Effective workstations can have a tremendously positive influence on productivity by minimizing extraneous movement and avoiding discomfort or injury.

The top of the work table should be at elbow height – considerably higher than a standard folding table or kitchen counter. I feel that workers move faster when standing, so we’ve set up all of our workstations for that. Anti-fatigue mats reduce wear-and-tear on knees and backs. We have workstations at two different heights, to accommodate both larger and smaller members of the crew.

Everything the worker needs should be within easy reach. Keeping tools and supplies within a 24-inch radius to the side and front speeds things up enough to make a little nagging worthwhile. We provide a coffee cup at each workstation to store the tools needed for the job at hand. Completed flats are moved to a trolley or cart that requires only a turn and a step to get to; workers without easy access to the trolley slide flats across the table for handling by somebody who can pivot to it.

For filling flats, we’ve constructed a table with walls on three sides. We buy our potting mix in two-yard slings, so we shovel mix from the sling up onto the table, which has the additional benefit of breaking up compacted chunks. Workers mound the mix over the flat with their hands, then shake the flat hard once before using a flat board to sweep the soil from the middle of the flat to the ends.

A few people actually enjoy bookkeeping. For most of us, it’s a tedious job that we have to do, and all too easy to put on the back burner since it doesn’t produce the same visible, visceral results that building a fence or harvesting carrots does. Since it’s such an easy job to put off, it doesn’t take long to create a seemingly insurmountable pile of stuff with something scary likely lurking somewhere in the middle of it – and you don’t want to find yourself behind on paying bills when the weather’s finally right for killing weeds.

Fortunately, modern bookkeeping tools and a good system for using them can make a big difference when it comes to cranking the bookkeeping widget. December is a great time to set up a new bookkeeping system, or revamp your old one, since the fiscal year starts on January 1, and you want to input your data in a consistent way throughout the year.

A successful bookkeeping system has three important outcomes: facilitate cash flow budgeting, monitoring, and decision-making throughout the year; make it easy to analyze profitability; and provide documentation and data for taxes. Contrary to the way many bookkeeping systems are set up, the last of these is the least important. – completing a schedule F is a once-a-year event, and the data can be easily extracted from a good bookkeeping system that is organized around the priorities of providing you with the information you need.

A successful bookkeeping system also has to be easy to use. Most farmers I know do their own bookkeeping, and even if you don’t, good bookkeepers don’t come cheap. That means you need systems that facilitate fast data entry and filing with a minimum of thought, especially if you are prone to doing bookkeeping after the field work is all done, or with a beer in hand.

I use QuickBooks for my bookkeeping, and will refer to it throughout this article. I’ve looked at other bookkeeping software, and I know that everybody has their preferences, but I keep coming back to QuickBooks because it’s the industry standard. You can use the same organization and workflow described in my Growing for Market article with any bookkeeping system.

The rest of this article is available from Growing for Market, as part of the November/December issue.

I often find that it's the little things that make or break my attitude. Big problems I can handle, but something like not having the address on a pre-printed check show up in a window envelope will truly drive me crazy.

Of course, sometimes it seems like the world was designed to make me crazy.

Printed checks - the kind you can run through your computer printer after inputting the data in QuickBooks - are just enough smaller than one-third of a sheet of letter-sized paper that the addresses don't reliably show. You need a different-sized envelope than the one you might use for invoices to make it show just right.

For invoices that we send out, we use a double window #9 envelope - these measure 3-7/8 x 8-7/8 inches.

For checks, we use a double window #8-5/8 envelope, measuring 3-5/8 x 8-7/8. And, yes, that 1/4 of an inch makes a real difference.

Because I live in the humid Midwest and don't have air conditioning, I vastly prefer peel-and-seal envelopes to the press-and-seal type; this allows me to buy in lots of 500, even though it might take two years for me to use them up. For some reason, their availability through Amazon and the big box office stores seems to limited, which frustrates me to no end. It occurs to me that maybe I should store my backstock in my onion- and seed cooler.

