with a bad loan on their books and you can reduce your monthly payments. And, of course, if things get better, you can always increase your payments back to their original level.

Consider a line of credit.
A short-term infusion of cash with a payback plan is usually a much better option than having a dozen vendors banging on your door and ringing your phone wondering when they are going to get paid.

Increase Success

This is perhaps the most important way to avoid a wreck!

In agriculture, profitability has three components: scale, costs, and utilization.

You need to produce enough product to cover your overhead expenses. It costs the same amount of money and time to have a website or write a newsletter whether you sell $1,000 worth of carrots a week or $50,000. And many variable costs have a certain baseline to them - trucking and handling charges are often based on the pallet or the truckload, regardless of how much product is on the pallet or in the truck. The number of pallets is a variable cost, but each pallet costs the same whether it's carrying $300 or $3,000 worth of product.

You need to drive down your cash expenses as much as possible. Don't skimp on the water and fertilizer that make your crops grow, but don't pay more for them than you have to - unless paying more for them provides value in another way. (I try to buy my tools locally, and pay more for them than I would at the big box store, because my local hardware store provides tons of help and advice with smaller purchases; I buy seeds from a high-quality vendor rather than getting the sweepings from the seed room floor from a cheaper source.)

You need to maximize utilization of your assets - all of your assets. If you are in the crop production business, every acre needs to be working for you, whether it's growing a cash crop or next year's fertility. If you have employees, you need to maximize their productivity. If you are selling meat, you need to maximize your use of the entire carcass, getting the best price on every part of the animal. In the delivery business, your trucks need to run as many days a week as possible, and as full as possible whenever they are running.

Most often, the changes that growers need to make in order to avoid a wreck come from improved management, rather than significant investments. Focus on investments that increase your ability to monitor the critical elements of your operation – most of these can be had at very little cost.

Don’t Wait for the Warning Signs

Of course, if everything in your operation is going great, you probably won’t have anything to worry about. But just like your car can seem to be running just fine right up until your tire blows out, farm financial troubles have a way of sneaking up on you. The best way to avoid a financial wreck is to look out far in advance. And the best way to do that is to institute a regular pattern of financial planning and monitoring.

Weekly - Are there bills to pay? Do I have money in my bank account? What’s my credit card balance?
Monthly - Are there any outstanding receivables? Does the bank think I have as much money as I think I have? How is my financial plan working out?
Quarterly - What do I owe the government for payroll and other applicable taxes?
Yearly - What do I owe the government now? How have my assets, liabilities, and equity changed in the last year? Did I make progress last year?

Every year, farm businesses should complete a balance sheet, income statement, and statement of cash flows, and evaluate the resulting financial ratios. These reports provide invaluable feedback on business progress from year to year, as well as predicting issues that are coming down the pike.

In addition, creating an ongoing financial history of your farm with these statements will not only demonstrate business growth, it will also demonstrate to a lender/investor that you take your business seriously; one of the primary complaints I have heard from lenders is that they are being asked to finance lifestyle choices under the guise of a business investment.

Mid-Level Management

1/28/2016

Part of maturing as a farm and as a business often includes the recognition that you could use some help getting results from the people on your farm. Welcome to the wonderful world of mid-level management.

Regardless of whether you call them a Field Manager, Crew Coordinator, or Team Leader, when you put somebody between you and some or all of your employees, you have thrust that person into a management role. You’ve made them responsible for the results of the work that other people are doing. That means that you must be prepared to precisely define your expectations, and provide people with the resources they need to perform in their new role – including how to do the work of coaxing performance out of people who used to be their peers.

When a worker becomes a manager, they’ve lost their peer group, at least at work. Supervisors must be willing to monitor and correct the people who work under them – including friends, relatives, and their former peers. Before elevating somebody into a position of crew leadership, be certain that they understand this, and that they are willing to do it. If they aren’t, they shouldn’t take the job.

Managers need to be prepared to embrace ambiguity. When you have responsibility for creating outcomes, you have to balance the conflicting demands of quality, speed and schedule – as well as the morale and happiness of your crew. You no longer get the luxury of simple positions like, “Quality is more important that speed.”

And managers lose their relationship with their peer group. Even if, outside of work, they are still friends with those they work with, under the work umbrella they have to be separate to do their job well. No longer can they engage in grousing about the boss’s unreasonable demands or stupid decisions, because now they are on the boss’s side of the gulf between labor and management.

Managers – especially those who have been promoted because of their technical proficiency – are also in the unenviable position of it suddenly being their job to facilitate getting things done, rather than just doing those things better and faster themselves. Even if they can cut salad faster or make prettier bunches, crew leaders have to put themselves in the position of monitoring the work that others are doing, correcting and adjusting for deficiencies, and anticipating and planning for needed logistics, supplies, and transitions.

Too often, the only reward mechanism we offer to outstanding performance is to give them a management role – but a job title doesn’t make somebody a leader or a manager. Effectiveness in those roles results from a set of behaviors and attitudes that have very little to do with the ability to bunch cilantro quickly and well.

(On a related note, I think we need to do more to reward excellence at technical tasks without moving somebody into a position of responsibility for the performance of other workers.)

It’s a Trap

1/21/2016

Poor performance begets poor performance.

When things don’t go well on the farm, you have less money, so you try to get by with less.

You skimp on fertilizer, so you don’t get good yields. Labor efficiency goes down because less-than-vigorous crops take longer to pick per harvested unit than high yielders. Now you’ve got less money, so you have to find another place to cut.

You skimp on hired labor, so you have less time and energy to focus on managing your operation and creating a rich family life. Without adequate help, timeliness of operations suffers, so you don’t get crops seeded, transplanted, and weeded on time, which reduces saleable yields and increases labor inputs. Again, you’ve got less money, so you have to find another place to cut.

