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The Deck is Stacked

12/31/2015

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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]

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Stack the Deck

12/24/2015

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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.)

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Good Luck, Bad Luck

12/17/2015

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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.

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Debt is Like a Chainsaw

12/10/2015

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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.
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Thanksgiving and Golf

12/3/2015

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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.

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Marketing Sweet Spot

11/26/2015

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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.
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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.

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Setting the Stage

11/19/2015

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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?

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You are Not Your Customer

11/12/2015

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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.

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Taking Up Space

11/5/2015

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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?

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It’s the Coffee, Not the Cup

10/29/2015

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

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Decided a Long Time Ago

10/22/2015

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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.

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Stress Degradation

10/15/2015

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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:

  1. The cost of reducing stress is almost always less than the cost of the consequences of stress.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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

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Forget about the Vegetables

10/8/2015

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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?

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Five Great Investments for Your Farm

10/1/2015

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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?

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Farming Ahead

9/24/2015

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A lot of the farms I’ve worked with recently who are really crushing it put a lot of time and effort into “farming ahead.”

All farming requires farming ahead to some degree or another: the act of planting a seed in anticipation of a harvest weeks or months later involves looking out months in advance and taking action now based on what you want to be true in the future.

But the farmers I’m talking about are farming ahead in much larger ways:

  • Rotating fields out of vegetable production for one year for every year they are growing vegetables (sometimes two years in a row), planting and managing cover crops to build soil and control weeds.

  • Cleaning spaces until they shine so that those spaces only take minimal maintenance during the production season.

  • Maintaining equipment in the winter so that when spring comes around, they just grease a few Zerks and they’re ready to go.

  • Building the biological and nutrient cycling in their soils to levels that don’t require amendment for multiple subsequent crops of vegetables.

  • Thinking through systems ahead of time so that they have the checklists and procedures clearly laid out before an employee steps on the farm, so that they don’t have to think about what to tell people and how to tell them.

  • Thoroughly planning planting and tillage schedules and maps so that in the rush of summer, they simply execute.

  • Making conscious decisions about scale and  income goals, rather than always scrambling for more.

What can you do now to get ahead for next year? What can you stage now to work on this winter?

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Picking the Perfect Winter Squash

9/17/2015

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The vast majority of winter squash out there is insipid and boring. Every now and then, the average consumer will pick a winner by blind luck, and they’ll be thrilled. But for every sweet and delicious squash they find, they get several duds.

The flavor, nutritional value, and keeping qualities of winter squash depend absolutely on the maturity of the fruit at harvest – and that’s not always easy to determine.

At farmer’s market, customers often asked me how to pick a good winter squash, to which I would invariably reply, “At my stand, you can pick any squash and we guarantee it will be sweet. But let me show you how to find a ripe squash in case you want to buy one from somebody else.” We were able to consistently charge up to three times the going rate for winter squash at farmers market by guaranteeing the eating quality of every squash we sold; at wholesale, we were able to push a 20% premium when we applied this to certain specialty varieties – acorn squash, not so much.

Eating quality in squash has two main components: sweetness and texture. Texture is largely controlled by genetics, although high storage temperatures can cause the flesh to become stringy. And while the sugar content has a large genetic component –think sweet corn – it continues to increase as the squash fruits mature. Nutritional content, especially carotenoid levels, also continues to increase while the squash is on the vine.

That’s why you want to leave the squash on the vine until they are fully ripe. Of course, sugar content and nutrition only increase when there is adequate photosynthesis, so disease and insect control to avoid defoliation is a critical component of getting a good squash harvest, even though you may get an acceptable overall yield without full leaf cover.

Good leaf cover also provides protection from a first, light frost. If you can get your squash patch through the first frost and into the Indian summer that often follows, it is possible to gain a couple of weeks of maturation time for your crop. But, in general, plan to get your crop out of the field before the first hard freeze.

