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Lottsa I Gotta

7/9/2015

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I gotta get better at record-keeping.

I gotta get that irrigation system fixed.

I gotta do something about that loan payment coming up.

I gotta keep the deer out of my field.

I gotta do better at managing my employees.

I gotta make some changes…

Working with farmers, I hear a lot of I-gotta. Unfortunately, I-gottas don’t do much for making change. Only I’m-gonnas make change. They don’t have to be big I’m-gonna’s - in fact, just the very next I’m-gonna necessary to move towards the I-gotta is often enough.

I’m gonna start carrying that pocket notebook and a cheap ballpoint pen.

I’m gonna test to see if there’s more pressure further up the line in that hose.

I’m gonna call my banker and ask for some input.

I’m gonna get online and research deer control for vegetable farmers.

I’m gonna try that idea from that book I read.

I’m gonna do things differently.

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Is It Part of the Job?

7/2/2015

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We all want to spend more time focused on the things we want to focus on. We want to farm, not (pick one or more) clean the packing shed, do the bookkeeping, fill out the records, market CSA shares…

Likewise, our employees want to get their jobs done - they want to bag the spinach, pick the chard, transplant the broccoli, rather than keeping the records and adjusting the transplanter.

Too often, critical tasks end up being “not the job.” I’ve seen large farms without records, discovered fields of freshly transplanted lettuce with the top of the soil block sticking out of the soil, and irrigation running with only half of the sprinklers turning - but at least the water was on, the lettuce wasn’t in the greenhouse, and the crops were getting harvested!

On my own farm, critical tasks often didn’t get the attention they were due, because they were treated as extras until the moment they had to be done - writing CSA newsletters, bookkeeping, greasing zerks on machinery, even the record-keeping (and we had a reputation to uphold!).

It didn’t change until we began to make things “part of the job.” Rather than writing CSA newsletters after the kids were in bed the night before deliveries, we began to dedicate time early in the week. I set up a system to rapidly sort bills and receipts as they came in to make bookkeeping easier, and set aside an hour a week to entering them into QuickBooks. We developed a system of written plans and instructions that were incorporated into the same sheet of paper where the records were kept, so that the record-keeping was already in the same place as the work that was being done.

We also worked to be clear about what the job actually was: harvest wasn’t finished until the quantities and fields were recorded in the right place;  and we stopped just “getting the lettuce out” and “getting the irrigation running” and started defining what done looked like.

To make something “part of the job,” you need to do one of two things: dedicate time and resources, or make the task inseparable from the work.

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It’s All Management

6/25/2015

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management
man·age·ment
/ˈmanijmənt /

1. The organization and coordination of resources and activities to achieve defined objectives.

Farm management.

Financial management.

Employee management.

Business management.

Holistic management.

Image management.

Social media management.

Relationship management.

Soil management.

They're all the same thing - management. And they all take dedicated time, energy, and attention to do well.

Management requires upfront planning – whether it’s annual crop planning, daily activity planning, five-year business planning, or even pausing to plan your very next action before diving into a task – and the positioning of resources – which may include money, people, knowledge, creativity, time, land, inputs, or just about anything else.

It takes monitoring and constant adjustment as the project or task moves forward.

It thrives on an ongoing awareness of all of the tools and resources you have available, and all of the activities that are happening as the thing unfolds.

And it requires knowing your objective, whether that’s ending world hunger or bunching today’s kale harvest.

When you work without a defined objective, or when you don’t monitor and constantly adjust, you’re stuck with the second definition:

2. The process of dealing with or controlling things or people.

And that’s just a whole lot less effective.

Not to mention, it’s not nearly as much fun.

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SWSWSWN

6/18/2015

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When it comes to dealing with sales, it's important to remember SWSWSWN.

Some will. Some won't. So what. Next.

Some folks will buy what you're selling. That's great.

Some folks won't buy what you're selling. It doesn't matter how good it is, how fair the price is, how righteous your growing practices are.

So what? That's business. Rejection of your product or your offerings or your price is not a rejection of you.

Move on to the next prospect, the next product, the next project.

(This works with crops as well as sales. Some crops will make it. Some won’t. It’s not about you, and it’s not always about your skill as a farmer. Sometimes things are simply beyond your control.)

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The Plan Never Survives First Contact with the Enemy

6/11/2015

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Farming, like war, rarely goes according to plan. But farming, like war, rewards careful planning.

The Prussian general, Herman von Moltka, noted that the plan of battle never survives first contact with the enemy. But he also knew that you never to go battle without a plan.

Why do all of that planning if it doesn’t survive first contact with reality? Because it’s the process, not the plan, that really matters.

Time spent planning is time spent assessing the objectives you want to achieve, the benchmarks you’ll need to achieve along the way, the resources you can bring to bear, and the activities you will need to coordinate to get there.

When you spend the time and focus to develop a plan, you develop a deeper relationship to the constraints and opportunities present in the field, whether it’s a field of battle or a field of vegetables. This increased awareness helps you make better decisions when the plan inevitably doesn’t work out.

Don’t abandon planning just because your plans don’t go the way you expect them to. Plan because it provides the information you need to know if you are on track, and, if you aren’t, how to bring things back to the center when it comes to meeting your objectives.

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The Month of Getting Things Done

6/4/2015

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In the North, June is the month of getting things done. Crops are flying into the field, weeds are growing, strawberries and peas are ripening. For us type-A farmer types, it’s time to get out there and Do, Do, Do.

