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Target Fixation

3/10/2016

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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.

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Hiring Potential Winners

3/3/2016

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Ken Blanchard (no relation) says that there are three basic approaches that you can take when hiring employees:
  1. Hire a winner.
  2. Hire a potential winner.
  3. 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.
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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.
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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:
  1. A self-winnowing process, where we provided information about the farm, our mission, and our values;
  2. A simple test to determine some basic character and potential;
  3. A written application;
  4. 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.

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Urgent or Important?

2/11/2016

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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.

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Don’t Be a Wreck

2/4/2016

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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.

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Low-Hanging Fruit

1/14/2016

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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.

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Three Investments to Save Labor

1/7/2016

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

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

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Marketing Sweet Spot

11/26/2015

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Your own marketing sweet spot happens at the intersection of your capabilities and the needs, wants, and desires of your customers – and where that intersection doesn’t intersect is with what your competition provides.
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Your capabilities are those things that you are able to do, and include products and services with different definitions of quality at different value points. For example, your capabilities might include producing inexpensive tomatoes and delivering them fresh to your customer’s doorstep; or, it might be producing the most beautiful, high-priced tomatoes in sufficient quantity to effectively distribute them through a wholesale distributor or food hub.

The needs, wants, and desires of your customers include everything from “I’m hungry” to a desire to feel like they are part of a community. In many marketplaces, customers exist on multiple levels: you might be selling to a grocery store, where you need to meet the needs of the produce buyer; but you also need to meet the needs of her customer, the one actually picking your produce up off the shelf.

Customers at the grocery store, for example, wanted our skinless, seedless cucumbers – the ones that you grow in the greenhouse and can charge a million dollars for. But the produce buyer at the store needed cucumbers that could last on the shelf for a long time. Since those skinless cucumbers wilt if you look at them funny, that meant that we needed to wrap them in shrink wrap to be able to sell them in the wholesale marketplace.

My mom, for example, wants salad mix in containers (she justifiably feels that bulk salad greens are subject to sneezes and other undesirable occurrences). The produce buyer at her store needs consistent deliveries of salad greens in well-labeled boxes with clear invoicing. Be certain that you are providing what the end consumer wants, as well as what the middleman needs.

Your competition includes those people and companies providing similar products and services in your marketplace. Your job is to provide goods and services that differ from theirs, in quality, price, and other expressions of value. If somebody’s already providing radicchio to stores in your area, why go there – unless your radicchio has some distinguishing qualities. Can you deliver more often? Is yours certified organic while theirs isn’t? Does yours have a significantly longer shelf-life? Can you grow and sell it at rock-bottom prices? (Please don’t do that last one.)

Competition happens at all different levels. The radicchio you sell to stores in your area is in competition with the radicchio from other local growers, as well as the radicchio being sold from national distributors.

Of course, your customer has to value your differentiation from the competition for it to do you any good. When I started Rock Spring Farm, we made bunched parsley available to the local food co-op. But the local food co-op was perfectly happy to buy parsley in bulk from another local grower and put the twist ties on themselves. While it seemed crazy to me, my capabilities (providing bunched parsley) didn’t match up with the needs, wants, and desires of my customer – the fact that I was doing something that my competition wouldn’t simply didn’t matter in this case.

Word of Thanks

Yes, this newsletter is coming out on Thanksgiving (at least here in the states!), but it’s also kind of a cool day from a measurements standpoint.

Sometime this morning, the Farmer to Farmer Podcast will go past 100,000 downloads. And last week, this newsletter shot past 800 subscribers - most of whom actually open and read it every week!

It’s pretty easy, talking into my microphone and typing away at my keyboard, to feel sort of isolated. It’s hard to know if anybody’s listening - and that means it’s hard to know if this is making a difference.

Thank you. Thank you for being there. Thank you for sharing the newsletter and the podcast, and thank you for letting me know that it matters. Most of all, thank you for doing what you do every day: getting up and moving your farm, or your boss’s farm, or your farming dream, forward. A little bit better every day.

Keep up the good work. Be safe. And keep the tractor running.