Squash pick up a lot of sweetness during the cool nights of autumn. As they grow, most of the sugars plants produce through photosynthesis are combined and stored in the plant as starches and other large polymers. But in response to cold temperatures, so plants – including squash – break down some of this stored energy into “free” sugars such as glucose and fructose, stashing the sweet stuff in their cells to protect against frost damage. Bonus for squash eaters: that free sugar also makes the plants taste sweeter.

As an additional advantage, fully ripe squash store much better than even their slightly under-ripe counterparts.


Harvest Cues

Squash commonly grown in the northern part of the continent come from three species, all in the genus Cucurbita: C. pepo, C. maxima, and C. moschata. Each has its own cues for ripeness.

Because each plant ripens several fruits in succession, starting with the fruit closest to the central stem, entire fields of squash are never ripe at the same time. Harvesting consistently great squash means you have to leave some in the field.

Although many sources say that you should test all squash for ripeness by trying to pierce the skin with a fingernail, this is simply unacceptable in a commercial setting – how many customers want to buy a damaged squash?

Cucurbita pepos include the Acorn and Delicata types, as well as pumpkins. All pepos have a hard, angular stem with five sides (the “stem” on a fruit is technically called a peduncle, which is much more fun to say than “stem,” but not universally understood), and tend to produce smaller fruits than other species. Where they touch the ground – or anywhere that light is excluded from the skin – C. pepo fruits develop an orange spot that darkens as the fruit ripens. This spot may be large or small, depending on the fruit’s position, but regardless of the size of the spot it is the color that indicates ripeness – when the color of the spot looks as though the cinnamon has been stirred into the pumpkin pie filling, the squash are ready to harvest.

As an initial cue on pale Delicata-types, we also taught our crew to look for a dark green stem and a mellowing of the fruit color from yellow to an earthier shade before turning the squash over to check for the spot.

Cucurbita maximas, including Buttercups, Kabochas, and Hubbards, are characterized by their large, spongy stem that turns corky as it ripens. As the name indicates, these also tend to be the larger fruited varieties (in fact, the world-record “pumpkins” are actually maximas bred to resemble the traditional jack-o-lantern style squash). The first of the maximas tend to ripen after the first of the pepos. To judge ripeness, look at the amount of the stem that has turned corky – you want to see at least 75% of the stem take on a corky texture before harvest. A larger percentage of corky stem is also acceptable.

C. moschatas, such as the Butternuts and Cheese types, have rambling vines and a hard, angular stem that flares out noticeably where it meets the fruit. Most of these ripen from a greenish-hued fruit to more of a peanut color. The greenness also fades from the stem when the fruits are ripe.

At the outset of each squash season, I liked to walk through the field with the harvest crew sampling raw slices of the various varieties while looking at the harvest cues. It’s easy to taste the difference between marginally ripe fruits and the fruits that will make a customer sit up and take notice.

It’s worth noting that squash plants set flowers starting at the central stem, and continuing out along the vines. Fruits will ripen in this order, as well. If you find a ripe fruit, every fruit closer to the center of the plant is also likely to be ripe.

How to Harvest


To harvest, I like to cut the stem right where it joins the vine. Because we hand-packed our squash into crates and bins, we didn’t have to worry about squash bumping into each other and making gouges with the longer stems. If you’re using a harvest conveyor, you might want to cut the stems shorter, especially for the pepos and moschatas.

It’s important to make the cut square to the stem. For the hard-stemmed varieties, I like a sharp bypass pruners to make the cut. In my experience, long-handled loppers encouraged a stooped posture and were difficult to control precisely, whereas pruners provided a precise cut and encouraged more ergonomic squatting.

Curing is always a source of debate among squash enthusiasts. We settled on not curing our pepos, but going ahead and curing our maximas and moschatas. It certainly does no harm.

Curing is best done at 70 to 80 degrees F in a dry place – conditions that are not uncommon after the first frost in New England and the Upper Midwest. Squash can also be cured in boxes, as long as you ensure adequate air circulation.