But it’s not enough to just get things done. We have to get the right things done, and the things done right. More than at any time of the year, in June we need to take the time and set aside the mental energy to manage activities on the farm.

I don’t think anything is harder in the long days and fast pace of June. And I don’t think anything is more important.

Getting the Right Things Done – Now is the time to take the process of capturing, collecting, deciding, acting, and reviewing more seriously. When you’re standing in the firehose of reality, it’s the hardest and most necessary thing to do.

Pay attention to what has your attention. When you see something that may need a response, make sure you have a way to capture that information without having to solve the problem right that minute. Whether it’s a notepad or the camera on your phone, you need a way that the million distractions on the farm – I need to weed that field, what’s that bug, what if I had this tool – can get out of your head and into a place where it can actually do you some good.

Collect that stuff all in one place. Scraps of paper and pictures in the Gallery on your phone don’t do any good unless you get them into a place where you can focus your attention on decision-making. Email pictures to yourself, and put those notecards into an inbox on your desk so that you can…

Decide what to do. The time to decide what to do is not when you are standing there looking at bugs on your broccoli but need to be leading your crew. Set aside time each day to process through the items in your physical and email inbox and make decisions about what to do. Make decisions and write them down so that you can…

Do. Don’t let management turn into an excuse for inaction. (This is one my foibles.)

Review. Review. Review. You’ve got to stay on top of whether things are getting done right, and have a systematic way of gathering information about what’s going on with the things we’re managing. Review to-do lists at the end of the day to make sure things are getting done. Confirm with your employees that “we’re done weeding the carrots” means “the carrots have been weeded.”

Take time every week to walk every field on your farm to determine what needs to be done. You’ll notice things as you move throughout the farm every week, but taking time every week to intentionally observe what’s going on everywhere on your farm is a key success factor.

Then take time to allocate the time and labor you have available to get it all done, so that you can prioritize the things to do that will get you the biggest results, and head off potential problems at the pass.

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Drought Lessons

5/28/2015

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For many of my friends in the northeastern United States, the spring of 2015 is starting off with a nasty dry spell.

Even in a non-drought year, water often goes lacking on vegetable farms because of a lack of infrastructure, poor practices, insufficient monitoring, and a simple failure to get out there and put the water on that your crops need.

In 2012, during the extreme drought that we experienced in the Midwest, I had the opportunity to work with and visit several farms, as well as to drag my own farm through the dust. It was a great year to learn about what to do, and what not to do, when it comes to managing irrigation on your crops.

Use a Pressure Gauge – Running an irrigation system without a pressure gauge is like driving a tractor without a tachometer. Nozzles and drip emitters are designed to work at specific pressures (drip emitters are generally designed to work best at 8 – 12 psi), and you can’t judge those pressures by eye or by feel.

You want to check pressure at the beginning of your distribution lines. For drip irrigation systems and other low-pressure systems, I like the pressure gauges that are mounted on a stake, with a barbed poly connector to tie into the header line.

Monitor Soil Moisture – Nobody has spoken to me more strongly about the potential for irrigation management to maximize yields than Jim Crawford of Pennsylvania’s New Morning Farm. Jim monitors soil moisture using a standard soil probe, and the “Look and Feel” method for analysis. A soil probe like the JMC Soil Sampler with Footstep from Gempler’s lets you take a core sample twelve inches deep without too much bending; you can buy cheaper ones, but this is a nice option for making water sampling easy.

Most guides to monitoring irrigation with the “Look and Feel” method for monitoring soil moisture just duplicate information. Louisiana State University has a guide, Irrigation Scheduling Made Easy, with a better-than-average presentation of the concept and practical applications.

Keep in mind that most vegetables have fairly shallow root systems, generally from 6 – 18 inches. If you aren’t keep that area of the soil profile supplied with adequate water, you’re hampering your crop’s ability to perform.

Size Your Supply Lines – Irrigation systems, no matter how small, have supply lines, header lines and distribution lines. The supply lines get water to the field, header lines get the water to the distribution lines, and the distribution lines put the water in the field. These supply lines should be bigger (or at least not smaller) than the header lines, and the header line should be bigger (or at least not smaller) than the distribution lines.

Too many farms that I visited had supply lines that were just too small, reducing pressure and restricting the flow of water, which reduces the efficiency of water distribution. Beginning farmers especially were relying on garden hoses, the most expensive and least effective option for supply lines.

Set up Overhead Irrigation Systems Correctly – For most irrigation systems, lay out sprinkler heads such that the arc of each sprinkler just about reaches the next riser, and so that the sprinklers are offset from each other in adjacent lines. This ensures full, even coverage.
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Monitor Your System – You can’t just turn your system on and walk away. When you turn the irrigation system on, you need to check to make certain everything is operating correctly. Is the drip tape leaking? Are the sprinklers all rotating?

Water at Critical Growth Stages – If you have to triage your water supply, focus the water where it will provide the most benefit. Germinating succession crops is obviously critical if you want to keep a supply of vegetables in the pipeline. Pay special attention to water supplies during tuber initiation for potatoes; fruit set and sizing and tomatoes, zucchini, and other fruiting crops; and head sizing in crops like broccoli and cauliflower.