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Five Great Investments for Your Farm

10/1/2015

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I like farming toys as much as the next farmer, and when you ask me, “What should my next investment be for my farm?” I’m as tempted as anybody to provide a listing of various configurations of metal and grease that, if properly applied, would be the perfect tool to address the situation.

But more often than not, I’d be wrong.

​More often than not, you’d be better off investing your time and energy into…

Improving the information you have about your farm - How much does it cost you to grow a pound of carrots? What are your fixed costs per acre of field production? How long does it take your crew - average, high, and low - to harvest a hundred bunches of kale? What’s your average per-acre (or per-square foot) yield on carrots? What’s your current ratio, and how does that compare to last year? How much did you spend to grow the vegetables that went into your CSA share?

Improving the information you have about your craft - What don’t you know about growing vegetables, feeding chickens, or raising cows? If you don’t know the basics of your craft, figure out where you can go to learn it - and keep in mind that this might not be your normal round of conferences! State and regional producer associations often have workshops about improving the fundamentals by people who are focused on fundamentals over philosophy. Take a class. Attend field days.

Creating systems - You already have ways that you get things done. What can you do to make them better? If there are places where things consistently go wrong, spend time digging in there and figuring out what you need to make things right - more often than not, it’s going to be a minor investment or a change in procedures.

Cleaning and clarifying workspaces - It’s such a small thing, but working with even slightly chaotic workspaces and storage areas takes a huge toll on productivity and worker perspective. Clean, bright work areas with obvious storage spaces for tools can ease workloads - and perceived workloads - tremendously. If you’ve ever had a worker spend two hours during a rare dry spell looking for the right piece of metal to make the transplanter work (that was me), or torn your hair out with frustration while a crew tried to find a harvest knife for the last worker, you’ve seen the incredible toll this can take on a farm’s bottom line.

Close open loops - Farms tend to be filled with almost-finished projects. Wrap them up and get rid of the extra parts, drop them off the to-do list, and get them out of your head. You’ll free up mental energy to focus on the work that makes a difference, and the physical space that keeps your workers (and you) from having to work around, under, and over that undone thing and the junk that’s hanging around to get it done.

What can you do with the time you would have spent researching new toys? What if you spent the money you were going to spend on something new on refining what you’ve got?

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Farming Ahead

9/24/2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Right Time to Learn

9/10/2015

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When is the right time to learn Taekwondo?

Before three guys jump you in a dark alley.

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

Before the drought sets in.

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

Before they get to high school.

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

Before pea and strawberry harvest really kicks in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Transition Times

9/3/2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Identify Yourself

7/30/2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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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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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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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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Order Propagates

12/18/2014

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Order begets order. And, sadly, order takes energy to maintain, because without energy, things tend towards chaos.

And chaos, wherever it exists - in the field, in the shop, in the office - can be overwhelming. You can't get on top of everything all at once, so you don't get on top of anything. And because the chaos surrounds any small bit of order you do carve out... well, chaos is always nipping at order's edges, and small bits of order have more edges than large bits of order, and things tend to fall apart.

Unfortunately, chaos doesn't just exist without energy. It sucks energy out of the everything that has to interact with it. Weedy fields take more energy to harvest, more water to irrigate, and more inputs to fertilize. Chaotic shops make it hard to find tools when you need them, to maintain equipment so that it doesn't break down, and to fix stuff quickly when it breaks. Disorganized papers and messy desks make it hard to access needed information and track important commitments (like bills).

And they all create resistance. Clean, orderly spaces and systems invite us in and invite others to participate; messy spaces do just the opposite.

My recipe for dealing with chaos? Carve out some order. Get one space, however small, that feels good - that invites you to participate - and ignore the rest for the moment. Weedy fields? Get one bed cleaned up, really well, and commit to keeping it clean. Chaotic shop? Clear off one workbench. Throw the tools and hardware spread across it into a bucket - it's no worse then having them spread across the workbench. Disorganized office? Clear out one file drawer (put it all in a box, if you have to), buy some file folders, and start using them. Get a little success. Let it feel good. And work your way out from there.

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Lowering Prices

11/27/2014

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Black Friday has me thinking...