Your shop’s a mess, so you don’t put your tools away, so the next time you need them, you have to spend extra time hunting for them, so by the time you’ve finished cranking that nut you’re in a hurry to get back out to the field, and the wrench goes back in the pile instead of getting put away where you can find it again.

One farm I worked with even tried to cut seed expenses to the bare bones, until the managers had a vigorous debate over whether they could buy seeds for the fall storage crops since they had already spent their seed budget!

And so it goes all across the farm, round and round and round again. Until, like the fabled and quite endangered Malaysian Concentric Bird, which flies in ever-smaller circles, you finally disappear up your own backside.

Unlike manufacturing, on the farm, many of our expenses are actually investments. Buying more charging ports doesn’t result in more iPhones. But adding more fertilizer will result in more crops, improving yields and income at a rate great that the increased expense. Adding more water – pumping more water and spending the money to manage the irrigation system – can dramatically increase yields (and, sufficient water is key to maximizing the utilization of soil fertility). Properly managed labor increases the farm’s productivity by accomplishing tasks in a timely manner that frees you up to focus more of your energy on actually managing the operation.

(Of course, this is only up to a point – but most market farms I work with simply aren’t at that point.)

The only way out is to invest more time, energy, creativity, intellect, or money into the things that are holding you back.

[HT to Edward Abbey for the Malaysian Concentric Bird.]

Low-Hanging Fruit

1/14/2016

Fruit that hangs from the lower branches is easy to pick – just reach out and take it. You don’t have to work very hard to get it, and it’s tasty enough.

But picking the lowest hanging fruit on big trees usually won’t make the best or most rewarding harvest. Especially in older, full-size fruit trees, as you get higher in the tree, the fruits get more exposure to the sun and have more leaves nearby harvesting more sunlight. And more sunlight means bigger fruits chock full of the things that make fruit bigger, sweeter, and more flavorful.

While the low-hanging fruit is easy to pick, carrying a ladder to the orchard and climbing up into the highest branches is going to get you something better.

Not to mention that when you’re picking the low-hanging fruit, you’re picking the fruit that everyone else can reach, too. It doesn’t take much in terms of effort, investment, or experience to reach out and grab the fruits that hang within easy arm’s reach.

When you’re in a situation with low-hanging fruit, it’s worth asking if focusing on the low-hanging fruit is going to get you where you want to go. Yes, it’s worth grabbing some on the way up the ladder, but focusing your attention on the low-hanging fruit might mean that you forgo the opportunity to get something great that leaves you standing out from the crowd.

Besides, the investment in a ladder and the skill to climb it might mean that you’re the only one with any fruit once all of the low-hanging fruit has been picked.

Three Investments to Save Labor

1/7/2016

I’d like to suggest three ways to think about investments to save labor on the market farm (and elsewhere):

Invest to make a job faster. For example, buy a cultivating tractor instead of wheel hoeing. Or invest in a root washer instead of trying to get things clean just by spraying with water.
Invest in a task to make a different task easier. The best example here is investing in weed control as a means to improve harvest efficiency – when you don’t have to cut around or pick through the weeds, harvest gets a lot easier and a lot faster. Other examples would include irrigation to improve yields, which makes harvesting faster because you don’t have to move as far to get the same amount of produce; or investing in more precision with seeding to increase crop uniformity, which reduces the time necessary to put together quality bunches.
Invest in capacity. Because farming is all about timing, when you and your crew can complete a task more quickly, you can move onto other tasks in a timelier manner. While this is related to investing-to-make-a-job-faster, it’s about more than saving money on the task at hand. If it takes a crew a full day to hand-weed half an acre, it will take six days to hand-weed three acres. But if you start hand-weeding on day one when conditions are perfect and the weeds are easy to kill, by the time you get to the last half acre, the weeds are going to be at an entirely different stage of growth.

The first is the easiest to identify and the sexiest to invest in. The third is easy to overlook – what’s the cost of doing your own payroll in terms of your capacity to get value-enhancing work done?

The best investments will have an impact on all three.

The Deck is Stacked

12/31/2015

Last week, I wrote to you about how you can stack the deck for success on your farm (today’s the day to check those bank and credit card balances!).

Here’s the good news that I forgot to mention: the deck is already stacked in our favor! Market farmers today have incredible advantages and resources that we wouldn’t have dared to imagine twenty-five years ago.

We have aware customers and markets. Organic and local have become part of the food lexicon, to the point where even conventional stores stock organic produce. Many stores have even dedicated entire sections of the store to “natural” foods. Michael Pollan is, at least in some places, a household name.

We’ve got restaurants and grocery stores clambering to jump on the local food bandwagon.

We have the idea of CSA - something that was only the glimmer of an idea in most of the country in 1991. Look back at the text that many of us relied on in the early 1990’s, Eliot Coleman’s New Organic Grower. No, not the new edition – look at the old one. Eliot talks about a “food guild,” but the idea is so fresh that the words Community Supported Agriculture aren’t associated with it.

Oh, and that text? About that. That was the only text available about organic market farming. Now you can fill entire bookshelves with excellent, accessible books about the details of organic market farming, orcharding, organic farm business management, medicinal herb production, crop planning, organic soil management… the list goes on and on.

And information? Talk about information. Growing for Market broke new ground in the early 1990s by publishing a newsletter by and for market farmers. Outside of the conventional agriculture and large-scale wholesale vegetable publications, that was really it for a long time.

Organic research was pretty much non-existent twenty-five years ago. When I worked in the carrot breeding program at the University of Wisconsin, “organic” meant that you didn’t do anything to it at all – including cultivating. In my soil science class, I waited anxiously all semester for the one lecture on organic farming. On that day, the professor stood up with an empty bag of dried steer manure from the garden center and said, “Look at the analysis on this! 0.5, 0.5, 0.5. You can’t grow anything with this.” Now, the UW and most other land grant universities have entire faculty positions focused on organic production.