One farm I worked with during the drought had a massive crop of tomatoes that was essentially dry-farmed all summer long. Just as harvest was getting under way, they got the first drenching rain in months – and cracked every tomato on the vine, resulting in massive crop losses.

If You’re Not in a Drought – If you’re in the vegetable business for long, you will experience a drought sooner or later. In 2012, the farms – beginning and experienced – who had invested in adequate and practical watering systems had their most profitable year ever. Irrigation is one area of the farm where, when you need the capacity, you just can’t get by without it. And there is no reasonable work-around. I’ve watched vegetable farmers haul water in 1,500-gallon tanks during a drought, and it’s a money-losing proposition. Invest now. Not only will the investment pay off in a drought year, but an easy, efficient irrigation system pays off in increased yields every year that you use it wisely.

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First Responses

5/21/2015

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I once had a trained wilderness first responder tell me that when they had trained in disaster response, his instructor had told them on first arriving at the scene of a disaster, responders should first stop and smoke a cigarette.

During the five minutes that it takes to light up and smoke down, the responder has time to assess, observe, and plan for how to create the best outcome in a stressful and chaotic situation. Otherwise, a wilderness first responder might find themselves trying to save somebody who can’t be saved while somebody who could have been saved worsens to a point where they can’t; or doing CPR instead of calling in a helicopter; or failing to remove injured people and themselves from an ongoing threat.

We deal with small “disasters” on the farm all the time, whether it’s a crew standing around talking when they should be working, a crate of dirty carrots that got stacked with the clean ones going to market, or a door that got ripped off the field van when somebody backed up with it open. I don’t recommend smoking a cigarette every time you discover something isn’t the way it should be, but I do recommend taking the time to figure out what’s going on, assess the situation for what it is and the outcome you want to create, and figure out how you’re going to get it.

Before you jump in to try to fix a problem, it’s important to create the space between stimulus and response so that you don’t create additional unexpected problems, and so that you can respond with actions that move you further towards your larger goals, rather than just relieving the pressure.

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Delegate by Focusing on Outcomes

5/14/2015

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Every growing farm has had to struggle with letting go of tasks and responsibilities. I haven't met many people for whom delegation comes easily. Farmers especially suffer from the understanding that they are the best person to do the job, and the conviction that nobody can do it as well as they can.

For effective delegation, remember that people thrive on two main things at work: knowing what's expected of them, and having what they need to do the job. If you can provide those two things, you've gone a long ways towards effective delegation.

When you really flesh out what's expected when you delegate a task, you give people an important tool for figuring out the variables on their own. To do this, focus on the objective of a task, rather than the method. Objectives are rarely one-dimensional, like, "wash the carrots." Instead, they usually have multiple variables that contribute to achieving a successful outcome: "wash the carrots so that that they look ready to eat without any further cleaning, keep the leaves in good condition, pack them 18 to a tote in alternating layers of three; you should be able to do these 120 bunches in one-and-a-half hours. When you are done, put them on the market pallet in the cooler."

How will I know when I'm done washing the carrots? When they are clean enough to eat and the bunches are packed into totes as described and put away. How will I know if I did a good job? If the carrots are ready to eat, the tops are clean and in good condition, and I finished in less than 90 minutes.

When you give people what they need to do their job well, you set them up for success. What do they need? They need resources: information, tools, and time.

Tools: Give people the tools they need to do their job right - and make sure you include how to use them in your instructions. The best tools, like this asparagus knife, almost tell the worker how to use it without any further instruction (see this video: https://youtu.be/EE-ng8wvdhU). Take the time when you are delegating a task to remind workers of the tools they will need - and be as specific as necessary - don't just tell them to "get a hoe" when you want the work done with a collineal hoe, and they should remember to carry a sharpener with them.

Time: Too often, we delegate tasks without sufficient time for the worker to get them done. Remember that what takes you fifteen minutes to get done may take a newbie thirty minutes or more. And it really helps to know what you can expect from your employees. Measure how long it takes this year to equip yourself better to provide guidance in the future - if you consistently underestimate how long it will take a worker to complete a task, you set them up for failure and disappointment.

Information: When you delegate a task, work hard to give the right amount of information about how to do the job, as well as the desired outcomes. A neophyte carrot washer will need a different level of instructions about the best way to get the job done than somebody who's been washing carrots all summer.

Think as well about the obstacles a worker might face in completing their job. "If you run the pressure washer at too much pressure, you'll rip up the carrots; if it's set too low, you won't be able to get them clean."

And remember to ask right up front: "Do you have any questions?" You're probably delegating tasks so that you can get on to other things, but taking time in the moment to provide all of the necessary information will save you time and money in the end.

On a similar note, make sure that you check back in on a delegated task in fifteen minutes. That's enough time for somebody to get started, but not enough time to do too much damage in most situations.

Here's an inherent contradiction that you won't be able to get around: new workers tend to come onto the farm when your work is tremendously time critical - precisely when you can't afford to give detailed instructions. But just like putting seeds in the ground, providing good information to new workers is an investment in the future. (Also, just like putting seeds in the ground, the more you've been able to think this through in the winter, the better you'll be able to execute a plan for transmitting information.)

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Gets and No-Gets

5/7/2015

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When I was eighteen, I had a job delivering futons in Seattle. Mostly the job was riding around in the truck, because I was too young for the insurance company to cover me as a driver, and occasionally jumping out to carry a futon on my back up several flights of stairs.