If you decide that you want to lower your selling price, you need to get something substantial for that. Lower prices should only be a reward for the customer who helps you drive down your acquisition costs, increase your utilization, or sell a lot more product.

CSA farmers often provide a discount for early purchases, and I've seen this more and more with the "market CSA" model where customers get a punch card to shop at a farmers market stand. Before you do this, you have to ask: does getting money up front reduce my overall expenses? Can I "borrow" the money from my customers for less than I could borrow it from the bank?

In that same model, you would also want to ask if providing a discount at your stand helps you to make better use of your fields or your product selection? One of the curses and advantages of farming for a CSA is the requirement to grow a lot of different crops - it's hard, but it also means you have the opportunity to get increased value on low-value crops by including them in the same box; for example, we used to include greenhouse greens in a box of winter roots, effectively increasing the value of the turnips by packaging them with the fresh greens.

Finally, does providing a punch card help you sell more product - and does it help you sell enough more product to offset the lost profits from the discounted produce? If you are making a 30% margin on your crops, and you give your customers a 10% discount, you are cutting your profits by a third.

The same questions apply to dropping prices in any situation. Does decreasing your price allow you to sell a lot more product - like moving pallets of broccoli to a wholesale distributor?  Does it drive down your costs - like saving the time and expense of going to farmers market? Does it get you needed cash flow to pay staff until you get to a more profitable crop? (Are you sure?) Does it help you put together a load that includes high-margin crops?

Never lower your prices for the sole purpose of selling products - sales without profit is just work.

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Reap More Rewards at this Winter’s Conferences

11/20/2014

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Every winter, I look forward to farming conferences, where I get to see old friends, get new ideas, make new connections, and find inspiration for the coming year. I can’t imagine farming without that regular coming together of our smaller and extended communities.

And I’ve never been to a farming conference where I didn’t take away enough information to pay back the time and money I spent to get there. Even for the most expensive conferences, the investment pays back quickly, and the new knowledge becomes a permanent asset that provides returns year after year.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty easy to go a conference and let the knowledge slip right on by. Game-changing suggestions, enriching connections, and even bigger opportunities can easily  slip right by, especially when you have to return from an event and get right into the greenhouse or the field. By approaching a conference like an investment, you can make the most of the opportunities and information that come your way.

Get Ready

Just like anything having to do with farming, you dramatically increase your likelihood of great results by taking a little time to prepare.

Set Goals - Once you’ve decided to go to a conference, decide what questions you hope to get answered. I find that it’s easier to get concrete results if you identify specific questions, rather than just an area of interest: “How should I organize my packing shed to maximize workflow and ergonomics?” rather than, “I want to know more about packing shed organization.”

Plan Your Time - Take time to review the workshops, and plan your attendance. Often, organizers post the conference program, with expanded workshop descriptions and updated schedules, in the days or weeks before an event. Figure out where you are likely to get your questions answered, and what presenters you might want to connect with after their workshop is over.

The exhibit hall can provide a rich source of information, as well. Take time to review the exhibitor listings to decide who you want to visit, and what you hope to get out of each conversation.

Prepare Your Kit - Finally, pack your business cards, a pen, and some paper. When that one key idea or one life-changing contact comes along, you don’t want to be stuck without the tools you need to make the most of it.

At the Show

The show isn’t all about work, but a few key actions can dramatically increase the value you get out of the event.

Engage the Material - You can increase your retention by actively engaging with each workshop you attend, rather than passively receiving information. Interpret key points for how they apply to your specific situation, rather than just writing them down - rather than just writing, “Point shovel points down to move more soil into the row,” add a note: “- would help with weedy broccoli!”

At the end of each talk, I like to take a moment to distill the entire talk down to one key point: “I can build organic matter on my farm by allowing cover crops to get through flowering,” or, “I really need to put together an income statement and balance sheet for my farm, effective January 1.”

Identify Actions -  I take prolific notes (it works for me, your mileage may vary), so it can be hard to identify the concrete actions that a speaker helped me realize I need to take. Even where I don’t write down a ton of information, I like to write a dash (-) to the left of each action item; when I scan my notes after the conference, I can quickly identify items to put on my task list, and show that I’ve done it by turning the - into a +.