Picture

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The Right Time to Learn

9/10/2015

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When is the right time to learn Taekwondo?

Before three guys jump you in a dark alley.

When is the right time to invest in the hardware and operational systems for an irrigation system?

Before the drought sets in.

When is the right time to establish boundaries with your children?

Before they get to high school.

When is the right time to forge a good working relationship with your employees?

Before pea and strawberry harvest really kicks in.

When is the right time to upgrade your food safety practices?

Before the government or your customers demand them (and certainly before an outbreak is traced back to your operation!).

When is the right time to talk to the bank about a line of credit?

When you have so much money that you don’t need to borrow any.

Of course, it tends to be when you’re standing there staring at three guys with scowls and big sticks that we think to ourselves, “I wish…”

So much of farming and farm life is about preparation and anticipation - it’s actually something we’re pretty good at, as farmers. When’s the right time to plant lettuce seeds? About ten weeks before you want to pick it. The trick is transferring this understanding to the other important areas of the farm: the business, the infrastructure, and the family life.

This is why I encourage my clients, right from day one, to:

  • Keep detailed financial records and create the three annual financial reports - a balance sheet, an income statement, and a monthly statement of cash flows;

  • Keep detailed production records, even if you aren’t certified organic;

  • Schedule time with children and spouses, even when, if time was measured in nickels, you wouldn’t have two to rub together;

  • Write a business plan, even if you aren’t taking it to the  bank or investors;

  • Put time into training employees - especially supervisors! - even if you are bringing people on during the spring rush.

  • Invest in an irrigation system - including water capacity - that can keep your farm running during a generational drought (and make irrigation pretty easy the rest of the time!).

(It’s also interesting to note that practice is not just about managing the big scary things - it also has a way of making your business, and your life, better as you go through it.)

What are you doing to anticipate and avert potential crises on your farm?

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Transition Times

9/3/2015

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When I was in high school, I spent a couple of years running triathlons. This was back in the early heady days of the sport, when the whole idea of stacking swimming, biking, and running together was relatively new. I spent hours poring over the pages of Triathlete magazine trying to divine the secrets of how to improve my swimming stroke or the right way to move my foot during a pedal stroke. And because I lived in Seattle at the time, I spent day after day during the dark and rainy winter on my bike on the indoor trainer, watching Scott Tinley and Scott Allen run the Ironman again and again and again on a VHS tape of the Wide World of Sports.

The Ironman consists of a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike, and a 26.2 mile run (I ran considerably shorter versions of a triathlon). The best competitors finish in a little over eight hours, while the course is open for a total of seventeen hours on race day. As you can imagine, the television coverage of somebody swimming 2.4 miles or biking alone for 112 miles just isn’t all that exciting.

What was exciting, though, was the transition from one part of the event to the other. A competitor would emerge from the water and dash along the sand to a huge field of bicycles, find the right aisle and stall for his bike, sit down on the pavement to slip into biking cleats, strap on a helmet, get on the bike, and head off. Hours later that same competitor would come in from the bike ride, dismount, park the bike, sit down on the pavement to switch from bike cleats to running shoes, remove the helmet, and start off on a run that for most people would be a lifetime accomplishment.

It was an amazing flurry of gear and limbs between hours of monotony, and I was somewhat surprised to learn that the world-class triathletes worked hard to optimize the process – Shoes or helmet first? Laces or velcro? The best way to get on and off the bike? – and actually practiced their transitions.

Transitions matter – and not just because the spread between first and second place at the Ironman occasionally comes down to seconds instead of minutes. Yes, transitions take time, but they also put together the pieces needed to make the next segment work (if you’ve ever tried running with improperly tied shoes or a folded over tongue, you’ll know what I mean).

Perhaps more importantly, they set the tone for the next segment of the work.