One day, the guy who drove the truck turned to me and said, “Chris, there are only two kind of people in this world. Gets and no-gets. Be a get.”

As much as we try in the hiring process, we are unlikely to bypass the no-gets. Hiring is an insanely hard job, and even people who are hired and paid to do the best job of hiring still make mistakes – and lots of them. And despite our best processes and intentions, and despite the most intensive process of reviewing applications and interviewing, the no-gets slip through.

When bringing on a new hire, be ready for the idea that you’ve made a mistake. Identify mis-hires quickly, and move them on out rapidly – in general, employees don’t improve from their starting point when it comes to fundamental characteristics. Non-listeners don’t turn into listeners, and slow walkers don’t turn into fast walkers; slow bunchers can improve, but hustle doesn’t.

Most small farms don’t have the slack in their staffing to pay for no-gets. If you’ve put two weeks into grooming a new employee and don’t see significant progress, it’s time to move them on.

(By the way, terminating someone’s employment sucks. But it sucks worse the longer you keep a poor-performing employee on board - for you and for the employee. “This position isn’t a good fit” is much more believable at the end of week two than at the end of week six.)

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When to Get a Loan

4/30/2015

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When a banker provides a loan, she is expressing confidence in your business, and your business’ ability to repay the loan. Your job is to convince her that this is the case.

And the time to do this isn’t when you need a loan.

Even if you don’t have any reason to think that you might want  a line of credit to manage cash flow, it makes sense to establish a line of credit when you have plenty of cash, and when things look good in your farm accounts.

That may seem counterintuitive, but your lender wants to invest in a successful enterprise – not in an enterprise facing a cash flow crisis. So talk to your lender when you’re flush with cash, not when the noose is tightening.

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Not 2,000 Miles Fresher

4/23/2015

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Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didn't think anyone was going to see is seen, and the person who sees it feels a little better because of it, and is likely to pass that feeling on to others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep on going. - Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

When I took over management of Beech Hill Farm in Maine - this was almost twenty years ago now - we harvested product for sale six days each week. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, we would harvest for same-day deliveries to stores and restaurants around Mount Desert Island; on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, we would harvest for sale in the farm's store, which was open those days starting in late morning.

Six days of harvest every week, and everything done in a just-in-time fashion! Having come most recently from a farm that harvested large quantities throughout each week and delivered almost everything to a distant market on Saturday, I was frustrated at the multiple harvests of small quantities of product - I knew that we were losing a huge amount of time to switching between crops.

Then we went to meet with our wholesale customers that fall, and I heard again and again that, "The quality is great, but the lettuce just doesn't last."

I decided to change things up. Instead of harvesting six days each week, we changed our harvest to three days each week - Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, for delivery and sale in the store on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. We got some push-back from the stores, because this meant they had to place their orders a day earlier - and our lettuce in the past hadn't been lasting for two full days, so they didn’t feel confident of their ability to predict what they needed.

I was surprised at the results. I had expected some modest gains, but we discovered that harvesting ahead, and the thorough cooling that resulted before we delivered our product, meant that product lasted much, much longer than it had before once it reached our customers' shelves. As a result, our customers actually increased their orders because our product was no longer super-perishable - over-ordering wasn't the huge risk that it had been before.

Plus, harvesting ahead saved time as we batched lettuce harvest into three days instead of six, reduced stress as we weren't working under deadline to get deliveries out the same day, and improved our customer service because any shorts became apparent a full twenty-four hours before our scheduled delivery. In addition, we were able to do deliveries in the cool of the morning, when tourist traffic was at a low ebb.

When I started Rock Spring Farm in Northeast Iowa several years later, we took this lesson to heart, and invested in a walk-in cooler our first year in production - and it made a huge difference. Rather than selling produce three days each week, we sold at farmers market one day each week. Our get-it-cold-fast philosophy gave us a huge marketing advantage, since we were able to guarantee a full 10-day shelf-life for our salad mix. We would often give away salad mix to customers who had already purchased theirs from another vendor, with a promise that it would still be good to eat the night before the next farmers market.

The biggest complaint I hear about local produce is that it doesn't have the shelf-life that produce from California does, even once it arrives here in the Midwest. The University of California at Davis suggests that Romaine should have a 21-day shelf-life at proper storage temperatures - that's our competition in the quality department. The whole idea of 2,000 miles fresher doesn't mean a thing if we aren't able to provide the shelf life that our customers need to move product through the distribution chain. And it's just as important for retail customers in a CSA or at a farmers market, since a long shelf life allows customers to buy more produce, and have the time to figure out what to do with it - or even to figure out when in their crazy day-to-day lives they are going to have time to prepare it.

At a practical level, I recommend that nothing goes to market, or gets packed into a bag or a CSA box, unless it has had at least twelve hours in the walk-in cooler to reach its desired storage temperature.

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Better Results Now

4/16/2015

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Systematically better results don’t usually result from the acquisition of a new tool, or doing a “better” job of adjusting your cultivators, repairing the leaks in your drip tape, or washing the carrots. Instead, better results come from better organization and coordination of the resources you have available and the activities you do with them.

On my own farm, and in my work with farmers around North America, the key to systematically better results has been to spend time managing – not weeding, not planting, not telling employees what to do, but engaging in the relatively simple act of observing, capturing information about what needs to be done, and making a plan to do it.