Ask Questions - Please, ask questions! Speakers dread having a disengaged audience, and there are few things more unnerving than leaving the requested ten minutes for questions at the end of a talk and facing a silent audience. Remember the questions you wrote down in preparation? Now is the time to get them answered. Questions don’t have to be limited to the material just presented,

Make Connections - Be approachable when you aren’t in a session. Don’t immerse yourself in your phone or the conference materials. Likewise, approach people. Everybody’s there to make connections, and a room full of strangers can be a lonely place. Walk right up, introduce yourself, and ask about the other person.

Make the Most of Connections - Use your business cards liberally - handing out a card is a great invitation to get one from somebody else. Take a moment to write down a note on the back of the card so that you remember the context, or something that you would like to follow up with. The value of a conference connection isn’t always apparent, and I’ve benefitted from connections with connections over the years.

Process Connections in Real Time - at the end of each day, empty the business cards from your wallet, quickly sort them into three piles: the first for those that you absolutely plan to follow up with, the second for those that you want to put into your address book, and the third for, “who is this person?” Throw the third pile away, and keep the other two accessible for when you get home.

For the cards in the first group, write a note on the back about your intended action - “send info on L245 for sale,” or “ask for contact for greenhouse company.”

When You Get Home

You’ll get the most from the conference if you follow up in real time, while the information and connections are still fresh. Reviewing your notes, information, and connections shortly after the event is a great way to increase retention and internalize important messages - and makes certain you don’t get caught up in the work that’s waiting when you get back before you have a chance to fully realize the value of being at the event. By changing the context and the format of the information, your brain uses different pathways to log the same information, improving your ability to remember and access it later.

Identify Actions - Shortly after you get home, pull out those notes. Review the actions you identified, decide if they are still meaningful, and put them into your task management system.

Follow Up with Connections - For the cards that you made notes on about following up, make that happen. Waiting until weeks after the conference allow you to slip from their minds, and any urgency they feel to respond to you can easily go by the wayside. Add everybody else to your address book, and consider reaching out to them on Facebook or through a quick email.

***

A good conference can be a great place to get inspired, chase some intellectual rabbit trails, and meet a ton of new people - but that’s not worth the price of admission all by itself. Those of us in the world of farming have chosen a life where knowledge and connections can turn into real actions to improve the planet, provide real food, and build community, as well as to provide a return to our businesses. A little bit of additional effort - before, during, and after the event - can provide a real boost to the outcomes a conference creates on your farm and in your life.

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Better Not Bigger

11/13/2014

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Unfortunately, most of the discussion around scaling up has to do with growing more acres, rather than doing better on the acres we’ve already got. Farming fewer acres leaves us room to grow our own fertility, and to increase our weed control through the judicious use of cover crops and careful tillage – and doing better at growing at your current scale is a prerequisite for increasing the number of acres under production.

Not to mention, increasing yields has amazing compounding effects, especially when it comes to harvest. Totes fill up faster when you have more spinach per square foot or more beans per plant. Plus, crops get back to the packing house and into the cooler more quickly – not only do you have more vegetables faster, you get a higher quality product, too.

Time and time again, I work with farmers who are failing to get top yields because they are missing two key elements of horticulture: weed control and irrigation.

Weed control pays dividends by doing more than just reducing competition. In fields with great weed control, crops like spinach and cilantro have fewer yellow cotyledons and dead leaves, resulting in faster harvests. And if you have plans to mechanize your harvest in any way, good weed control is an absolute must.

Likewise with water – fresh vegetables are made of H2O, and lots of it. The old rule of thumb of an inch of water a week is just that – a rule of thumb. Watering needs vary according to heat, humidity, and stage of growth. Optimum yields may require much more than an inch of water per week – some growers I know apply three or more inches of water during critical growth phases.

Before investing in anything else, take a moment to look into these two critical systems on your farm this fall. Too often, huge improvements can be made without resorting to huge investments – the real issue is the allocation of time and energy into these areas. Doing more with what you have will always be a surer avenue to success – financial, personal, and ecological – than scrambling to do more with more.

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Customer Complaints

9/11/2014

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When customers complain, it can feel like a blow to the gut. You’ve put your heart and soul into growing and delivering your crops, and after that kind of effort, rejection really hurts.