Depending on the day and the farm, market farming can seem like nothing but transitions, from the small – “We’re done harvesting the salad mix, let’s move onto the radishes.” – to the large – “Summer is coming to an end and we’re shifting from harvesting what we need week by week to really bringing in the harvest.” – to the huge – “We’re moving from this piece of property to that new one over there.”

Here’s what I learned about transitions from watching the Ironman:

  • Plan for your transitions. The more you can think through what’s involved switching from one thing to another, the better you’ll perform: in a race, you certainly don’t want to have any confusion about which way to turn as you come out of the bike corral. Don’t arrive at the end of the salad mix harvest without knowing what the next job is and how you’re going to get the crew from here to there and what needs to happen along the way – are you driving or walking? Do you need to move tools? If you’re heading back to the packing house with the crew, how long do you want to take for bathroom and water breaks? If you’re transitioning between seasons, what equipment are you going to park (and where) and what are you going to get out?

  • Have what you need ready to go. You don’t want to have to gather harvest containers and knives while your crew waits, so have the tools that you need waiting for you. For bigger transitions – such as those between seasons – make sure you have the necessary tools and equipment ready well ahead of needing them. October is not the time to be fixing the root harvester, and May is not the time to perform annual maintenance on the flame weeder.

  • Manage the resources you’re transitioning. When you’re getting off the bike after 112 miles to begin running a marathon, you don’t expect the muscles in your body to make a snappy transition – instead, you spend the last few miles of the bike ride spinning pedals backwards and stretching the back and arms in preparation for the run. The same is true for managing the people in a transition. Can you send two people ahead to the next job before the current one is finished, so that you have less people standing around after their crates are full on the current task? Should somebody start putting crates on the wagon while everybody else finishes?

  • Pace matters. It’s probably not necessary in every situation to run from one crop to the next (although that might be kind of fun), but making transitions into a deliberate process can help everybody maintain momentum. Starting and stopping require time and attention, and keeping things in motion, even if you’re changing direction, can reduce the effort required to slow down and speed up a task.

In a triathlon, managing transitions well doesn’t make up for a lack of time spent training for the athletic portion of the event, but it can go a long ways towards creating a feeling of calm control and setting a tone of efficiency; and occasionally, it can make the difference between winning a race or not. On a farm, managing transitions well won’t make up for slow pickers, bad attitudes, or a general lack of timeliness, but it can make a tremendous difference in the way the next piece of work turns out.

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A Day in the Fall Is A Week in the Spring

8/27/2015

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Here we are in the middle of August, and Wisconsin is experiencing a bit of a cold snap. It’s a reminder that the changing of the seasons is, as always, under way.

As we move into the fall, day length begins to shorten at the same time the high temperatures give out. As a result, plant growth begins to decelerate, and that deceleration has a cumulative effect.

Along the 43rd latitude, where I have spent most of my life, there were 890 hours of sunlight between April 15 and June 15; there are 728 hours of sunlight between now and October 28, which is about the time we’d like to be out of the field around here, and pretty much when it’s too cold for things to grow outside.

As a farmer-friend told me long ago, a day’s difference in planting in the fall is like a week’s difference in planting in the spring.

While timelines matter at all times on the farm, it becomes doubly important with fall plantings. Spinach seeded on August 15 will size up for a November harvest, while spinach seeded September 1 probably won’t.

Cover crop effectiveness is especially enhanced with early plantings. Barley and peas seeded now will put on substantial growth before winter-killing, building carbon and protecting the soil. Two weeks from now, that cover crop will still make a difference for holding soil, but won’t put much back into the soil.

Solar Calculator

If you like this sort of thing (I do), you can download a rather comprehensive daylength calculator from NOAA.  It includes just about everything you would want to know about the sun’s location relative to your location. Pretty fun and geeky.