In my experience, the weekly field walk is the key black-belt move that makes the difference between managing and reacting. Every week, every field, high-tunnel, and greenhouse should get a visit for the sole purpose of observing and recording the work that needs to be done there: what weeding tool should be applied? Does the cover crop need to be mowed? Are the crops going to be ready to harvest this week or next? Are the transplants being over- or under-watered. By observing with intention, you increase the opportunities to catch problems before they get out of control, monitor the results of the choices you made previously, and plan the appropriate actions in response.

By engaging in this sort of ongoing development of a high degree of situational awareness, you set the stage for being pro-active, rather than re-active. You can plan your cultivation activities so that when the weather is right (or when the employees go home, or the crops are harvested), you aren’t trying to decide what to do, you just do it. You don’t miss weeds going to seed in your cover crop, or allow it to go past the optimal plow-down stage. You can find recipes for the CSA box before you’re writing the newsletter, and you can let wholesale accounts know that the broccoli will be ready, rather than that it is ready, allowing buyers time to adjust inventory. You can correct errors before they become chronic problems or flat-out crises.

A weekly review of what needs to be done and the overall condition of the farm elevates you from putting out fires to watching for hot spots, and puts you in the driver’s seat rather than just being along for the ride.

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Focus on Success Instead of Failure

4/9/2015

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When I started working on farms back in 1990, I got pretty lucky. Early on, I got to work on farms like Santa Barbara’s Fairview Gardens and Wisconsin’s Harmony Valley Farm, and moved through several research operations and even managed the gardens at Seed Savers Exchange – places where weeds simply weren’t tolerated, and where crops were, by and large, successful, even in adverse conditions.

My first year at Harmony Valley Farm – back then it was about 35 acres of vegetables, although it’s much larger now – was 1993, one of the wettest years on record. Despite the horrible growing conditions, not a weed went to seed on the farm (that sounds bold, but I am not exaggerating) – I clearly remember weeding crews bucketing weeds out of the fields so that they wouldn’t re-root in the ongoing rainfall.

And the crops performed well; in fact, I still have nightmares about the bumper crop of celeriac that year, which I spent day after day trimming and washing.

At Fairview Gardens and Seed Savers Exchange, the gardens were public or in public view, and image mattered, so fields were clean and the fields were well maintained.

At all of these farms, trucks and tractors were expected to start. Machinery worked when it was hooked up. Greenhouses didn’t freeze or overheat.

I was also very fortunate to be exposed to farm after farm where there was an internal expectation of success. Funny how that works – successful farmers tend to refer you to successful farms. When I saw farms that didn’t work, it left a deep feeling of unease that kind of gnawed at my gut – that’s not how things were supposed to be.

So when I started managing a farm on my own, and again when I bought my own farm, I expected the fields to be free of weeds.  They weren’t, but I knew that it was possible, and had an expectation that I would be able to create that result. I expected tractors and trucks to start, and machinery to work, and when it didn’t, I had an expectation that things would look different. It wasn’t always easy, and I didn’t always succeed, but my early farm experiences had created a frame of success that I could picture my own farm inhabiting.

Too often when we face failure, we focus on what went wrong, the mistakes that could have been avoided and the factors that kept us from getting the results we wanted. It is far more profitable to focus on what success looks like, so that you can begin to frame a model of what your farm’s success could look like.

Find successful farms – not farms that are a little bit successful, but farms that have withstood the test of time, that have respect in the community, that look like they work.

And when you do find success, work to understand what has fostered success on those farms: What are the circumstances that made this farm work here, and how do they apply in your situation? What skills do the farmers have that make them stand out, and how can you develop or hire those? What attitudes and attributes does the farm’s team bring to its work, and what you do to foster those same attitudes and attributes in your approach to your farm?

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Loan Terms

4/2/2015

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It can be tempting to try to finance capital purchases with the shortest-term loans possible. I don’t think anybody really likes debt, so we want to get out of it as quickly as we can. Shorter loans also tend to come with lower interest rates, lowering the overall cost of borrowing money.

But that lower interest rate comes at a cost – it increases the borrower’s risk. Short-term loans have higher minimum payments, and require you to service the debt regardless of what else happens in your business.

Cash is king, and it pays to stay flexible. You never know what crises or opportunities might come your way to change the availability of cash in your operation.

You can always pay off a loan early, but it’s much harder to extend it once you’ve signed the loan documents.

(By the way, it’s never advisable to use an annual crop note [a cash flow loan] to finance capital purchases. Borrowing on a long-term note and paying it off the same year is a much more prudent course of action.)

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Sell to Your Lender

3/26/2015

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A loan for your farm is an investment in your business by another entity. Your lender wants to know that the money they invest (via a loan) is going to give them the returns (interest and principle) you promise.

In addition to financial factors – do you have collateral? Is there a business plan in place? – your lender will want to see that you have a solid understanding of business requirements, in addition to an ability to perform or effectively delegate business functions.

Taxes and Accounting – Do you know the difference between operating expenses and capital purchases, and account for them appropriately? What taxes will your business be liable for? When do you need to make deposits for employee withholding and your own tax liability? Do you show smart decision-making when it comes to timing purchases to manage tax liability?

Insurance – What kinds of insurance does your enterprise require? Farm vehicles may require additional commercial coverage if driven by employees. Certain customers may require product liability insurance. Farmers markets may require certain levels of liability coverage.