Following is the text from an article I wrote for Rock Spring Farm's Eat Better Newsletter in 2009. The Scott Viner has performed well for us through the years. We've learned a few key lessons:

• The forward groundspeed of the tractor must be close to the speed of the belts that carry the roots up to the cutting knives. This is more important for crops like carrots than it is for crops like beets.
• Weed control is absolutely critical. Nothing messes up the Scott Viner like weeds.
• It's harder than you think to find a tractor operator to drive the bin wagon.

I took the following unedited video at Featherstone Farm in the fall of 2012. They shortened the elevator significantly compared to the Scott Viner at Rock Spring Farm, which shortens the drop but also requires the bin wagon tractor driver to operate much closer to the harvest machine:

Rube Goldberg at Rock Spring Farm Link to Original Post at eatbetternews.com

On Tuesday, we took delivery on what may prove to be a life-changing (or at least, a fall-changing) machine, a Scott Viner root harvester. This improbable-looking device pulls behind a tractor, and places carrots and beets directly into a 20-bushel bin on a wagon pulled by a second tractor.

I had been part of a crew running a similar device almost fifteen years ago at Harmony Valley Farm in Wisconsin, but had more-or-less discounted its applicability on a farm of our scale until I was visiting with David Van Eeckhout at Hog’s Back Farm east of the Twin Cities for a consulting project this spring. He had purchased one last fall, and put away some five thousand pounds of carrots in just over three hours. When he told me what he had paid for it, it didn’t take me long to figure out that the labor savings could pay for the machine in just one year, based only on last fall’s beet harvest at my farm. I called Roeter’s Farm Equipment, in the heart of Michigan’s vegetable-producing country, within hours of arriving home.

The Rube Goldberg device has belts running every-which-way to power more belts, pulleys, chains, elevators, and knives. Everywhere you look the machine has a grease fitting! A rider uses four different hydraulic levers and two more manual controls to steer, control the depth of two different parts, steer the belt that dumps roots in the wagon, and control the speed of the conveyor. Add three wheels and a conveyor that hangs out about eight feet to the side, and enough rust to indicate that it is certainly older than me, and you’ve got something that appears in stark contrast to the fiberglass-clad harvest machinery used in corn and bean fields.

Here’s how it works: a shoe at the front of the machine undercuts the roots at the same time two points lift and aligns the leaves. Twin belts grab the leaves and lift the roots out of the ground, conveying them toward the rear. Two sets of interlocking knives, rotating upwards like gears, grab the leaves and cut them from the top of the roots, which then fall onto a conveyor. The conveyor moves the roots out the back of the machine, where another conveyor goes up an elevator and dumps the roots directly into a bin on a wagon pulled by another tractor.

When Mark Roeter delivered the machine, we were quite fortunate that he stayed around long enough to put it together (the elevator at the rear shipped separately because the unit wouldn’t have fit on his semi-trailer otherwise), and ran me and Ben through everything we needed to know to get it running today. (As with almost all of the 1960’s vintage equipment I have used, assembly and adjustment required a sledge hammer to make it all work!) He told us to expect some frustration in learning to use it, but we put it in the field first thing this morning and were exchanging high fives just a few minutes later.

From the harvest row to the edge of the receiving wagon is about eighteen feet, so organizing fields to facilitate using the machine will take some serious planning, and we won’t be able to use it to its full extent during the season. Our fall storage crops, harvested at a moment when time is short and labor are both short, are set up to accommodate the machine. We are all very excited!

In a farm's bookkeeping system, distinguishing between revenue expenses and capital expenses matters. In my visits with beginning farmers, I often find these two items blended together.

• Revenue expenses are those expenses associated with the day-to-day operation of the business;
• Capital expenses apply to the purchase of assets such as property, buildings, or equipment - fixed assets with a long-term use.

Because revenue expenses are associated with the day-to-day operation of the business, they are incurred every year. Capital expenses are incurred infrequently, so they don't reflect on the profit performance of the business in any one given year. It is important to track them separately.