We’ve even got the internet! I remember the excitement of getting Steel in the Field on video and watching it on a VCR, pausing and rewinding to grab each little detail. I also remember calling Richard de Wilde to have him explain to me, without pictures, how to set up the cultivators on a farm I had just started to manage - he hadn’t seen them, and getting him pictures would have required having film developed and pictures posted. For most things, if we wanted to see it in operation, we had to go and see it. Today, YouTube provides an endless array of insights into how to get things done on the market farm. (Check out this video of asparagus harvest in California if you want to feel slow.)

On the finance side, we’ve got amazingly low interest rates, and bankers who don’t all think you’re crazy for wanting to start an organic vegetable farm somewhere outside of California.

And, yes, there are still shortcomings. We need more customers willing to pay a premium for local and organic food. We need distribution systems adapted to our needs as farmers. Land prices are outrageous in many places. Organic research is still a crazy-small part of the overall USDA research budget. We’re facing new regulations and expectations for food safety. And more.

But overall, I don’t think there’s ever been a better time to be a market farmer. And even if there has, this is the time we’ve got. So use the all of the tools and resources at your disposal and make the most of it!

Happy new year! Here’s to the best of fortune in farming, family, business, and life in 2016!

[HT Steve Pincus http://www.farmertofarmerpodcast.com/episodes/pincus]

Stack the Deck

12/24/2015

I think it’s fair to say that most of the success factors in market farming can be described in a bell curve. As the bell curve implies, most of us have okay access to markets, and we farm ground that’s okay for market farming. We have okay business acumen, okay marketing skills, okay land-access arrangements. Our available labor is largely okay, we have okay innate organizational skills, and okay willpower to get out there and get the right work done on the right day.

Most of our models in farming, however, have something more than okay: they’ve got several factors located far out to the right on the bell curve. They’re located close to concentrations of wealth and enthusiasm for social righteousness and good food. They got into the market at just the right time. They inherited land or bought it on the cheap. They acquired business acumen in another line of work. They discovered what they wanted to do early in life and had a few dominoes tip in just the right way. They’ve inherited or developed the traits that help them stay organized, intuit what needs to be done, and relate well to people.

That’s not to say that our models don’t work hard, develop new skills, enhance value, innovate, and do a thousand other things right day in and day out. If you’re going to succeed in this business – any business! – you’ve got to do a lot more than get lucky. And “getting lucky” is almost always a function of hard work and smarts in addition to having life’s dice roll your way. “Making it” in market farming, especially over the long haul, is never handed to you on a silver platter. (If it is, I haven’t seen an example.)

But it does mean that many of our models in farming can get away with things that those of us without a stack of lucky breaks at our backs can’t. They can get away without a monthly cash-flow budget, or filling out financial statements, or getting a line of credit at the bank. They don’t need to understand financing because they don’t have to incur debt in order to reach their goals. They don’t require a system for employee management because it just comes naturally to them.

The rest of us need to stack the deck – and the best way to stack the deck is to increase the intentionality that we bring to the management of the farm. And that means increasing our use of the plan-monitor-control cycle.

And if there’s one area that drives everything else when it comes to management, it’s money. Because money is the bottom-line expression of value and ability to continue farming in our world. That’s not to say that money has to guide everything you do, but money provides the foundation that allows every other expression of our values to be present in the world. It allows us to farm another year.

And this time of year – right now, as a matter of fact! – is the best time to put together the three key tools you need to monitor your farm’s financial performance: a balance sheet, an accrual-adjusted income statement, and a statement of cash flows. As we move towards the start of the new year, it’s the perfect time to take inventories of our supplies, and set aside an hour on New Year’s Eve to check balances on our bank accounts, accounts receivable and payable, loans, and credit cards.

These three tools, conventional as they are, can provide insights into your farming operation, especially when compiled year after year, when plugged into various farm financial ratios, as described in resources such as this Farm Financial Scorecard. Tracking these year after year can provide not only important measurements of your farm’s performance, they can also help diagnose problems and provide an early warning of negative trends in your business.

(Please see the October and November issues of Growing for Market – available here if you don’t subscribe already – for my articles on assembling financial statements, as well as the book, Fearless Farm Finances, which I coauthored.)

Good Luck, Bad Luck

12/17/2015

I didn’t learn to use a chainsaw until I was 21, working at the University of Wisconsin’s Rhinelander Agricultural Research Station, up in northern Wisconsin. A couple of days after I started working on the research station, my boss taught me how to use a chainsaw and set me to felling some trees to make room for a new greenhouse pad. It being a state job, he insisted that I suit up properly, with protective chaps and a hardhat with earmuffs and an eye screen. I’d been around chainsaws before, but I’d never seen anybody working in such a ridiculous get-up, but I did what I was told.

(At this point, let me say that it’s really hard to kill a horsefly that’s chewing on your head when you are wearing a hardhat. Also, it’s hot and humid in Wisconsin in the summertime, especially when you grew up in Seattle [not hot] and spent the last two years in the desert [not humid]. The combination of horseflies, mosquitoes, and sweat was pretty darned distracting.)

(Also, I’m not sure that felling trees was the right job for a novice chainsaw user. But it was the work that needed to be done.)

Things got exciting at a number of points during the day, as I got the chainsaw stuck in the tree, and dropped a tree the wrong way and got it hung up in some branches, with nothing but my own youthful lack of good judgment to get it down. But nothing was quite as exciting as when I let the chainsaw bit full speed into my thigh – the chaps shredded and stopped the chain. I spent quite a bit of time digging the fibers out of the chainsaw, and then I had to explain to my boss why we needed new chaps.