Legal Requirements – What regulations does your farm face? Are there labeling restrictions to the way you want to market your product? Where can you sell your product? What inspections or licensing do you or your processor need to get into the markets you want to access with the form of product you are proposing to sell? Do your trucking plans require special licensing? What are the environmental and zoning regulations that apply to farms and facilities in your state and county?

Employment Compliance – Does your plan for hiring and compensation meet legal requirements? Do you understand state and federal overtime rules and when you need to comply with them? Have you arranged for workers compensation insurance? Are you clear about if and when your farm’s activities stop being “farm activities” as defined in your state? Do you aware of the requirements of OSHA and the Worker Protection Standard as they apply to your operation?

Showing that you understand the business shows that you understand what it takes to not get derailed by the “not farming” part of farming.

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Empty Holes

3/19/2015

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If you want people to work faster, set the pace for them.

The summer after high school, I worked on a fish processing ship in the Bering Sea. I stood in front of a belt of trays, and put the fish into the trays, heads down and belly to the right. I put 120 fish in the trays every minute, because that’s how many trays went in front of me every minute. Nobody ever told me it was an option to go slower - the machine set the pace. Empty trays went by me, and I knew exactly what was expected of me.

Five years later, a farmer put me on a transplanter pulled behind an International 504. The 504 didn’t  have a creeper gear, although it did have a “torque amplifier” that slowed it down. When I told Richard that he was driving too fast for me to possibly keep up, he replied that the tractor was going as slow as I could go. The empty pockets on the transplanter told me very clearly what I needed to do. So I learned to keep up, and to do what the machine expected of me.

The water wheel transplanter that I bought at Rock Spring Farm didn’t help our fastest workers set plants any faster. But it set the pace for slower workers, and encouraged them to keep up. The empty holes in the soil were there to be filled, so the holes got filled before they disappeared behind the workers.

Empty trays, missed pockets, and blank holes create a dissonance for workers that moving slowly down a field doesn’t.With a machine, the feedback is baked right into the system. Workers see, second by second, exactly what the expectations are for the speed of their work. It provides a far more immediate feedback than counting how many beds or bunches are completed every hour.

(The same thing can be accomplished without a machine if you provide shoulder-to-shoulder leadership to your workers. When you work alongside your employees to show them how fast and how well a job can be done - and continue to do so while the job gets done - you create much the same effect as the empty trays on the filet machine belt.)

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Inoculate Your Transplant House

3/12/2015

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Aphids suck. Literally. And they poop sugar – a bad combination that can result in stunted and deformed plants, disease transmission, and fungal growth on your plant. They are often born pregnant – female aphids can carry young that are already carrying young, just like Russian nesting dolls – which combined with a life cycle as short as seven days, can give rise to rapid and destructive population increases.

They also seem to come from nowhere. Even in an isolated greenhouse that was allowed to freeze out over the winter, aphids will suddenly show up to ruin your day. Peppers are especially prone to damage from aphids in the greenhouse, especially in the low light, high temperature conditions of early spring.

Pesticides suck, too – even organically approved pesticides are no fun at all to spray. Especially in a diversified greenhouse, trying to scout out and make targeted applications on a few dozen plants creates all kinds of problems, from how to mix up such a small batch of pesticides to how to provide appropriate intervals before worker reentry.

Fortunately, inoculating your transplant production house with beneficial insects early in the season can help suppress pest populations until light and temperature balance out. I’ve had exceptional results with releasing a variety of beneficial insects before scouting or sticky traps turned up any problems.

In fact, releasing beneficials before you see a problem lets the bugs do the scouting for you. If you’ve got a small population of aphids or other prey, a flood of beneficial insects will do a much better job of rooting them out.

Early releases also help you stay ahead of the predator-prey population cycles. Out in the world, prey populations (say, rabbits) increase ahead of the predator population (say, coyotes). As the population of rabbits increases, the population of coyotes does, too. Eventually, the population of rabbits peaks and starts to go down; then there are too many coyotes for the available rabbits, and their population starts to go down, as well.

If you’re using beneficial insects (predators) to control pests (prey), you want to introduce the beneficials when there are less pests than the beneficials can consume. Yes, some of the beneficial insects won’t have enough to eat, but that just makes them highly motivated to root out and kill the pests that are damaging your plants. An early introduction of beneficial insects really helps to keep pest populations from ever getting out of control.

At Rock Spring Farm, on the 43rd latitude in northern Iowa, I liked to flood the transplant house with a variety of beneficial insects around the third week of March. I had great success with the garden packs available from Hydro-Gardens – the “Greenhouse” pack did nice work in my 3,000 square-foot heated greenhouse, with lacewings and ladybugs to attack the aphids, as well as whitefly parasites, thrip predators, and spider mite predators - as well as beneficial nematodes to work on any early fungus gnat larvae.

(Please note: Hydro-Gardens needs to receive orders by noon Mountain time on Thursday in order to ship beneficials the following week, so it’s important to get ahead on placing your order – another reason why it doesn’t pay to wait until you see a problem starting to develop before you put the good bugs in your greenhouse.)



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My New Farmer to Farmer Podcast

3/5/2015

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I'm so excited that I wanted to put that in all caps!

Last Friday, we did a soft launch of my new Farmer to Farmer Podcast, and now we're ready to share it with the world!

You can subscribe and download on iTunes, or, for the Android-inclined, get it on Stitcher.


