Category: 2016 - Purple Pitchfork

All I Can Do

3/17/2016

Three thoughts on life:

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

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

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

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

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

Target Fixation

3/10/2016

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

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

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

Hiring Potential Winners

3/3/2016

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

Hire a winner.
Hire a potential winner.
Prayer.

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

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

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

Three Characteristics of Potential Winners

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winnowing

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

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

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

GET DIRTY, HAVE FUN, EAT WELL!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HOW TO APPLY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winnowing Employees

2/25/2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

(HT Seth Godin)

CSA Marketing Triangle

2/18/2016

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

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

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

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

Urgent or Important?

2/11/2016

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

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

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

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

Spending focused time with your kids is important.

Dealing with a meltdown is urgent.

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

Flaming on the right day is urgent.

Eating well is important.

Being hangry is just ugly.

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

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

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

Don’t Be a Wreck

2/4/2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

Avoiding the Wreck

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

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

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

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

Increase Success

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t Wait for the Warning Signs

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

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

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

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

Mid-Level Management

1/28/2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a Trap

1/21/2016

Poor performance begets poor performance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Low-Hanging Fruit

1/14/2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Investments to Save Labor

1/7/2016

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

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

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

The best investments will have an impact on all three.