My first real farming job was at a farm on the outskirts of Santa Barbara. We would wake up early every Wednesday and load the pickup truck in the dark before heading south to a farmers market in Santa Monica. Just the thought of driving the overloaded little truck through L.A. rush hour traffic added a nice touch of stress to the morning.

My first week on the job, we arrived at market and began to set up a rather elaborate stand that included an overhead structure to hold long, gorgeous garlic braids (this was back when garlic braids were still new and kind of unusual). The structure had to be nailed together, and, unfortunately, we didn’t have a hammer.

The farmer sent me off to find one. One vendor finally directed me to an old Japanese farmer: “He’s always got his tools.” I got the hammer, we put up the stand, and the market was a success. And I came to two important conclusions:

1. When I got my own farm, I intended to be the guy with the tools, if only to help the poor kid who got told to go find a hammer on insufficient coffee; and
2. We had to do something to make certain we had what needed at farmers market.

I went home that night and put together a checklist to make certain we would never again get to farmers market without everything we needed to have a successful market. I’ve been a big fan of checklists ever since. We used them on our farm for deliveries, farmers markets, washing and packing workflow, opening and closing the packing house, and hooking up implements to the three-point hitch.

Here are a few tips adapted from The Checklist Manifesto for creating a great checklist:

1. Make them precise.
2. They should be efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations (hung-over, tired, or emotionally stressed).
3. Do not try to spell out everything. (again, brevity is important).
4. Provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps – the ones that even highly skilled professionals using them could miss.
5. Above all, make sure they are practical.

(The Checklist Manifesto is a great read, and even a pretty engaging audio-book!)

The office has always been an important part of my farm. Unfortunately, the farm’s office work often takes a back seat until the sun has set and the kids are fed. Too often, that back seat also means that we don’t take the time to make our office a more efficient, smooth-running part of our operation.

Here in northeast Iowa, we still have some snow on the ground. Before things get too crazy with spring planting, it’s a great time to look into some key time-saving performance upgrades.

Monthly Filing for Financials.  Stop filing your paper financial documents by vendor, account, or anything else. Start filing them by month, instead. After you’ve processed a receipt or a bill into your accounting program, just put it in a file labeled, “March, 2014.” If you find you need to refer to it later, you’ll be able to look up the transaction in QuickBooks, and cross-reference it to the correct month; finding the occasional receipt this way will take far less time than filing every receipt in its own alphabetical system.

Get a Headset.  Market farming is all about communication. If you have to kink your neck or use a hand to talk, you can’t take care of other things at the same time. You can’t type notes on the computer, you can’t enter orders or take messages quickly, you can’t water the plants while you’re waiting on hold.

In any case, you’re a farmer, and you don’t need a kinked neck leading to yet more chiropractor bills.

Learn Some Keyboard Shortcuts.  Every vegetable farmer knows that time spent moving your hands is time spent not working. When you have to move your hand from your keyboard to your mouse, that takes time; and then you have to move it back. Every program has keyboard shortcuts, and most of them are the same across every program on your operating system. Learn them. They take a little more time than mousing when you are first getting used to them, but a few sessions spent intentionally not using your mouse will pay huge dividends.

A few of my favorites:

• Ctrl + x = cut
• Ctrl + c = copy
• Ctrl + v = paste
• Ctrl + n = new
• Ctrl + s = save
• Ctrl + a = select all text
• Ctrl + z = undo most recent action
• Home takes you to the beginning of the current line of text
• Ctrl + Home takes you to the beginning of the document
• Shift + Home highlights the text between your cursor and the beginning of the current line of text
• Ctrl + shift + home highlights the text between your cursor and the beginning of the document
• End works the same way, except that it takes you to the end of the line of text
• Alt + Tab toggles between open windows
• Ctrl + Tab toggles between tabs in your browser, or multiple windows in a program

By the way, most forms, whether in a database, in a spreadsheet, or on a website, can be navigated easily using the tab key to advance between fields. Type your first name, hit tab, and it takes you right where you want to enter your last name. Tab again to get to the address field. Shift tab takes you back to the previous field.

Browser-based apps usually have their own shortcuts. I use Gmail to manage my email, and the keyboard shortcuts (see this link) allow me to manage my entire inbox from start to finish without ever touching my mouse.

Besides, if I don’t touch my mouse, I can’t click on the bookmark for Facebook.

Supercharge Your Keyboard Shortcuts.  I have used a fantastic little program called ActiveWords since 2007 to do all kinds of things with just a few keystrokes. For example, if I type frwx, that immediately expands to “Flying Rutabaga Works”. Rsfx expands to Rock Spring Farm. Typing cellx expands to my phone number. Datex expands to today’s date in my preferred date format. Fsig expands to my business email signature; listx expands to the signature I use for list serves.

I find it especially handy to use ActiveWords for hard-to-type words, such as post-harvest handling or E. coli 0157:H7.

You can use ActiveWords to substitute text, insert formatted text, open websites, open programs, open files, open folders, and open control panels from anywhere you can enter text. Most of what you do on your computer you do over and over and over again; why not automate that, rather than clicking through multiple windows?

Over the years, I have used ActiveWords to facilitate answering emails (csafull could expand to the standard statement you use to explain that your CSA is full), make data entry consistent, share data that I can’t remember (whslx expands to the url for Rock Spring Farm’s wholesale sheet, http://www.rsfarm.com/WholesaleSheet.pdf; tfrlink (short for The Flying Rutabaga link) expands to the link to sign up for this newsletter), and input a formula in a downloaded payroll report.