But complaints result from one of two things: either you’ve got a problem with your product, or you’ve got a problem with your customers.

If customers complain about the quality of the product they get from you, you need to determine why they’ve gotten low quality produce from you. Did you pack rotten vegetables in their boxes? Do you lack the cooling capacity or procedures to get product cold fast, reducing respiration and increasing shelf life? Do you understand the commercial requirements for the product you are selling? Do you need to up your disease-control and insect-control game, or make changes to your soil management practices? Do you have what you need to maintain the cold chain – or at least a semblance of a cold chain – from the time your product leaves the farm to the time the customer takes control of it?

Or does the problem lie on their end? Did your farmers market customer leave their salad mix in a hot car for hours before it found its way to their refrigerator? Does your wholesale buyer adequately manage their stock rotation? At Rock Spring Farm, I offered a no-questions-asked refund or replacement the first time a customer complained about quality issues; but if customer-specific quality issues arose again, I turned into a detective to figure out the source of the problem.

If customers complain about prices, either you aren’t providing the value they expect, or you’ve got the wrong customers. Value – what a bundle of goods and services is worth to a customer – has little or no relationship to your particular cost of production; it’s a function of customer perception. You need customers who value local, organic, family-farmed vegetables (if that’s what you’re offering), and you need to provide them with a quantity and quality that matches what they expect. No small feat!

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Value is Subjective

9/4/2014

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The price you need for your products is based on your cost of production and marketing. But the price you get for your product comes down to value.

And value is subjective. In my first year at Rock Spring Farm, I couldn’t get $1.00 per pound for our tomatoes at the Decorah, Iowa, farmers market – but I could sell exactly the same tomatoes for  $2.50 a pound in Rochester, Minnesota! The same tomato, sold in the same way, had much more value for my Rochester customers. Guess where I sold my tomatoes?

I also found that I could sell my salad mix at a higher price than my competitors in Rochester. Why? Because it looked better in the bag and lasted longer in the refrigerator than the other salad greens at the market. We consistently nailed the production on salad greens, and followed it up with great post-harvest handling. Same market, same crop, but with a significantly higher value.

If you aren’t getting the price you need for your products, you’ve got four choices:
  1. Reduce your cost of production, marketing, and distribution, so that you can charge a lower price for your current value proposition;
  2. Decrease your value proposition;
  3. Increase your value proposition; or
  4. Find new customers.

To make money farming, you absolutely must match your value proposition to your customers.

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Market with a Triangle

8/21/2014

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In marketing, it pays to match the range of products and services you offer to the breadth of the market you offer them to.

Think about a triangle, with the point at the top. The point represents a narrow range of products and services, while the base of the triangle represents a very broad market – that’s how a company like Grimmway (the giant carrot producer) sells carrots: they’ve got a very narrow product offering (carrots), and they market them to everybody possible.

If you broaden out the product and service offerings (the point of the triangle) while keeping the market (the base of the triangle) the same, you end up with a square – a broad range of products marketing to a very broad marketplace. An extreme example would be growing everything from radicchio to Burbank Russet baking potatoes, and selling the whole lot to everyone from urban foodies to Iowa corn growers.

When you market with a square, it’s just plain hard to stand out from the crowd. Because the definition of value and quality varies with different segments of the market, it’s almost impossible to provide a wide range of products that is perceived as high value to a broad marketplace – so you end up competing on the basis of price, instead.

And that’s not sustainable.

Now, invert that triangle so that you’ve got a very broad range of products and services, but you’re marketing to a very narrow market. Most farmers in the organic and local food movements are already doing this to some extent by marketing to customers with an elevated commitment to those values. But too many small growers continue to try to be everything to everybody who might be interested in the product categories they have to offer.

You need diversity, but too much diversity at both the top and the bottom of the triangle becomes too difficult to manage effectively. Think about how to narrow the bottom of that inverted triangle: instead of marketing CSA shares to an entire city, what about marketing to a select neighborhood, or to a select self-identified community? Instead of marketing through a CSA, wholesale, and farmers market, what about picking one segment, and doing it really well?

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