At the time, I felt pretty unlucky. I felt like an incompetent fool, and I’d embarrassed myself in front of my boss and my new crew. But when I’ve looked back, I actually feel pretty fortunate to have made such a grand mistake so early in my chainsaw-using career. I learned my lesson and I learned it good, and I’ve never used a chainsaw without chaps and a helmet since, and I’ve never hit myself with the saw again. For twenty-some-odd years now, I’ve approached chainsaws with respect for how much they can get done, as well as how much pain and suffering can be caused by a moment’s inattention.

I had a different experience when it came to learning to manage people. In fact, I had the worst luck I could possibly have had when we hired our first full-time employee at Rock Spring Farm: he was great. Shaun was the kind of worker who bought into our enterprise just as fully as I did. He would match my speed and enthusiasm all day, and go in the house and make dinner for the family at the end of the day. When things didn’t work, he jumped in to figure out how to make them right, with no judgment at all. If the rain kept us out of the field one day, he’d stay out until dark to get the transplanting done when it did dry out. He rode his fellow employees hard so that we didn’t’ have to – and he did it with a smile on his face. And he’d come to farmer’s market after a 60-hour work week, and come home to watch the kids if there was something else that I needed to take care of.

And it was the worst possible thing, because when Shaun left at the end of the year, and we hired new employees the next year, I expected them all to be Shaun. As we doubled our production, bought a bunch of new tools, and entered into what would be a disastrous wholesale lettuce contract, we leaned on our crew, but found that we had entered a post-Shaun world. Where Shaun saw what was right with our farm, our new crew found the flaws. Where Shaun jumped in to make things right, the new crew stood around and waited for things to be fixed – and assumed that what went wrong reflected something wrong with us. When five o’clock rolled around, morale went in the toilet if we need to stay a few minutes late to get a job done.

And we had no idea what to do about it. Instead, we flailed around and yelled and jumped up and down and generally did a bad enough job of managing people that we drove a crew of ten people off the farm in the space of two weeks.

If Shaun hadn’t been so good, maybe I would have had to learn a thing or two about managing employees before I got in over my head. I think I could have saved myself a lot of pain and suffering if I’d learned to protect myself earlier in the game, rather than just bumbling forward and assuming everything would be okay.

If we’re lucky, things aren’t too easy when we’re learning, and we get the chance to make some mistakes before the stakes get too high. If things are easy, and we don’t make a bunch of stupid mistakes – or if we’re lucky enough that we (or our businesses, or our relationships) are wearing the equivalent of chaps and a helmet – we have to work that much harder to get the skills and assume the attitudes that are necessary to continued success.

Debt is Like a Chainsaw

12/10/2015

My friend and fellow financial geek Paul Dietmann says, debt is like a chainsaw. With a chainsaw, you can cut a lot of firewood in a hurry – increasing your capacity to keep your house warm over the winter at a reduced cost.

Or you can cut your leg off.

Like any tools, it’s all about how you use it. Yes, it has risks. But it also has rewards.

Good debt serves a defined purpose to create long-term outcomes. It includes a plan to service the debt – not just a gut feeling that you’ll be able to do it. And good debt creates value for your business.

Good debt – especially long-term debt – should increase the productive capacity of your farm.

Good debt provides a return on investment commensurate with the cash flow required to service it. If you’re borrowing money for your business, the borrowing should create additional cash flow in line with the payments that are due. This is why an operating loan or crop note usually doesn’t require monthly servicing of principal –it takes time for those tomatoes to grow and yield a return on your investment so that you can pay it back.

The payback terms of good debt matches the time it will take to achieve your returns. Don’t finance capital investments with short-term debt, and don’t shorten the term of your debt on your loan documents unnecessarily. By all means, pay loans back faster than the schedule laid out in your loan documents – but you want to be the one providing the discipline to pay down debt quickly, rather than asking the bank to do it. After all, you’re likely to be a lot more flexible if something goes wrong, or if another opportunity presents itself.

The balance on good debt falls faster than the value of the item it was used to finance. When you borrow money to buy a tractor, that tractor will probably be worth less than what you borrow on it the moment you drive it off the lot (or, if you borrowed money to buy a two-wheeled tractor, the moment it’s delivered to your door). If you’ve made a smart investment, the tractor will retain enough value that, pretty soon, it’s worth more than you owe on it – that way, by the time you pay off your loan, you’ve got an asset that has contributed to increased equity on your balance sheet.

Remember: debt doesn’t just take the form of cash borrowing from banks and relatives. When you sell CSA shares, that’s a kind of debt: you’ve borrowed your customers’ money with an expectation that you are going to provide them with vegetables. Too often, I see farmers move CSA sales from winter and spring into the fall to cover cash shortfalls, which creates an unhealthy spiral because they’re bringing cash flow that they’ll need next year into the present – it’s the equivalent of sticking your finger in a hole in the dike. It may be a good way to plug a leak for the moment, but it isn’t a very good long-term strategy.

Likewise, when you pre-sell farmers market vegetables, you’re taking in cash now instead of taking in cash later. Since most pre-sale arrangements come with a discount, farmers who do this run the risk of borrowing from the future at a rate much higher than what would be charged by the bank for an operating loan.

Alternatives to debt also have risks and rewards. By refusing to borrow money to make smart investments, you might miss out on opportunities to grow your business, or enhance its sustainability. Forgoing good tools and the right facilities because of an aversion to debt can be the equivalent of cutting your firewood by hand – a noble undertaking, but one that might result in far more work for the same results.