Capital expenses *are* accounted for each year using depreciation. Under current tax laws, business owners can "depreciate" some capital expenses in a single year; however, this doesn't mean that the entire depreciation expense should show up in your income statement. (An income statement allows you to calculate your farm's "net farm income," or the amount of "profit" your farm gave you over the past year in return for the labor, expertise, and capital you invested in it; it is the key measure for comparison of year-to-year financial performance.)

Many business owners confuse the amount of depreciation taken for taxes with the depreciation requirements of an income statement. The depreciation taken on an income statement should represent the actual change in value of the asset in a given year. You can calculate this with the following formula, in which the salvage value is the price you could get for the equipment after the life of the investment:

While depreciation can be a good approximation of the capital expenditures necessary to maintain the asset base of your farm, this is not necessarily the case for new and rapidly expanding operations, where large initial investments are required. As the business stabilizes, the approximate value of the assets that need to be replaced each year should be represented by depreciation; a profitable, sustainable business needs to plan for asset replacement.

Keep in mind that capital expenses do have an impact on cash flow. In your cash flow budgeting process, you need to account for the capital expense in the year that you spend the money. But when you assess business performance, use the formula above to calculate that expense.

In the CSA community and online, much has been made of the growth of box plans that resemble traditional Community Supported Agriculture programs in packaging and marketing, but don’t provide the same retail-level pricing and community support that formed the core of the original CSA concept.

To me, this all comes down to a marketing issue. In favor of a short acronym, we’ve all dropped the Community and Supported aspects of the concept from the every-day language we use to describe this way of marketing vegetables, with the result that CSA has (in the same way that Kleenex now means anything you use to blow your nose) come to imply any delivery of vegetables in a box.

CSA needs a new name. Or maybe it’s an old name that harkens back to some of the original writings on the subject of Community Supported Agriculture, such as Trauger Groh’s Farms of Tomorrow. In any case, it needs to be short and snappy, and it needs to say something about those two core values of community and support.

The new name, and indeed the movement as a whole, will need to find a way to draw the line of who is in and who is out – the lines aren’t as clear as you might think. At one end of the spectrum you’ve got programs that never reference the term CSA and make no representation about actually producing the food, such as Chicagoland’s Irv and Shelly’s Fresh Picks, and farm-based companies like the Pacific Northwest’s Full Circle that have added on to their own production to such a degree that the farm’s own produce doesn’t represent the cornerstone of their distribution program any more.

But you also have farms that supplement their own production from area growers, as well as others that offer add-on programs to supply out-of-region items like fruits and coffee to their members. For some of these farms, the add-on items include an implicit connection to a social-justice movement or even directly to the producer; for others, it’s just a box of good fruit.

The organic movement went through this definition process about 30 years ago, when organic certification began to define who was and who wasn’t organic long before the government got involved. I think it’s time for Community Supported Agriculture to do the same.

We recently hosted a field day at Rock Spring Farm on the subject of saving labor on the market farm. Inevitably, the discussion at the end of the day – once we had moved into the shade of the packing house – turned to managing employees.

As I described the systems we use to communicate with employees about desired outcomes and the parameters for success, a beginning farmer asked, “But what do you do if they simply don’t do the work?”

I hear variations of this question a lot at farming conferences. I suppose it strikes right at the heart of the local, sustainable produce grower’s dilemma when it comes to hiring people: I grow this food not to get rich, but to make a difference in the world and in people’s lives. I hire people at relatively low wages to do hard, hot, and dirty work that few Americans really want to do. And I depend on them to do the work. Big corporations treat food and people like ingredients and automatons – so shouldn’t I be different?

It all begs the question, why do you hire people? I have a short answer for that: You hire them to make you money.

Put everything else aside for a moment. Forget that you like to surround yourself with people. Forget that you are training young people to be farmers, or to appreciate where their food comes from. Forget being a job creator, a sympathizer with the workers, or a role model.