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A Pricing Rubric

8/20/2015

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Pricing can make or break your business, and you have to approach it with care - especially when making adjustments for customers buying in quantity. The less you charge for your product, the more certain you need to be that you are pricing it right, because the costs are going to be much closer to the price that you receive.

First, you’ve got the cost of the product. This is what it takes to actually make the thing - what it costs, including labor and overhead, to grow and harvest a carrot.

Second, you’ve got the cost of selling. This is the money and time that you spend to get the thing to market, sell it there, and get it back home. You might want to think of this as an entirely separate division of your farm - or even another “business” entirely - as the processes here bear very little relationship to those of actually farming.

If you do a farmer’s market, this is the time to load the van, drive to the farmer’s market, set up, sell sell sell, break down, load the van, drive back home, and unload the van. It’s the cost of fuel and a market stall. That’s a lot of time and money, and you should get a lot of money for it.

If you take orders from stores and restaurants, this is the time it takes to send out information about what you’ve got, answer questions, take the orders, put the orders on pallets, load the truck, write the invoice deliver the product, and drive back home. It’s the cost of fuel and boxes. It’s probably less time and money per carrot, and you’re probably going to get less money for it.

This is a key point: you lower your per-unit price when you lower your per-unit costs. If you are taking orders from a restaurant for one bunch of carrots at a time to make up a $25 sale that you deliver, that’s not a wholesale sale, even if it is a business-to-business sale. It should be priced at retail prices. (When my business shops at Staples, I pay the same prices that I do when I go there for my daughter’s back-to-school supplies.)

Likewise, when you sell something to a food hub or a distributor, it may not make sense to take a lower price than you already get for selling to stores and restaurants unless they are buying in a quantity that significantly reduces your cost per carrot sold.

Third, you’ve got the risk of selling. When you sell a product at farmer’s market, you harvest, wash, and pack that product without ever knowing if you will sell it. If it rains, if there’s a big game on, if traffic is bad… you might wish that you had taken less product to market. Every carrot you sell has to pay for the other carrots that you took but didn’t sell. (The bank charges higher interest for risky loans because they still have to make money on the loans that don’t get paid back.)

When you take orders before you harvest, you reduce your risk because you can harvest only what you’ve already sold. This lowers your effective cost per unit, because you don’t have the risk of harvested, but unsold, product.

Take the time to understand the why behind your pricing levels for different customers and different quantities, and you’ll be one step closer to making great pricing decisions.

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Another Perspective on Management

8/13/2015

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I really like this definition of management: the organization and coordination of resources and activities to achieve a defined outcome.

But how do you do it?

You plan. You monitor. And you control. If necessary, you make a new plan.

If I’m want to go to buy groceries, I make a plan for how to get there: I’m going to head down East Washington to Baldwin and turn left, then turn right on Willy Street.

Then I get in the car and start driving. When I’m in the car, I monitor things at all different levels - I check the tires before I get in, and glance at the fuel gauge when I turn it on. I watch the speedometer. I check my mirrors every seven seconds. And as a I drive down East Washington, I watch for the landmarks that tell me I’m getting close to Baldwin. I also pay attention to where the car is actually going - I’m almost always a little bit off to the left or to the right, and I make constant little corrections to stay on track.

If I stop paying attention to keeping the car on track - if I decide to send a text, or to check my email - suddenly a few seconds can go by and I’m waaaay off track, with potentially disastrous consequences. Constant monitoring and small corrections keep me on the road; when I stop monitoring and correcting, I’ve stopped managing, and suddenly things can careen crazily out of control.

(I went cold turkey on texting and emailing while driving over 18 months ago, and I’m still going strong. Nothing’s that urgent.)

I want to monitor the right things at the right intervals. I don’t need to check the fuel gauge as I drive down the road, and I don’t need to check the oil every time I get in the car (at least, not in this car. I’ve had cars where it was prudent to do so).