Thanksgiving and Golf

12/3/2015

At the Thanksgiving table last Thursday, the conversation turned to golf. My partner and my dad’s both play golf, and both tried to convince us that we should go along when the grass greens up in the spring. We both insisted that we have gone along for golfing, but they were both pretty adamant that mini-golf doesn’t count. Okay, fine, we said, we’ll come along and drive the cart with the beer cooler. Nope, they said. You should play. You’ll enjoy it!

Dad and I are both pretty clear that we would find it pretty frustrating, and would probably lose our tempers. At least a little bit.

My partner said that she gets frustrated, too. “You know, sometimes you have the game of your life, and the next time you go out and act like you’ve never held a club in your life.”

We all laughed, but I took out my Universal Information Capture Device (the note cards and pen that I carry in my shirt pocket) and made a note, which made everybody laugh.

I wrote it down because that’s the difference between an amateur and a professional. Professionals get consistently positive results. They don’t win all the time, and they may have an occasional off game (or season), but they consistently get it more right than not.

Consistency. And consistent improvement. Let’s go there.

(Just don’t make me do it while I’m holding a golf club.)

Why I’m Not Talking about the FSMA Produce Rule (Yet)

I’m not talking about the FSMA Produce Rule, which was recently released, because even the experts and people who have been immersed in it for the last several years are still parsing it out. Expect more information as we know more, including a podcast planned for release next week with Sophia Kruszewski from the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition about what we know at this time.

In the meantime, NSAC is posting rule interpretations here http://sustainableagriculture.net/category/food-safety/.

Please keep in mind that, for most of the regulations, farms will have between two and four years to come into compliance. And I’ll be doing my best to help you make the new rules work for you and for your farm.

Marketing Sweet Spot

11/26/2015

Your own marketing sweet spot happens at the intersection of your capabilities and the needs, wants, and desires of your customers – and where that intersection doesn’t intersect is with what your competition provides.

Your capabilities are those things that you are able to do, and include products and services with different definitions of quality at different value points. For example, your capabilities might include producing inexpensive tomatoes and delivering them fresh to your customer’s doorstep; or, it might be producing the most beautiful, high-priced tomatoes in sufficient quantity to effectively distribute them through a wholesale distributor or food hub.

The needs, wants, and desires of your customers include everything from “I’m hungry” to a desire to feel like they are part of a community. In many marketplaces, customers exist on multiple levels: you might be selling to a grocery store, where you need to meet the needs of the produce buyer; but you also need to meet the needs of her customer, the one actually picking your produce up off the shelf.

Customers at the grocery store, for example, wanted our skinless, seedless cucumbers – the ones that you grow in the greenhouse and can charge a million dollars for. But the produce buyer at the store needed cucumbers that could last on the shelf for a long time. Since those skinless cucumbers wilt if you look at them funny, that meant that we needed to wrap them in shrink wrap to be able to sell them in the wholesale marketplace.

My mom, for example, wants salad mix in containers (she justifiably feels that bulk salad greens are subject to sneezes and other undesirable occurrences). The produce buyer at her store needs consistent deliveries of salad greens in well-labeled boxes with clear invoicing. Be certain that you are providing what the end consumer wants, as well as what the middleman needs.

Your competition includes those people and companies providing similar products and services in your marketplace. Your job is to provide goods and services that differ from theirs, in quality, price, and other expressions of value. If somebody’s already providing radicchio to stores in your area, why go there – unless your radicchio has some distinguishing qualities. Can you deliver more often? Is yours certified organic while theirs isn’t? Does yours have a significantly longer shelf-life? Can you grow and sell it at rock-bottom prices? (Please don’t do that last one.)

Competition happens at all different levels. The radicchio you sell to stores in your area is in competition with the radicchio from other local growers, as well as the radicchio being sold from national distributors.

Of course, your customer has to value your differentiation from the competition for it to do you any good. When I started Rock Spring Farm, we made bunched parsley available to the local food co-op. But the local food co-op was perfectly happy to buy parsley in bulk from another local grower and put the twist ties on themselves. While it seemed crazy to me, my capabilities (providing bunched parsley) didn’t match up with the needs, wants, and desires of my customer – the fact that I was doing something that my competition wouldn’t simply didn’t matter in this case.

Word of Thanks

Yes, this newsletter is coming out on Thanksgiving (at least here in the states!), but it’s also kind of a cool day from a measurements standpoint.

Sometime this morning, the Farmer to Farmer Podcast will go past 100,000 downloads. And last week, this newsletter shot past 800 subscribers - most of whom actually open and read it every week!

It’s pretty easy, talking into my microphone and typing away at my keyboard, to feel sort of isolated. It’s hard to know if anybody’s listening - and that means it’s hard to know if this is making a difference.

Thank you. Thank you for being there. Thank you for sharing the newsletter and the podcast, and thank you for letting me know that it matters. Most of all, thank you for doing what you do every day: getting up and moving your farm, or your boss’s farm, or your farming dream, forward. A little bit better every day.

Keep up the good work. Be safe. And keep the tractor running.

Setting the Stage

11/19/2015

On one of my first farm jobs, at Wisconsin’s Harmony Valley Farm, I watched farmer Richard de Wilde come in from the end of a day of cultivating on the tractor and spend another five or ten minutes cleaning any accumulated soil from the knives and sweeps with a paint scraper and a wire brush. The job simply wasn’t done until the cultivators were ready for another round.

This wasn’t just something that happened on a prized piece of equipment. At the end of each day, every tractor was put away in its assigned parking space. Delicate equipment like seeders and transplanters was shedded, and other implements put away neatly along machinery row. At the end of every day, the packing shed floor was swept and hosed down, and the tanks cleaned and sanitized; and on Saturdays, while everybody else was off at farmers market, I was directed to clean and sanitize the packing shed from top to bottom.

At Harmony Valley Farm, we were practicing a classic productivity technique known as “clearing to neutral.” Rather than reaching the finish line exhausted and dropping everything where we finished the work, we completed the job and then brought everything up to the point where it was ready for the next time we needed it.

