Leadership and supervision come naturally to some people, but for many others, the act of inspecting and correcting feels foreign and klutzy - something that’s often exacerbated by the fact that young people interested in working on organic vegetable farms often come from one anti-authoritarian perspective or another. The very act of monitoring other people’s work is not something most people learn in school, and telling somebody that their bunches of beets are too small, that their hoeing is too imprecise, or that they simply need to pour the crates into the brush washer a little faster, strikes right at the core of our own insecurities.

It gets much more difficult when our farms grow to a size where we need other people to step into this role.

At a practical level, the leader of a crew - whether it’s the farmer or somebody she has designated - needs to understand their role. Often it’s two-fold: do the job, and supervise everybody else doing the job. With so much on their plate, crew leaders can benefit from having some protocols for facilitating the best possible outcomes from the people whose performance they are responsible for.

Be the Anchor - First, a crew leader should, as much as possible, position herself at the end of any production line, so that she can check quality and direct changes. For example, if you're working the brush washer with your crew, be in the position of closing the boxes, rather than pouring the cucumbers in. This allows you to monitor the cleanliness and the quality of the resulting product. Likewise, if your crew is bunching beets and setting them on the ground, be the person counting the beets into boxes.

Less Talk, More Do - When giving directions, remember that you don’t have long. Experiential educators - the folks that take teenagers hiking or do jobs training in the garden - know that you’ve got to get your message across quickly. Yes, it’s valuable to provide context, but it’s just as important to get things moving. Provide context and training as you go. One of the most dispiriting things for a new manager is talking to a crew and seeing the blank stares you often get in return. We learn best when our bodies are in motion, so hit the highlights and get going.

Fifteen Minutes - Once a job is started, come back fifteen minutes later to make sure that things are going well. Give your workers the best instructions you can, then let them have some time to work things out. The first five minutes of a new job are often spent getting into the rhythm, the next five are right on, then the five minutes after that some of the instructions are forgotten. By coming back after fifteen minutes, you are inserting yourself at the right time to make corrections: before things have gone off the rails, but after problems have had a chance to surface.

Thirty Minutes - If at all possible, check in every thirty minutes after that. If you have to seed carrots down the road while your crew is picking chard, you probably won’t be able to pull this off (but don’t leave before that fifteen-minute check-in!). If you’re working near your crew, take the time to make an inspection. If you’re working the line with your crew, that thirty minutes is a good reminder to get your head out of the doing the work and to take a moment to focus on how things are going as a team - are we moving at the right pace? Are we getting the turnips clean enough?

(By the way, you need a timepiece - and one that’s not your cell phone. Especially if you have a smart phone, it’s difficult to check the time without checking something else. Put one on your wrist or on your belt loop so that you can see it without having to dig in your pocket - it’s a good reminder that farming is all about timeliness, for you and your workers)

Monitor and Correct Course - Leaders have to be willing to monitor performance and correct course when necessary. If you aren’t willing to do that, you can’t function effectively as a manager. You absolutely have to be willing to state the standard (“At ABC Farm, we expect everybody to bunch at least 50 bunches of kale an hour.”), comment on deviations from the standard (“You’re bunching 30 bunches an hour.”), and provide leadership on how to achieve the standard (“If you put the tote next to your right hand, you won’t be reaching across your body to put the kale bunches in it. That will make a big difference.”). If you’re not willing to do that, you need a different role.

An important part of monitoring is to keep an eye on when you expect a job to be done, and whether you have the resources, such as twist ties and totes, to finish the job. For some people, this is second nature - they just always seem to have an idea of how long a job is going to take, and they’re usually pretty close. I’m not one of those people, so I recommend making this estimate thirty minutes into a job (“We’ve bunched 300 bunches of kale in thirty minutes… we need 750 bunches, so we should be done in about forty-five minutes”), and again when the job is halfway done (“We’re halfway through the bed of zucchini, and we’ve filled 25 crates. We only brought forty with us, so we need to figure out how to get more out to the field.”).

You can use these tools as guidelines to keep in mind, or as a checklist to make sure you’re on track. Sometimes it’s helpful to use a more rigid structure (“I must check in with the crew exactly fifteen minutes after I’ve finished providing the initial instructions.”) as a way to establish new patterns. Once you get the habit firmly entrenched, a more casual approach may be suitable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Control depends on the right operation of the right tools.

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

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

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

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

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

Dealing with weeds is just depressing.

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

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

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

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

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

Every so often – especially as pea-picking season winds up and the bean-picking season gets started - I’ll hear a farmer or a manager say, “I’ll just make that person so miserable they’ll quit. That way I don’t have to fire them.”