Manage Your Passwords. Do you have time to deal with hacked accounts in August? Neither do I. Get LastPass to manage unique, high-security passwords for all of your accounts. LastPass uses a master password to bring all of your other passwords under one roof; an extension in your browser and an app on your phone make it easy to access and recall usernames and passwords for individual websites. I won’t pretend to understand the technology behind it, but I’ve seen enough referrals from people who do to go with it.

The LastPass browser extension also provides form filling; unlike the form-fillers that already live in your Chrome or Firefox browser, you trigger the form to fill. You can even use LastPass to store credit card information so that you can fill payment information quickly and easily, without having to let web stores store your information.

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.

We used to have a problem with counting. Every week, the harvest and packing logs would say that we had 180 bunches of Swiss chard, but we'd have 178. Either way, each week the CSA line would grind to a halt, and we would scurry around to harvest a couple of additional bunches, which wouldn't get properly washed and chilled before we packed them into the remaining CSA boxes.

Or we'd have 210, meaning that 30 got composted because they didn't have a home.

I tried emphasizing that getting the count right mattered. I talked about quality. I talked about 30 composted bunches represented wasted money and wasted resources. I explained how it held up the CSA line. I pleaded. And nothing worked.

Finally, I added a new column to the harvest and packing logs where the person responsible for the count and the quality wrote his or her initials. I was certain that this would provide me with the tools I needed to find the responsible people and take corrective - or even disciplinary! - action. I had every expectation that I would soon have the opportunity to open a big ol' can of whoop-ass and solve this problem.

But that didn't happen. Instead, suddenly, every count was right. It didn't just improve, it changed completely. We went from regularly mis-counting items to nailing the count time after time.

As a result, I implemented this accountability all over the farm, anywhere we were keeping records or requiring tasks to be done. Pallet stacking sheets, closing checklists, tractor work directives, and bathroom cleaning logs all came with a place for the responsible worker to make his or her mark.

A recent article in the New York Times shared the results of a study that monitored restaurant employee behavior for signs of theft. The surveillance did cut down on theft, but it also had the surprising side effect of encouraging employees to do the right thing: savings from theft were modest, but after installing the monitoring software, the revenue per restaurant increased by an average of 7 percent. Workers pulled back on unethical practices, but they also put more efforts into things like prompting customers to have dessert or a second beer. No whoop-ass necessary.

Monitoring employee performance, whether actively by tracking productivity or passively by requiring accountability, changes behavior. The same people making mistakes, moving slowly, or simply not making the effort to do their job well can be set up to succeed. And that's a win for everyone.

I’m tired of hearing about how local food is fresher than produce trucked in from California, Arizona, and Mexico. “Freshness” relates to the amount of biological activity that has occurred from the time of harvest to the time a vegetable is prepared in your kitchen. Local food can provide tremendous benefits to a community’s economic vitality, to the flavor and selection of produce, and to a more-secure, less-carbon-outputting food system; but freshness is not a fundamental quality of locally-grown produce.

When I started Rock Spring Farm, I went to a meeting of growers for local food producers in Decorah at which the produce manager of the local natural foods cooperative commented that the lettuce she purchased from local producers didn’t last very long, while the produce from California had a shelf-life of a week to ten days. I had experienced the same thing with local produce on a farm I managed in Maine, and it all comes down to temperature. In both of those times and places, local growers hadn’t invested in the equipment and systems necessary to maintain produce quality.

Within the range of temperatures where plants survive, the rate of chemical and biological processes approximately doubles for every ten-degree increase in temperature. That means that produce stored at 45 degrees will last half as long as produce stored at 35 degrees; and produce stored at 55 degrees will last only a quarter of the time. When we pick a vegetable, we separate it from the source of energy and sustenance that comes from having its extensive network of roots expanded throughout the soil – at this point the portion of the plant we’ve picked begins the process of dying, which in vegetables is characterized by a decline in “freshness” and quality.

Getting produce cooled to the proper storage temperature is the first essential step in ensuring freshness; keeping it at the proper temperature is the second. The large-scale production systems in the vegetable-producing regions of this country dedicate a tremendous amount of infrastructure and energy to getting produce cold and keeping it that way. It is not unusual for a harvest operation to include refrigeration units right in the field, climate-controlled packing facilities, and refrigerated transportation from harvest right to the point of sale.

Furthermore, it’s not just the air temperature of the storage environment that matters – it’s the interior temperature of the produce. Grocery store coolers and home refrigerators do not have the power they need to actually suck the heat out of warm produce – that needs to be done by the farmer. And dunking in cold water (ground water comes out of the tap at around 45 degrees on the Iowa-Minnesota state line) and storing at ambient temperatures just can’t do that.

At Rock Spring Farm, we’ve invested in the cooling facilities and harvest systems that get produce cooled quickly, and keep it cold until it’s sold. Whether it’s planning for harvest to allow time for equipment to cool the produce, our rapid harvest techniques and shading in the field prior to transport to our insulated packing facility, adequate potable water to provide a continuous supply of cold water for initial cooling, our commercial-grade walk-in cooler, or the cold chain our delivery partners maintain throughout the delivery process, we work hard to ensure that vegetables will stay alive – and stay fresh – for as long as possible.