Having reached the end of the season – across the Midwest, farmers have just gotten rained out of the field at long last – now is a great time to clear your farm to neutral and to set the stage for the busy, urgent world of spring.

Too often, I’ve been a part of farming operations (including my own!) that reached spring in a state of sheer panic: cultivator parts were dirty, rusty and dull; the flame weeder hadn’t been serviced; and we still needed to figure out how to fix the muffler belt on the Farmall. In the spring, everything comes hot and heavy and all at once, with a ton of pressure to get things done. It’s harder to make good decisions in that context, and even more difficult to successfully manage unexpected hurdles (wait – you mean there isn’t a muffler belt on the Farmall?). Moving as many tasks from spring to fall as you possibly can sets the stage for a cleaner, smoother start in the spring.

In the transplant house, now is a great time to drain water systems and hoses to prevent freezing over the winter. Draining the hoses reduces the build-up of slimes and other undesirable stuff, and ensures that the day you turn the furnace on, you can run water through your hoses. Remove any fittings from frost-free hydrants so that you can be assured that they will drain properly.

Clean and sanitize transplant production flats to reduce the likelihood of carrying over diseases. It’s important to remove any soil before sanitizing, because clay and organic matter typically inactivate sanitizers. Sanidate and Oxidate are two relatively benign sanitizers that have been approved for organic production and are approved for hard-surface sanitizing (always check the label, and check with your certifier!).

Test greenhouse furnaces or boilers now, and schedule any maintenance to happen in the next month, rather than discovering problems the week you are trying to get things fired up for production.

Clean the fan blades on the circulating fans and the furnace to increase efficiency.

In the packing house, drain the hoses when you’re done with them for the year. Give every surface a good scrubbing down and sanitizing, including equipment, walls, and ceilings in the packing area and in the coolers, and get everything as dry as possible to prevent the growth or harborage of bacteria.

Pull stored pallets away from the walls to make that space less inviting to rodents – most sources recommend a foot as being enough to allow you to observe any activity, as well as to reduce the desirability to the undesirables.

Take the covers off of the evaporator fans and clean and sanitize the fan blades – you’ll be shocked at how gross these can get over the course of a year. Cleaning them will increase efficiency and reduce the likelihood of spreading rots or diseases.

In the shop, and in the equipment yard, take a look at each tractor and implement to remind yourself of any repairs or improvements that need to be done, and organize this into a list that you can check off as you go through the winter.

For the implements that don’t need repairs, dig in on the maintenance. Change the oil, grease the Zerks, and tighten the bolts. Remove any soil from scouring surfaces with a wire brush or a brush attachment on an angle grinder. Sharpen the edges on your cultivating tools. Wipe scouring surfaces with a bit of oil or grease once you’ve got them cleaned up to prevent rusting over the winter.

(I spent too many years without an angle grinder. What a great tool for maintenance and cleaning. Relative to a bench grinder, the angle grinder makes it much easier to get the work done. After too many years of unmounting cultivator knives and trying to get the angle to work right with the grinder on my workbench, I finally treated myself to a cheap angle grinder; a few years later, I got a really good one and I would definitely recommend buying a nice one right from the outset.)

(Also – don’t forget to wear eye protection and, preferably, ear protection while you’re using a grinder. Dirt and sparks fly everywhere, and I’d really like you to be able to see next year.)

Clean and sharpen hand tools with the angle grinder or a wire brush and a file. Rub the handles with linseed oil, and coat the blades with oil or grease to prevent rusting; you can wipe this off again in the spring.

Pull the gaskets from any irrigation equipment so that they don’t dry out over the winter in the cold and low humidity.

In addition to preparation for next spring, get ready for winter. It will happen. Put the blade or the snowblower on the tractor after you are finished with field work. Find the snow shovels. Lay in a supply of salt for paths and stairs.

In the office, prepare to put together end of the year financial statements by inventorying any assets that won’t change between now and the end of the year.

Review accounts receivable so that you can clean those up with customers before too much time goes past. Review payables so that you can get those cleaned up by the end of the year, which will help with taxes and with your bookkeeping.

Getting the work out of the way now will reduce stress and increase effectiveness when spring comes around. And who wouldn’t like that? What else can you do now so that when the snow melts and the fields dry out, you are ready to grease a couple of Zerks and make the most of it?

You are Not Your Customer

11/12/2015

When you sell your goods, remember that you aren’t your customer.

Your customer has different values and different perspectives than you do.

You may look at an heirloom tomato and think, “I wouldn’t pay $4.00 a pound for that!” But you can grow it, and they can’t. And they’re watching Bobby Flay tell them how great it is. (Actually, if you’re a farmer, the fact that they have time to watch cooking shows probably tells you that you are not your customer.)

Don’t set your prices based on what you would pay.

Taking Up Space

11/5/2015

Things that you have, but aren't using, suck up resources.

Equipment sitting in the bone yard requires you to mow around it if you don't want a thistle patch. And sitting there, it occupies space on your balance sheet that could be converted to something productive.

An unread book sitting on your bookshelf provides a great excuse for procrastination.

Boxes that you no longer use take up space on the shelf, requiring you to work around them.

Policies that you don't enforce erode your authority as an employer.

Categories in your chart of accounts that you no longer use encourage mis-allocation of spending.

Items on a to-do list that you don't intend to complete creates a soul-sucking cognitive dissonance.

Resentment and bitterness occupy mental space that would be better used on love and kindness.

Cleaning up and clearing out frees up mental, physical, and financial energy. It allows you to focus on the things that move your farm, business, and life in the direction you want to go.

What can you clean up and clear out to free up your energy to more productive and rewarding uses?