If something happens that’s very much not to plan - I miss my turn on Baldwin Street, or I run over a nail - I go back to square one and replan. This might mean that I need to turn someplace else (if I missed my turn), or that groceries are off the list of things to do today entirely (if I run over a nail).

Here are some monitoring schedules you might think about applying to your farm business (these are by no means meant to be exhaustive. Sorry.):

Crops

Daily - Do the transplants need water? Do freshly seeded or freshly transplanted crops need water?

Weekly - What needs to be done on the farm? Scout for pests. Scout for weeds and weeding opportunities. What’s ready to harvest this coming week? In two weeks? What needs to be seeded or transplanted according to the plan? Did the transplants or seeds do what I expected them to do?

Yearly - How did the crops do? Did we perform according to plan? What went right, what went wrong? Do we need to plant more, or less, or earlier, or later?

Finances
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?

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?

People

Daily - How is the work going? Are staff meeting standards? Is heat or cold an issue to be addressed?

Weekly - How are my people doing? Are staff meeting standards? Are there people on the crew who shouldn’t be? Do we need extra help? What’s coming up for family events?

Monthly - Do people know how they’re doing? What adjustments do we need to make? Am I spending enough time with my crew, my kids, my partner?

Yearly - Do I need more staff or less staff? Do we need to change the staff structure?

Yourself

Daily - Am I hydrated? Am I eating well? Am I giving attention to the things that need attention?

Weekly - What am I trying to accomplish right now? What do I need to do next? Am I getting enough sleep? How’s my healthy? Is my allergy season coming up? Would a visit to the chiropractor now prevent a bigger problem soon?

Yearly - Am I doing what I want to be doing? Am I heading in the right direction?

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Say What You Mean

8/6/2015

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I drove by a McDonald's recently. The sign on the front advertised Artisan Grilled Chicken.

I went in my local co-op and saw baby carrots that were just big carrots that were cut into pieces.

I went to farmers market and saw growers selling Sungold cherry tomatoes as heirlooms. Also, Green Zebra was released in 1983.

I've worked with any number of clients who call their experienced employees managers, but don't give them any decision-making power or the training to exercise it.

I have a daughter who says she's literally starving to death. She's not.

Various companies market CSAs that have very little to do with community, support, or agriculture - other than the fact that the food did originate with a farmer.

Language is a powerful tool, and its misuse does us all a disservice. I know my daughter isn't starving to death (that's what ramen noodles are for), but when I use language carelessly with customers and employees, I am setting myself up for misunderstandings and disappointments.

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Identify Yourself

7/30/2015

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About a month ago, I packed up Purple Pitchfork (and everything else in my life) and moved to Madison, Wisconsin. This Saturday, my partner and I finally made it to the farmers’ market on the capitol square - that’s the famous one here, and the largest in the country. It was a nice day, and we got some great eats, but I was surprised to see how many of the farmers simply didn’t stand out. There was a lot of beautiful produce - it’s clearly a good year for beets - and some unique items, but I was surprised at how few of the vegetable stands really set themselves apart from the sea of vendors.

On the other hand, the vegetable stands that stood out were largely the growers who have been at the market for decades.

When I go into Whole Foods or HyVee, I rarely see un-branded produce from national and international vendors - almost everything has a company name on the twist-tie, bag, or sticker. Sales are based largely on emotion, and brand identification creates a level of comfort for the customer - whether they are buying from a local farmer or an international powerhouse.

As local vendors, we should be capitalizing on the desire of our customers for connection and the corresponding comfort it brings by making ourselves and our products stand out, whether it’s at the grocery store or the farmers’ market. A beautiful display works for making the first sale, but it doesn’t help people find you the next week.

Even for a national brand like Bunny Luv carrots, the brand marker makes the product a known quantity. You want to be a known quantity as well. Your name and location provide a mental “hook” for your customers. That hook may allow them to feel comfortable with you as a person (“I know something about this person”), provide a conversation starter (“How far is it from Viroqua?”), or give them something to talk about when they get home (“This lettuce is from Rock Spring Farm”). It also provides a reference point that they can return to, or that they can refer friends and colleagues to.