That’s all good stuff, but fundamentally, you hire people to make you money. To keep your farming business alive. To further your own goals, ignoble and noble alike.

That doesn’t make you a bad person. And it doesn’t mean you have to behave poorly. It does mean that you have to do your job as a manager.

When I have an employee who isn’t doing the work I’ve asked them to do, or isn’t performing to the standards I’ve set, I sit down and ask myself:

• Have I outlined the desired outcomes and principles for success? In other words, did I tell the employee to go weed the herbs, or did I provide instructions that every inch of bare soil needed to be scuffed and all weeds uprooted in the south three beds of perennial herbs in field 112?
• Have I provided the tools they need to do their job? Did I use my knowledge of my farm and my resources to direct them to the right hoe? Did I provide a field map so that they knew exactly where I expect them to work? Did I provide the training for how to use the tools, and how to sharpen them, and how to work efficiently?

If I’ve done these two things – in other words, if I have done my own job as a manager – and the employee isn’t doing the work that I need done, I resort to a short, verbal reprimand. At Rock Spring Farm, we try our best to use one-minute praisings and one-minute reprimands where appropriate, per the short and excellent One Minute Manager. Often, we’ll combine a reprimand with a little bit of re-training: “If you hold the hoe like this, you can slide it under the soil like this.”

If the reprimand doesn’t work, a verbal warning is in order. At the end of the day, I will pull the poor-performing employee aside and tell them in no uncertain terms that their job is on the line. I include exactly why, and exactly what will need to be done by the employee in what timeframe in order to keep her job. (That timeframe has a lot to do with the length of an employee’s tenure. Seasonal workers who are only on the farm for ten weeks don’t get much time to fix performance issues.)

More often than not, this simply doesn’t work. If an employee’s work hasn’t improved after reprimands and re-trainings, it’s probably not going to improve at all. But I feel an obligation to let an employee know exactly what is on the line before letting them go.

If the verbal warning does work, it’s important to communicate that to the employee – they need to know that their head is off the chopping block.

If it doesn’t work, it’s time to let them go.

When Jack Hedin called me last summer to ask if I would take a look at some transplant production issues Featherstone Farm was having in their greenhouses, I had no idea or expectation that, one year later, Featherstone Farm would occupy such a large part of my time and attention. It’s been a great year, with many exciting and engaging challenges.

In over twenty years of working on and with organic vegetable farms around the country, including thirteen years of farming on my farm, I’ve noticed that most farms and their farmers just plow ahead, making decision after decision on what action to take next to keep the irrigation pumps running, the harvest crews picking, and the tractors in motion without consideration for larger impacts or processes. The race against the weather and the perishable nature of vegetable crops combine with scarce time and monetary resources to create a situation where farmers never get a chance to stand back and evaluate their operations, much less the time to make systematic and systemic changes to build the foundation for future improvements.

It reminds me a bit of parenting.

We put a lot of effort last winter into a rewritten business plan and refinancing. But just as importantly, we worked hard to put processes in place for the financial management of the business on an ongoing basis. Featherstone  Farm now has not only a financial plan, it has a system in place for the periodic and timely monitoring of performance to that plan, as well as mechanisms for making corrections and replanning as necessary. Each month, the leadership team meets to review the farm’s income and expenditures relative to the plan – then, where things are not going right, we figure out how to correct them and assign responsibility for following through.

Weekly meetings of the leadership team provide an opportunity to check in and get everybody on the same page about progress made on addressing those financial issues, as well as other issues on the farm. The CSA team meets on a schedule to decide what’s going in the box and what’s going in the newsletter. And every Friday morning, the entire crew has a short stand-up meeting to make certain that everybody’s on the same page about the little and big things that keep the farm running smoothly, from rolling the windows up on the farm trucks and holiday work schedules to the process for reporting accidents and injuries and the importance of communication and teamwork to the farm’s success.