It’s the Coffee, Not the Cup

10/29/2015

I grew up in Seattle. Back when Starbucks sold beans, but not coffee. Back when the mermaid still had her navel. My dad and I used to wait in line on Saturday mornings to get the beans for the office coffee, and the nice woman at the cash register would let me have a chocolate-covered coffee bean.

I remain a coffee snob.

Actually, I’m kind of half-assed as a coffee snob. I don’t have a fancy brewing machine, and I have a run-of-the-mill Braun grinder, and a Chemex coffee carafe. But I won’t compromise on the beans. I order the beans in bulk from Café Mam out in Oregon because they consistently supply me with the best coffee beans I’ve ever had.

If you start with good beans, you can make your coffee incrementally better with a burr grinder and a fancy coffee machine. You can even make it better by putting it in a good cup (white, thick ceramic with a nice lip). But if you start with crappy beans, no fancy grinder, high-priced machine, or solid coffee cup is going to make your coffee any better.

The most important part of any enterprise is the foundation – until the foundation is sound, everything else is just a distraction.

If you grow crops, manage your soil fertility before you worry about making compost teas.

If you raise livestock, see to your fencing, water supply, and feed before you dig into aromatherapy for your cows.

If you use a tractor to cultivate, master the basics of knives, sweeps, and shovels before you invest in the latest fancy weeding equipment.

If you manage employees, don’t just read books and go to seminars about managing employees – actually do the things they say to do.

If you grow vegetables, make sure you can keep them watered and get them cold before you make promises about delivery and freshness.

If you buy an app to manage your crop planning, make sure it handles planting dates smoothly before you worry too much about how pretty the maps are.

If you run a food hub, figure out how you’re going to get your margins so that you can pay your employees before you start promising prices.

If you want to speed up your vegetable harvest, master weed control and fertility before you expect your employees or harvest machines to perform miracles.

It’s the coffee, not the cup, that really matters.

Tools for Managing and Motivating Employees on the Farm

Employees make it possible to get more done, but managing workers and their work takes dedicated time, energy and processes. Whether you manage one seasonal worker or a large year-round crew, good management can make the difference between making headway on your farm's work or just creating headaches. Join veteran farmer and educator Chris Blanchard to learn how to create a productive, positive work environment by communicating clear expectations and implementing systems for efficiency and accountability. In this workshop, you'll learn how to: utilize practical tools to increase employee satisfaction and productivity, remove emotion from management decisions and actions, and build a team culture.

Upcoming Events:

Cedar Rapids, Iowa | Monday, November 30
hosted by Iowa Valley Resource Conservation and Development
10:00 AM - 2:30 PM

Columbia, Missouri | Tuesday, December 8
hosted by Missouri Young Farmers Coalition
10:00 AM - 3:00 PM

Decided a Long Time Ago

10/22/2015

Between coaching clients and discussion groups, I’ve heard a lot of people ask lately, “Any suggestions on how to keep crew members motivated through the end of the season?”

Sorry. That was probably decided a long time ago.

Like most relationships, your relationship with your employees as it stands now is most likely the result of how they feel about the totality of your interactions, not just what you decide to do tomorrow.

Have you ever noticed how with a significant other, it’s almost impossible to make things better in a hurry? Ever tried giving somebody flowers when they were unhappy with you? On the other hand, when things were already a little unsteady, have you ever had things go south in a big way over something that seemed small?

That’s October on the market farm. If your crew is fundamentally motivated – if they feel good about the place they work, the people they work for, and the way the work is going – things are probably going to be okay. If things start to sag with the short days, you can kick it up with the equivalent of a bouquet of flowers: a small bonus, pizza ordered in for lunch, lattes brought to the field.

On the other hand, a crew that has arrived in October feeling less than positive about things is not going to be swayed by anything you can do at this time of year.

That being said, everybody, regardless of attitude or motivation, performs better as the days get shorter and colder with attention to a few things:

Make sure people have what they need to stay warm and dry.
Make allowance for the fact that the shorter days cause a natural tendency to slow down, especially for workers who aren’t used to working with the rhythm of the season. Let people off work before it gets too dark to see, and start them when the sun is up.
Warm drinks can go a long way towards keeping people going.
Cut people a little slack. For seasonal crews especially, October and November can induce symptoms similar to the “senioritis” we all went through in high school.

Stress Degradation

10/15/2015

Systems under stress degrade. Systems under more stress degrade faster. Degraded systems work less efficiently and are a lot less fun to be a part of.

Stress happens when systems operate beyond their normal capacity. The further beyond their capacity they operate, and the longer they operate there, the more stress is created on the system, and the less efficiently it functions.

On the freeway, traffic flows smoothly when there are less cars on the road. Add more cars, and the traffic flows less freely, although it still flows. However, there comes a tipping point where traffic starts to slow down for absolutely no reason. Normal function simply starts to break down when the system is pushed beyond what it can normally handle.

And worse, when some small thing does go wrong - when somebody has a fender bender and pulls to the side of the road - everything grinds to a dead halt.

We can reduce stress by increasing capacity or reducing pressure. On the freeway, that means building more lanes or reducing the number of cars. Either way, stress is reduced because the number of cars per unit of road goes down.

On the farm, keep in mind:

The cost of reducing stress is almost always less than the cost of the consequences of stress.
Planning is the best way to increase capacity at the lowest cost. Knowing what needs to be done on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis gives you the tools you need to deal with the variations that otherwise cause everything to blow up.
You almost always have to reduce pressure to increase capacity. On the freeway, you close lanes to build more lanes. In organic farming, you might grow cover crops to increase output in future years, or dedicate land to hedgerows to provide habitat for beneficial insects and other creatures.
Filling things to capacity creates congestion. If you expand your acreage and immediately fill every square foot with crops, you haven’t changed the relationship between capacity and pressure - you’ve just put more cars on a bigger freeway.
Increased capacity - whether it’s soil fertility, staffing, irrigation, or cooler space - increases your ability to achieve high throughput without having to worry about the details.
You have to counteract stress. One car driving over the same freeway for enough time will eventually create the need for road repairs. You have to plan for time to reorganize, rebuild, and refresh, whether that’s in your shop, your crop rotation, or your family life.

