Risk is the sum of probability and seriousness, less the preventative and contingent actions taken to reduce it.

To get all math about it:

Risk = Probability + Seriousness - (Preventative Actions + Contingent Actions)

In the context of food safety for fresh produce, it's easy to forget this. So many resources spell out the things we can do to mitigate risk - from washing your hands and keeping food off the floor to using sanitized pallets and requiring workers to bathe daily - without providing any context about the probability of contamination.

Prevention in food safety comes down to keeping the poop off of the food. Preventative actions vary in their effectiveness. For my money, good hand washing - thorough scrubbing in running potable water with soap and drying with a single-use towel afterwards - provides the single biggest risk reduction. Everything else (except not dumping raw manure on your vegetables) pales in consideration.

Operating under the assumption that our produce is contaminated, we take contingent actions to keep the bacteria from spreading or growing. Washing in running water, sanitizing wash water, and cooling produce to slow enzymatic activity all reduce risk.

Of course, the seriousness of a food safety outbreak is high - E. coli 0157:H7 and Salmonella enterica can kill people. But the probability is relatively low - in the 2006 spinach - E. coli 0157:H7 outbreak, only three people died, and a couple hundred were sickened, despite over 250 billion servings of fresh bagged salad greens having been sold in the United States that year.

Effective food safety plans leverage preventative actions that are relatively straightforward and common sense to reduce the risk of a contamination incident, and back them up with contingent actions that reduce the risk of a single contamination incident spreading or multiplying.

When you are considering a food safety plan for your farm, focus on those preventative and contingent actions that yield a high return. A series of one-percent reductions in risk will add up, but you get far more bang for your buck by focusing first on those actions that yield big results.

You can buy tools, or access land, or hire people, to increase your likelihood of success. But you can’t buy success.

Too often, we think that that one tool (one field, one person) will prove to be a game changer. But they almost never turn out that way.

The real game changers are:

• Farming skills – the real nuts-and-bolts knowledge gained through years of experience about how to get the work done.
• Acquired instincts – the year-over-year acquisition of that gut feeling that tells you when you need to plant instead of cultivate, harvest instead of transplant, or get back home to roll down the sides on the greenhouse.
• Real markets – where enough people are willing to spend enough money to buy a quality-differentiated food product.
• Business management systems – the development of systems on the farm that keep the important work of sales, employee management, and financial record-keeping and decision-making on track so that you can focus on farming.
• Knowing what success looks like – understanding what healthy crops, weed-free fields, and properly prepared produce actually look like. If you can’t visualize it, you can’t create it.
• Getting it right – you can spend all of the money you want, but if you (or your crew) overwater your transplants, drive the tractor crookedly down the row, don’t set the transplanter right, or don’t provide workers with the guidance they need to perform their jobs correctly, you may as well flush that same money down the toilet.

It’s easy to look at another farm and see their shiny tractors, fancy packing house, or automatic watering system and misidentify these as the source of their success. More often, success is the result of the unglamorous work of getting better at the game, rather than chasing after game changers.

I grew up in Seattle, so watching the Seahawks dominate the Super Bowl was a special treat. One of the best parts was watching coach Pete Carroll's postgame speech. Praise and praise and praise, all of it legitimate and all of it earned.

He praises the team members so much that they take it up themselves! Imagine what that means to everybody who worked so hard, to everybody that felt like they sometimes came up short, to everybody who doubted himself as he worked to accomplish something that stretched beyond his comfort zone.

I like to imagine a harvest crew having finished loading the truck for an early departure, and a farmer extolling their virtues: "We have done everything the way we wanted to get it done... I am so proud of what we've done... And how about that kale crew! Three people in two hours packed 240 bunches! And what about the CSA line! 200 boxes down the line in 87 minutes!"

It's too easy to let the small mistakes dominate, and we forget that at the end of the day - we got the truck loaded for market! We packed the CSA boxes! We hoed that broccoli!

"We're all we've got! We're all we need!" the players chant at the end. When we believe in ourselves, when we believe in our team, we play hard, we work hard, we have fun, and we succeed - together.

The basket of goods and services you provide to your customers has more in it than the explicit stuff. It’s not just the vegetables and the delivery and the newsletter - it’s the box you put the produce in, the label you put on the box, the invoicing system you use, and more.

People who buy your fruits and vegetables aren’t just buying produce and a newsletter, they’re buying everything that goes into buying that produce, from the way you present it to the story you tell about why and how you got into farming. Farmers market customers are buying clean and fresh farmers in addition to clean and fresh vegetables, and wholesale buyers buy a communication and delivery schedule in addition to their produce.

You can one-up the competition by doing exceptionally well at adding real value with service and consistency where your customers don’t even know that they expect it. At the wholesale level:

• Provide a clean, well-designed, and organized invoice, including your contact information;
• Use an email service like MailChimp to schedule availability notices at the same times every week (you can do the same with faxes);
• Promptly document credit requests for products that don’t meet expectations;
• Verify your customers’ overdue payment status every month, and let them know about anything that’s missing - including applying a credit to an invoice.

At farmers market:

• Clearly identify prices for your products where customers can easily see them (putting the price for radicchio on a chalkboard behind the stand does not make it easy for customers to identify the vegetable or its price);
• Be prepared with at least one “week-night” preparation for every product on your stand, and make sure your helpers have the same knowledge;

For a CSA:

• Provide a straightforward sign-up process (this doesn’t have to be an online shopping cart - Fair Share Farm in Missouri requires members to come to a sign-up event - the process just needs to be linear and clear in its description of options and process.
• Let members know what to expect in their share before you deliver it - at the same time every week;
• Make box return easy by providing instructions for unfolding boxes;
• At delivery sites, keep the boxes off of the ground to keep them clean and sanitary.