Farmers’ market signage doesn’t have to be fancy, and it doesn’t have to cost a lot. For years, our farm identification at farmers market was written on a chalkboard with chalkboard markers. It was a simple, inexpensive, and flexible way to say who we were, and hung readily from our market canopy.

While some people identified my farm by name, I was always surprised at the number of people who didn’t know it, even after we added it to our awning and refrigerated truck. But everybody readily recognized two things about our stand: my hat (a vaguely Crocodile Dundee-style hat that I reserved for farmers market) and our homemade cedar display boxes. Very rarely did anybody come looking for Rock Spring Farm carrots in our early years, but they did come looking for “the carrots from the man in the hat.”

Other examples of market branding that I’ve seen over the years include:

  • Have everybody at your stand wear the same shirt. At Harmony Valley Farm’s market stand, each member of their staff was wearing a bright red shirt with the farm name and logo. Aprons work for this as well, and provide a little more flexibility.

  • Color-coordinate your stand. At Luna Circle Farm’s market stand, the awning and table cloth are purple (and it’s been that way for 20 years).

  • A frame around the stand that always has something hanging from it, whether it’s pepper ristras or garlic braids.

  • Hats are always popular, whether they are crazy (like the guy at Marsden’s Pure Honey, who wears a bee-hive on his head) or just distinctive.

(By the way, branding doesn’t have to be a look. If you’ve ever been to Pike’s Place Market in Seattle, you probably know the guys who throw the fish around - but you probably don’t know the name of their business.)

Most importantly, find a consistent way to make you and your market stand stand out, week after week.

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A Mnemonic for Keeping a Task Moving

7/23/2015

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When you’re working with a crew, slowing down or stopping work is bad. It disrupts a crew’s mojo, threatens timelines, and costs money (if you have a crew of six stopped for ten minutes, that’s an hour’s worth of wages).

The best farm crews I’ve worked with don’t let the work stop, but too many crews and too many crew leaders are willing to let a job come to a stop when something disrupts the work - most often, the lack of supplies like totes or twist ties, or the the need to move product out of the field.

Of course, it’s better to keep ahead of crew and product needs, but when a bump in the road looms ahead or suddenly appears, it’s worth asking three key questions:

What resources do I have to keep this job going? If I’m out of the right harvest containers, are there other containers I can use? If I’m out of twist ties, can we pick product into containers and bunch later?

Can I get more resources to keep this job going? Especially in a larger operation, can you call on somebody else to get you resources so that your crew can keep on working - this is almost always going to be faster than fetching the resources yourself.

How can I make productive use of this time? If a break in the job at hand is unavoidable, find a way to make the highest use of the available time. Can you prep for the remaining work to do - for example, can you strip bad leaves from the chard plants you are going to harvest when the containers get back to the field? Estimate the time involved in the break - should the crew move to the shade to rest, or should they wait by the tractor?  Find another way to be productive - is there some hand-weeding or plant maintenance nearby to tackle?

Having these questions at hand, or training crew leaders to answer them, can help keep things moving, even when things are hot and frustrating (or wet and miserable).

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A Practical Template for Crew Leadership

7/16/2015

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Leadership and supervision come naturally to some people, but for many others, the act of inspecting and correcting feels foreign and klutzy - something that’s often exacerbated by the fact that young people interested in working on organic vegetable farms often come from one anti-authoritarian perspective or another. The very act of monitoring other people’s work is not something most people learn in school, and telling somebody that their bunches of beets are too small, that their hoeing is too imprecise, or that they simply need to pour the crates into the brush washer a little faster, strikes right at the core of our own insecurities.

It gets much more difficult when our farms grow to a size where we need other people to step into this role.