For over twenty-five years in the organic and local farming business, I've benefited tremendously from farmers sharing their knowledge, stories, and inspiration with me. It's what inspired me to work with the MOSES Organic Farming Conference for over thirteen years, and it made me a better farmer at every step of the way.

I created the Farmer to Farmer Podcast to provide a fresh and honest look at what it takes to make your farm work, from a variety of perspectives. The show features down-to-earth conversations with experienced farmers - and the occasional non-farmer - about everything from soil fertility and record-keeping to getting your crops to market without making yourself crazy. In the episodes I've recorded so far, we've talked about everything from employment philosophy and the best techniques for weed control in carrots to making your way as an organic vegetable farmer in the heart of conventional corn and soybean country.

We've already published episodes with Liz Graznak, Lisa Kivirist, Allen Philo, and John Peterson, and we've got more great guests lined up and on the way.

Please take a listen, and leave a review on iTunes or Stitcher (or both, if you really love it!) - your ratings and reviews are a critical part of moving the Farmer to Farmer Podcast up in the lists and search results, and help me get the Farmer to Farmer Podcast out to more people.

From the reviews on iTunes:

  • This is the type of farming podcast I have been looking for. It provides valuable insight into other operations and the minds of their operators. Chris is an excellent host and his decades of experience allow him to ask the perfect questions to provide a valuable and informative interview with talented and wise growers. Thanks to Chris for putting together such an amazing resource for growers, new and veteran.

  • Honestly, I found myself laughing out loud, shedding a tear (thanks, Liz!), and wishing I wasn't driving so I could take notes, as I listened to this podcast. It is the perfect mix of farmer's stories along with practical, usable knowledge for new and established farmers alike. Great job, Chris. We want more!

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Tool - Dramm ColorStorm

2/24/2015

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The Dramm Color Storm is a metal fan-shaped nozzle with a built-in quarter-turn valve. I’ve picked out the purple one here, but you should feel free to choose your own color.  Also available from Gempler’s.

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Understand Margins to Understand Pricing

2/5/2015

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When a company buys your product to sell it to somebody else, they charge more to their customers than they pay you - that's how they cover their own expenses, and how they make money in return for their management expertise, risk, and investment.

The additional amount they charge can be expressed in two different ways: as a markup, or as a margin. A markup describes the additional percentage a reseller makes on the product, whereas a margin describes the percentage of the selling price that a reseller makes over and above the price they paid for it.

Understanding margins can help you estimate the price a store or wholesale distributor is paying for their product. Margins are also part of the language of the trade, so understanding margins puts you on a more professional footing when you talk with buyers.

Margins are useful because they describe the "gross profit margin" that a reseller actually gets. The margin has to cover all of the reseller’s expenses related to selling produce. For example, natural food stores in my area use a 42% margin as their basis for calculating retail produce prices. That 42% of their selling cost has to cover all of the store's direct expenses related to selling produce: the labor, bags, and display items, as well as the overhead costs of running the store: electricity, rent, bookkeeping, cash registers, and everything else.

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In other words, if the store is charging $1.00 for a bunch of parsley, they’ve got $0.42 to cover all of the costs of selling that parsley, because they spent $0.58 to purchase it for sale in their store.

And, even though they use a 42% margin to calculate their prices, they expect to realize only a 35% margin on their produce sales overall, since they lose a certain amount to "shrink," due to spoilage, trimming, blemishes, customer handling, and so forth.

Different outlets have different cost structures, so they use different margins.

A wholesale distributor I've worked with uses a standard margin of 23%. They have lower expenses per unit sold than a retail store does, so they don't need to charge as high of a margin.

In fact, different product lines in a grocery store also have different cost structures, so the margin on canned goods is going to be different than it is on fresh produce, since canned goods don't have the same risk of spoilage and don't have the same labor requirements as fresh produce.

And that's where margins matter to market farmers. When you have higher selling costs, you need a higher margin. When you sell produce at farmers market, your costs - labor, stall fees, shrink - are higher than your cost to sell to a retail store. If you sell at a retail store and at a farmers market, your prices in each of those markets should reflect your costs in each of those markets. It costs the same amount of money to grow a bunch of kale for your farmers market stand as it does to grow a bunch of kale for a retail store, but it costs a lot more to sell that bunch of kale at a farmers market.

We'll continue this topic next week when we get into margin math, so stay tuned!

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The Ruminant Podcast - Culinary Herb Production

2/4/2015

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Jordan Marr at The Ruminant was kind enough to have me on his podcast recently for two episodes talking about successful culinary herb production in a farm operation.  In the first episode, I make the case for focusing on herbs, and discusses the proper sourcing, and subsequent propagation, of herb cuttings.  In the second episode, I talk about how to harvest herbs in a way that strikes a balance between high production and low labor costs.

Episode 34 - Part 1
Episode 35 - Part 2

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Weeds Now or Weeds Later

1/22/2015

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In any cropping operation, you're going to put a lot of energy into weeds - it's your choice if you want to put that energy into preventing them, controlling them, or dealing with them.

Preventing

Prevention takes two forms: an ongoing reduction of the numbers of weed seeds in the soil over a number of years, and the use of crop rotations to set following crops up for success.
If one year's seeding is seven years' weeding, then keeping weeds from going to seed is perhaps the most fundamental principle of weed prevention.