You’re always selling more than what you’re selling, and the extras are part of the price that your customer pays for their produce.

The default setting is still a choice. We often don't do something different out of the fear of making a change, but doing the same thing you did last year is still a choice - it just doesn't require any intention.

The default option is the no-fault option. Nobody - not your banker, not your neighbors, not your partner, not yourself - will fault you for staying on the established path. We endure marginal profits, unsatisfying relationships, sub-optimal yields, dysfunctional organizational structures, and marginal results year after year not because empirical evidence says we should, but because it's safe.

The lack of a decision is still a decision, it's just not a conscious choice.

If you aren't getting the results you want, it's time to start looking at what could be different. Because the default setting doesn't seem to be getting you there.

When a ship maintains a heading, it's rarely on course - almost always, it's just slightly off, and the helmsman makes a small correction, then goes off course again and makes another small correction. But a good helmsman gets the ship to port through the course of these small adjustments.

The only time you need to make a big correction is when you're way off course. But a good helmsman doesn't let that happen.

That means you've got to pay attention, even when it's not much fun. You monitor if things are heading in the right direciton. Catching budgets, crops, and employees when they've gotten a little off course is a lot easier than trying to spin that wheel round and round to make a major correction. Even if the ocean is boring - I've been there, and sometimes there's nothing but horizon and flat water as far as you can see - you've got to keep your hand on the wheel, and you have to keep steering the ship.

I can describe to you what it feels like when you jump into the pool, and I can tell you how to move your arms and legs - but until you actually get in the water, you're never going to feel it and you're never going to really know what it is that I am talking about.

It's all too easy to forget this when working with employees. You can spend all the time you want telling prospective employees how hard it's going to be, how hot and how muddy and how intense, but until they actually get to your farm and start working, they won't really know.

The same is true for documenting procedures. You can spend all winter writing about how to drive a tractor or making videos of how to put a twist tie on kale, and that's tremendously useful, but in the end, the person who's going to do it has to get on the tractor and go. You can read tips and tricks for driving straight, but you still have to do the work of driving straight to really learn it.

At the same time, you can capture some important information this way. There's nothing worse that trying to figure out how to do something this year that you know went right last year! And documenting procedures lets the lowest-possible skilled person do the work. You're not going to hire a packing house manager with no experience, hand them a manual, and expect them to succeed; but you can hand that same document to somebody with experience and expect them to understand how the processes work on your farm, and what the end product should look like.

So, yes, write it down. Describe the wetness of the water and the angle of your arms as well as you can, but remember that your people will still have to swim before they really understand.

You know that guy at farmer's market who sits on the tailgate of his pickup truck, looking down at the ground with his arms crossed? How much effort are you going to put into going up to him and buying his vegetables?

Nobody's obligated to buy from you. Wal-Mart has organic and local produce now. Yes, you work hard. Yes, you take good care of the earth. Yes, you suffer through droughts and floods and plagues of locusts, but that just doesn't matter. Your competition isn't asking for a break, and that means your customers aren't going to give you one.

I try to patronize local businesses, but I'm often greeted with an attitude that makes me wonder why anybody would shop there - the appliance store that charges an extra trip charge because their repair guy didn't bring the right parts, the clothing store staffed by young women who can't be bothered to talk to me, the Mexican restaurant that can't be bothered to bring a margarita in under fifteen minutes. These people are coasting, and coasting doesn't work forever (even if you keep going downhill, you eventually run into the ocean).

The small farmer needs products that have real value. Local and organic don't make up for salad greens that go bad in just a few days, dirty carrots, or bruised tomatoes. If you aren't providing fresh, flavorful, beautiful vegetables that actually last in the customer's refrigerator, you're coasting. And when things get tough - when produce departments change hands, or wallets tighten in a downturn - the customer is going to pick a produce supplier who's pedaling. And if not that, they'll just pick somebody cheaper.

There comes a point in the growth of any business where working harder doesn't get you significantly more results.

When you start out as a farmer (or any entrepeneur) on a few acres or with a few hundred chickens, you can rely on hard work to get you by. The tractor breaks? I'll use the rototiller. The beans are weedy? I'll just take longer to pick them. Behind on the bookkeeping? I'll stay up late and get it done.

Unfortunately, this works. It works so well that a lot of farmers work themselves right into a successful operation based primarily on their ability - and sometimes the ability of a loyal crew - to just work harder. For a farm where a significant portion of the labor comes from the farmer, increasing the number of hours you work, or ramping up the intensity, makes a big difference. You plant more acres, pack more boxes, sell more at farmers market, piecing together equipment, working late, and figuring it all out until suddenly it stops working.

On a few acres, labor-saving implements just save labor: if you miss a timely weeding because the hydraulics go out on your cultivating tractor, you can put a couple of enthusiastic workers out on hoes for a day or two and clean up a lot of weeds. On twenty acres, not so much. And at some point, depending on your location, coming up with more people on short notice simply becomes impossible.

And on a farm with ten full-time employees, adding another day to the farmer's workload just doesn't make much of a difference in the overall output of the farm.

I've heard beginning farmers say, "We're so small that efficiency doesn't matter." But that's completely backwards. When you're small is the time to figure out how to make the most of your time, to set up the patterns of work that make certain the tractor has been maintained so it isn't going to break, to document procedures and communicate expectations so that you can attend to urgencies and emergencies while knowing that the work is proceeding and proceeding well, to put systems and processes in place that are transparent and linear.

If you don't do it when you're small, you'll have to do it when you're big (and if you aren't going to get bigger, this still applies - working harder is a lot easier at 30 than it is at 40!). And it's a lot easier to do it up front.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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