At a practical level, the leader of a crew - whether it’s the farmer or somebody she has designated - needs to understand their role. Often it’s two-fold: do the job, and supervise everybody else doing the job. With so much on their plate, crew leaders can benefit from having some protocols for facilitating the best possible outcomes from the people whose performance they are responsible for.

Be the Anchor - First, a crew leader should, as much as possible, position herself at the end of any production line, so that she can check quality and direct changes. For example, if you're working the brush washer with your crew, be in the position of closing the boxes, rather than pouring the cucumbers in. This allows you to monitor the cleanliness and the quality of the resulting product. Likewise, if your crew is bunching beets and setting them on the ground, be the person counting the beets into boxes.

Less Talk, More Do - When giving directions, remember that you don’t have long. Experiential educators - the folks that take teenagers hiking or do jobs training in the garden - know that you’ve got to get your message across quickly. Yes, it’s valuable to provide context, but it’s just as important to get things moving. Provide context and training as you go. One of the most dispiriting things for a new manager is talking to a crew and seeing the blank stares you often get in return. We learn best when our bodies are in motion, so hit the highlights and get going.

Fifteen Minutes - Once a job is started, come back fifteen minutes later to make sure that things are going well. Give your workers the best instructions you can, then let them have some time to work things out. The first five minutes of a new job are often spent getting into the rhythm, the next five are right on, then the five minutes after that some of the instructions are forgotten. By coming back after fifteen minutes, you are inserting yourself at the right time to make corrections: before things have gone off the rails, but after problems have had a chance to surface.

Thirty Minutes - If at all possible, check in every thirty minutes after that. If you have to seed carrots down the road while your crew is picking chard, you probably won’t be able to pull this off (but don’t leave before that fifteen-minute check-in!). If you’re working near your crew, take the time to make an inspection. If you’re working the line with your crew, that thirty minutes is a good reminder to get your head out of the doing the work and to take a moment to focus on how things are going as a team - are we moving at the right pace? Are we getting the turnips clean enough?

(By the way, you need a timepiece - and one that’s not your cell phone. Especially if you have a smart phone, it’s difficult to check the time without checking something else. Put one on your wrist or on your belt loop so that you can see it without having to dig in your pocket - it’s a good reminder that farming is all about timeliness, for you and your workers)

Monitor and Correct Course - Leaders have to be willing to monitor performance and correct course when necessary. If you aren’t willing to do that, you can’t function effectively as a manager. You absolutely have to be willing to state the standard (“At ABC Farm, we expect everybody to bunch at least 50 bunches of kale an hour.”), comment on deviations from the standard (“You’re bunching 30 bunches an hour.”), and provide leadership on how to achieve the standard (“If you put the tote next to your right hand, you won’t be reaching across your body to put the kale bunches in it. That will make a big difference.”). If you’re not willing to do that, you need a different role.

An important part of monitoring is to keep an eye on when you expect a job to be done, and whether you have the resources, such as twist ties and totes, to finish the job. For some people, this is second nature - they just always seem to have an idea of how long a job is going to take, and they’re usually pretty close. I’m not one of those people, so I recommend making this estimate thirty minutes into a job (“We’ve bunched 300 bunches of kale in thirty minutes… we need 750 bunches, so we should be done in about forty-five minutes”), and again when the job is halfway done (“We’re halfway through the bed of zucchini, and we’ve filled 25 crates. We only brought forty with us, so we need to figure out how to get more out to the field.”).

You can use these tools as guidelines to keep in mind, or as a checklist to make sure you’re on track. Sometimes it’s helpful to use a more rigid structure (“I must check in with the crew exactly fifteen minutes after I’ve finished providing the initial instructions.”) as a way to establish new patterns. Once you get the habit firmly entrenched, a more casual approach may be suitable.

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Purple Pitchfork is a project of Renewing the Countryside, a non-profit dedicated to rural revitalization and collaborative farmer education that serves as the home for these resources Chris Blanchard created.
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