Farming is governed by rhythms and interruptions. We plant, cultivate, and harvest in cycles and patterns big and small, seeding onions in at the end of winter, harvesting lettuce in the cool of the morning. We weather floods and droughts, scramble to solve personnel crises, and shuffle the resources we need to get a critical piece of equipment repaired while the rest of the farm keeps running. And while weekly staff meetings and monthly financial reviews may be a part of many businesses, these larger patterns – independent of nature’s cycles, and recognizing the interface of agriculture with the larger culture of individuals, finance, and governance – occur all-too-rarely in the world of organic and local farming operations. To have the opportunity to join Featherstone Farm’s efforts to harness these processes to further the farm’s goals of making a difference in the world is truly an honor.

Here's the original guest post on Featherstone Farm's blog.

On Tuesday last week, Ben and I finished Rock Spring Farm's organic certification application for 2012. Organic certification is the process whereby a state or private certification agency verifies compliance with the USDA’s organic standards, which provide for an organic production system that responds to site-specific conditions by integrating cultural, biological, and mechanical practices that foster cycling of resources, promote ecological balance, and conserve biodiversity. Producers must document inputs, field and production activities, harvests, and sales to verify compliance with the standards.

For several years now, we have listened to other growers say things like, “We follow the organic standards but choose not to certify,” or, “Organic certification requires too much paperwork for a small farm,” while they continue to advertise their products as organic. We have chosen to stick to our guns and apply for certification every year, because we believe in the power of having somebody looking over your shoulder – just like having a coach to make certain you are following the details of a training plan (and not sneaking donuts on the side!), or a referee in a ball game to parse out the rules of just when a runner is safe at second. Although we may think that an input is allowed (or should be allowed), certification reminds us to double check our judgment with that of the larger organic community before making a decision.

To qualify for organic certification, prohibited materials—including chemical fertilizers and pesticides, as well as genetically-modified organisms such as those found in seeds and many biological controls—must not have been applied to organic crops or the soil in which the crops are grown for a minimum of 36 months prior to harvest. Certified organic farmers have to follow strict standards for applying manure or manure products, such as compost: unless the compost is fully mature, organic farmers have to apply the compost at least 90 days before harvesting a crop for human consumption, and 120 days if the edible portion of the crop touches the ground.

In addition, certified organic farmers have to use certified organic seed whenever it is available, and always have to use certified organic transplants. Inputs for organic production have to meet certain standards as well, such as not being produced from genetically modified organisms (as many bacterial seed inoculants and biological insecticides and fungicides are). Some of the insect and disease controls, as well as mineral fertilizers, are regulated regarding under what circumstances and how often they can be applied, guaranteeing that least-toxic approaches are used first; for example, if we use a copper-based fungus control, we have to demonstrate that we have used other methods of disease control first, such as proper spacing for air circulation and selection of resistant varieties—and, we have to document our usage to show that we don’t use copper repeatedly in the same field, so that we don’t have a toxic buildup.

Certified organic farmers are also required by law to work to enhance biodiversity, conserve soil and water, and not deplete natural resources. To qualify for organic certification, a farmer must demonstrate the maintenance or improvement not only of their soil, but of their surrounding environment, as well.

Each year, certified organic farmers develop an Organic Farm Plan that lays out how they plan to comply with the organic rules. Then, they complete an application for organic certification, and submit their farm to an inspection by an independent, third-party inspector. These inspectors are trained not only to verify the information in the organic farm plan, but also to look for signs that the plan is actually being implemented. An inspector might look for cover crop residues in the soil, examine crops for signs of residual herbicide damage, and check that farmers actually have labels from the bags of seed they claim to have used.

Because real organic farming is much more about what you actually do, rather than what you don’t do, the certification process requires a farmer to go through the process, every year, of thinking their way through their organic farm plan and how they will actively enhance biodiversity, conserve natural resources, and produce healthy, clean food, rather than simply avoiding certain products and practices. In our busy schedule, it is always a challenge to find time to do this, but it is always a worthwhile exercise.