The creative and judicious use of crop rotations can also work to prevent weeds. At Pennsylvania’s Beech Grove Farm, Anne and Eric Nordell combine shallow tillage with the following crop rotation in a technique they call Weed the Soil, Not the Crop.  Complete details of their process can be found in their book.

Year 1: Late-planted cash crop
Year 2: Fallow and cover crops to winterkill
Year 3: Early-planted cash crop
Year 4: Fallow and cover crops to overwinter

At Illinois’ Angelic Organics, Farmer John Peterson emphasizes weed prevention using the following four-year rotation:

Year 1 and Year 2: Perennial cover crop
Year 3: Early-season vegetables followed by winterkilled cover crop
Year 4: Hard-to-weed vegetables

On both farms, fertility is applied to the cover crops, and work is done to prepare the soil for the following year, reducing demands on spring tillage work and labor.

Controlling

Control depends on the right operation of the right tools.

It's easy to invest in weed control tools- it just takes money. It's a lot harder to invest in the will and the systems to use those tools effectively. Invest in basic, versatile tools for weed control - sweeps and knives for the tractor, stirrups for the wheel hoe - then work to get the weed control systems working right before you invest in fancier tools.

Weed control tools must be applied early, often, and well.

Early: The right time to kill weeds is before you can even see them. It takes serious monitoring and awareness to target weeds before they break through the surface, but hoeing or cultivating weeds in the white thread stage hits them at the weakest link in their lifecycle. Every day after they break through the soil surface makes them a little bit stronger.

Often: There is not a magical number of cultivations that constitutes sufficient weed control. You're done controlling weeds when you're done controlling weeds, not after three wheel-hoeings or two hillings. And count on hand-weeding - even with great weed control, a few hardy specimens are likely to slip through.

Well: Time spent adjusting cultivators is an investment, not an expense. Time spent setting things up right ensures that you maximize returns on time you spend driving through the fields. If you farm anywhere other than the desert, you never know when you'll get another chance to kill weeds, so kill every single one you possibly can each time you hit the field with a cultivator, flamer, or hoe.

Dealing

Dealing with weeds is just depressing.

Weeds compete with plants for sunshine, water, and nutrients, reducing your yields. They reduce the airflow around the plants, increasing drying time and allowing fungi to propagate and bacteria to multiply.

Plus, harvesting in weeds takes more time than harvesting in clean fields - and can keep mechanized harvesters from working at all. More time harvesting means more expense, lost opportunities, and lower quality as it takes longer to move crops to the cooler.

I've picked my share of beans in pollinating ragweed, and pulled my share of weeds out of salad greens. And I must say, preventing and controlling weeds is easier on the spirit, not to mention easier on the bottom line.

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Surfing the Harvest Wave

1/1/2015

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When I first started growing perennial herbs for commercial sales, we would harvest only the plants that seemed ready, and only harvest what we needed from each plant. When I started paying attention, I realized that we actually did this in varying degrees in a lot of our cut-and-come-again vegetable crops, such as our kale, chard, parsley, and salad greens.

This seemed like the best way to maximize our yields, but in the end, it really just maximized our work as we spent as much time walking and evaluating each plant as we did harvesting. It also resulted in a field that had a patchwork quilt of regrowth size and quality. A chard plant with eight nice leaves would sit right next to one that had been harvested down to its nubs, or a thyme plant would be half-harvested while the other half was going to flower. And pretty soon, some plants were overgrown and woody, while the remaining plants were over-harvested to meet demand.

At the time, we were rotationally grazing sheep, and I had been reading about proper management of pastures in rotational grazing - basically, you keep the sheep (or whatever other ruminants you're grazing) on a given piece of pasture until it has all been eaten down to the best level for managing the target species in that paddock, then move the herd to new section of pasture; and you manage the grazing to prevent the plants from switching from green vegetative growth to reproductive, flowering growth.

I realized that we could apply some of the same principles to growing and harvesting our herbs and vegetables:
  1. Harvest everything in a section of the bed to the same level;
  2. Create a “wedge” of growth;
  3. Manage plants for vegetative, not reproductive, growth; and
  4. Manage our “grazing” to match the variable growth rates throughout the year.

Most of our herbs and greens at Rock Spring Farm were planted as full 150-foot (and later, 300-foot) beds, with two rows per bed, so our “paddock” size was determined by how many feet of bed we harvested for a given day's needs. If the leaves on a plant were too small to harvest, we cut it right back to the same level as all of the harvested plants around it, and simply threw the too-small portions on the ground. The end result was a section of the bed in which every plant had been harvested to the same level: a crew cut on the thyme plants, or every kale plant left with 6 small leaves.

Harvest started at one end of the bed, and moved steadily down the bed with each harvest. The result was a stepped appearance, as illustrated in the picture.

Rotational grazers call the resulting growth pattern a "grazing wedge"; at Rock Spring Farm, we called it "the harvest wave" (I've always had a fascination with surfing, and waves sound much more fun than wedges). Sometimes the wave got ahead of us - the chard leaves would grow over-mature and develop spots, or the oregano would show signs of flowering - and we would cut back the over-mature portion of the bed to manage crop quality and productivity.

Surfing the harvest wave allowed us to minimize harvest labor by reducing the number of steps taken because it encouraged even regrowth and discouraged workers from hunting-and-pecking their way through the field. It also maximized yields by helping us identify when a section of the bed needed maintenance to stay green, healthy, and growing.

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