Tools for Managing and Motivating Employees on the Farm

Employees make it possible to get more done, but managing workers and their work takes dedicated time, energy and processes. Whether you manage one seasonal worker or a large year-round crew, good management can make the difference between making headway on your farm's work or just creating headaches. Join veteran farmer and educator Chris Blanchard to learn how to create a productive, positive work environment by communicating clear expectations and implementing systems for efficiency and accountability. In this workshop, you'll learn how to: utilize practical tools to increase employee satisfaction and productivity, remove emotion from management decisions and actions, and build a team culture.

Three events this fall:

Hemmingford, Quebec | Friday, October 23
hosted by La Ferme des Quatre-Temps
10:00 AM - 3:00 PM
(1 hour from Montreal; 90 minutes from Burlington, Vermont)

Cedar Rapids, Iowa | Monday, November 30
hosted by Iowa Valley Resource Conservation and Development
10:00 AM - 2:30 PM

Columbia, Missouri | Tuesday, December 8
hosted by Missouri Young Farmers Coalition
10:00 AM - 3:00 PM

Forget about the Vegetables

10/8/2015

If I grow good soil, I can forget about the vegetables. - Nigel Walker

Over the course of the past nine months, I’ve interviewed over thirty farmers on the Farmer to Farmer Podcast, spent a day each on ten different beginning farms, and worked with several experienced growers in different capacities. And here’s what I’ve learned:

It’s not about the vegetables.

Of course, you have to know how to produce the vegetables. Or the chickens, or the cows, or the herbs, or whatever. You can’t get away from needing to know the basics.

And you have to do the work to grow the vegetables.

But one common theme among successful operators has really surfaced: when you put the rest of your world in order, the vegetables (or the chickens) just sort of get in line.

At Angelic Organics, John Peterson builds the soil for two years, uses an easy-to-weed crop to clean the soil, then grows carrots or salad greens that usually don’t require much attention to weeding.

At La Grelinette, J.M. Fortier has used created permanent beds and permanent pathways to reduce compaction, minimizing tillage requirements and driving up yields.

At Tipi Produce, Steve Pincus and Beth Kazmar put employees first, and have almost eliminated turnover in their crew. They don’t spend hours in May teaching employees how to work on a vegetable farm.

At Pleasant Valley Farm, Paul and Sandy Arnold have invested in smart infrastructure that creates high returns and drives costs and inputs down year after year, without taking on a mountain of debt. The farm gets smaller and more profitable every year.

At Spring Hill Community Farm, Patty Wright and Mike Racette have organized their CSA around creating community with their customers, creating a retention rate that approaches one hundred percent (and drives their marketing budget to down near zero).

At Eatwell Farm, Nigel Walker runs his chickens on the cover crops for a year, and gets two full years of practically pest-free vegetable production from the fertility and biological cycling he has created.

At TLC Ranch, Rebecca Thistlethwaite rigorously analyzed the time spent on chores to focus on the most profitable activities.

At Clay Bottom Farm, Ben Hartman cleaned up his work spaces to facilitate the smooth flow of workers and work.

At your farm, what can you do to set yourself up for success?

Five Great Investments for Your Farm

10/1/2015

I like farming toys as much as the next farmer, and when you ask me, “What should my next investment be for my farm?” I’m as tempted as anybody to provide a listing of various configurations of metal and grease that, if properly applied, would be the perfect tool to address the situation.

But more often than not, I’d be wrong.

More often than not, you’d be better off investing your time and energy into…

Improving the information you have about your farm - How much does it cost you to grow a pound of carrots? What are your fixed costs per acre of field production? How long does it take your crew - average, high, and low - to harvest a hundred bunches of kale? What’s your average per-acre (or per-square foot) yield on carrots? What’s your current ratio, and how does that compare to last year? How much did you spend to grow the vegetables that went into your CSA share?

Improving the information you have about your craft - What don’t you know about growing vegetables, feeding chickens, or raising cows? If you don’t know the basics of your craft, figure out where you can go to learn it - and keep in mind that this might not be your normal round of conferences! State and regional producer associations often have workshops about improving the fundamentals by people who are focused on fundamentals over philosophy. Take a class. Attend field days.

Creating systems - You already have ways that you get things done. What can you do to make them better? If there are places where things consistently go wrong, spend time digging in there and figuring out what you need to make things right - more often than not, it’s going to be a minor investment or a change in procedures.

Cleaning and clarifying workspaces - It’s such a small thing, but working with even slightly chaotic workspaces and storage areas takes a huge toll on productivity and worker perspective. Clean, bright work areas with obvious storage spaces for tools can ease workloads - and perceived workloads - tremendously. If you’ve ever had a worker spend two hours during a rare dry spell looking for the right piece of metal to make the transplanter work (that was me), or torn your hair out with frustration while a crew tried to find a harvest knife for the last worker, you’ve seen the incredible toll this can take on a farm’s bottom line.

Close open loops - Farms tend to be filled with almost-finished projects. Wrap them up and get rid of the extra parts, drop them off the to-do list, and get them out of your head. You’ll free up mental energy to focus on the work that makes a difference, and the physical space that keeps your workers (and you) from having to work around, under, and over that undone thing and the junk that’s hanging around to get it done.

What can you do with the time you would have spent researching new toys? What if you spent the money you were going to spend on something new on refining what you’ve got?