I’m tired of hearing about how local food is fresher than produce trucked in from California, Arizona, and Mexico. “Freshness” relates to the amount of biological activity that has occurred from the time of harvest to the time a vegetable is prepared in your kitchen. Local food can provide tremendous benefits to a community’s economic vitality, to the flavor and selection of produce, and to a more-secure, less-carbon-outputting food system; but freshness is not a fundamental quality of locally-grown produce.

When I started Rock Spring Farm, I went to a meeting of growers for local food producers in Decorah at which the produce manager of the local natural foods cooperative commented that the lettuce she purchased from local producers didn’t last very long, while the produce from California had a shelf-life of a week to ten days. I had experienced the same thing with local produce on a farm I managed in Maine, and it all comes down to temperature. In both of those times and places, local growers hadn’t invested in the equipment and systems necessary to maintain produce quality.

Within the range of temperatures where plants survive, the rate of chemical and biological processes approximately doubles for every ten-degree increase in temperature. That means that produce stored at 45 degrees will last half as long as produce stored at 35 degrees; and produce stored at 55 degrees will last only a quarter of the time. When we pick a vegetable, we separate it from the source of energy and sustenance that comes from having its extensive network of roots expanded throughout the soil – at this point the portion of the plant we’ve picked begins the process of dying, which in vegetables is characterized by a decline in “freshness” and quality.

Getting produce cooled to the proper storage temperature is the first essential step in ensuring freshness; keeping it at the proper temperature is the second. The large-scale production systems in the vegetable-producing regions of this country dedicate a tremendous amount of infrastructure and energy to getting produce cold and keeping it that way. It is not unusual for a harvest operation to include refrigeration units right in the field, climate-controlled packing facilities, and refrigerated transportation from harvest right to the point of sale.

Furthermore, it’s not just the air temperature of the storage environment that matters – it’s the interior temperature of the produce. Grocery store coolers and home refrigerators do not have the power they need to actually suck the heat out of warm produce – that needs to be done by the farmer. And dunking in cold water (ground water comes out of the tap at around 45 degrees on the Iowa-Minnesota state line) and storing at ambient temperatures just can’t do that.

At Rock Spring Farm, we’ve invested in the cooling facilities and harvest systems that get produce cooled quickly, and keep it cold until it’s sold. Whether it’s planning for harvest to allow time for equipment to cool the produce, our rapid harvest techniques and shading in the field prior to transport to our insulated packing facility, adequate potable water to provide a continuous supply of cold water for initial cooling, our commercial-grade walk-in cooler, or the cold chain our delivery partners maintain throughout the delivery process, we work hard to ensure that vegetables will stay alive – and stay fresh – for as long as possible.

I’m writing this from Little Rock, Arkansas, where I am doing a presentation on farm financials for the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group.  It’s another in a string of presentations I signed up to do this winter, many of them with a focus on issues of scale in agriculture.

For beginning farmers especially, scale can cause significant problems as the business matures. Most of us get into this business to save the earth, get a feel for the soil, or simply to feed people – we don’t get into it to spend time crunching numbers at a computer, manage employees, or track down overdue payments.

Unfortunately – and I have a feeling that this happens to almost all small business owners – those are the very tasks that make or break a business, especially at the point when it needs to take a turn from being run on the constant over-exertions of the farmer and his or her dedicated crew.

So, one of the core messages I try to carry to beginning and expanding farmers is that they need to understand, at the outset, just how much they will eventually need to produce to sustain the quality of life they want to achieve; and since money is one sure way to unlock the flexibility and resources that can sustain an operation and a family, I focus on that.

If a market farming couple hopes to retain a $50,000 profit to cover their living expenses, mortgage, retirement savings, and such (this is a ridiculously low number based on the number of hours and level of risk assumed by most farmers, but I use it as an example because we tend to be a bunch with relatively low financial expectations), and market farms of their scale seem to average about a 40% margin, that means they’ll need to raise about $135,000 of vegetables – and that’s a lot more rutabagas than most of us got into farming thinking that we would be producing.