I think this approach stinks.

First, it’s mean. And it lets everybody else on your crew or staff know that they don’t know where they stand. If you consistently dump somebody on the garbage jobs without telling them what’s going on, you aren’t just making them miserable, you’re demonstrating your inability to communicate clearly about your expectations and to hold people accountable for meeting them.

Second, it’s cowardly. Yes, firing people is a difficult thing to do. Get over it. You’re the boss. It’s your job to do the hard things, especially the emotionally hard things. Anybody can muck out a pig pen, but it’s another matter entirely to have a frank discussion with an employee about the termination of their employment.

Don’t make people miserable. Cut them free so that both of you can get on with it. It’s uncomfortable, horrible, and one-hundred percent the right thing to do.

When I started as a white belt in Taekwondo, I felt like a bumbling klutz - forming a proper fist and putting my hips into a punch didn't come naturally, much less trying to move my left leg in a sidekick. Four years later, I don't require the kind of careful instruction for every new move that I did for those first kicks, punches, and knifehand strikes. My body understands how the different moves all fit together, and what once felt like advanced fumbling has become second nature.

The motions of vegetable farming require a different set of motor skills than texting, driving, and typing, and many employees don't arrive on the vegetable farm with a ready ability to adapt. If you are able to harvest quickly yourself - and I hope you are! - pay special attention to exactly how to do it: put your thumb here, position your wrist this way, slice towards/away from you. Then share that information with your crew, explaining that this is exactly how to do the job at hand. As your people learn the fundamentals of bunching, cutting, and trimming, they will find their own unique styles and be more able to adapt to new crops.

Some hints for moving faster, whether you are just starting out or want to refine your skills:

• Drag containers rather than pushing them.
• If the last motion of harvesting leaves the crop in your left hand, you should be working from left to right, so that your left hand is trailing you.
• Keep the container near the hand that the product ends up in, and never cross your body with your hands.
• Keep supplies like twist ties and rubber bands right at hand, next to the hand that grabs them.
• Don't set down your tools; if you are putting a twist tie on a crop that you cut with a knife, learn to hold the knife while you put the tie on.
• Keep tools sharp; if you can feel the knife when you cut yourself, it isn't sharp enough (but don't bleed on the produce).
• Track progress from week to week throughout the season where employees can see it; that will provide an reinforcing feedback loop for your team.

People feel better when they do things right. Unfortunately, conveying expectations about just how to do a job can confound even experienced managers – especially if you have inexperienced workers with very little idea of what a successful outcome looks like.

Even for experienced workers, incomplete instructions on the part of a supervisor can result in poor performance, even if they have done exactly what they understood needed to be done.

When you give somebody a new task, make it a point to check back in fifteen minutes later. That’s enough time for somebody to get started, but not enough time to do too much damage in most situations. Make it clear that it isn’t a matter of trust – you want to be certain you’ve conveyed the instructions and parameters correctly.

Management is its own job, and you only get the results you want by managing.

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.

Employee performance is a function of outcomes compared to expectations.

If you want to get all math about it, Employee Performance = f (outcomes/expectations).

You can't evaluate employee performance without the ability to measure outcomes against defined expectations. If you haven't been clear about your expectations, you don't have any ability to evaluate outcomes - and more importantly, employees don't have a way to measure their own performance.

And ambiguity breeds poor performance.

When employees and teams fail to meet your expectations, the first question to ask yourself is, "Was I clear about my expectations?"

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.

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.

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.

On March 14, I’ll be presenting a workshop on employee management for the Practical Farmers of Iowa. And while good management can make the difference between making headway on your farm's work or just creating headaches, the legal side of farm employment is almost guaranteed to lead to headaches, especially for market farmers.

Because it requires large injections of seasonally-intense labor, as well as having a legitimate reason to offer employees housing, farm work is often subject to slightly modified set of labor laws and regulations. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to find concise answers in one place to all of the questions these exceptions raise. And for market farmers, the issues get even more complicated because many of the activities we engage in – such as cleaning, packaging, selling, and delivering produce – don’t fall under the traditional (and legal) definition of farm work.

Practical Farmers of Iowa, working with the nonprofit law center Farm Commons, has created a Farm Employment FAQ, with answers to many of these difficult questions for Iowa farmers, available here.

Farmers’ Legal Action Group has created a printable guide for Minnesota farmers, available here.

Kudos to both of these organizations for creating accessible information for this critical and often misunderstood area of farm management.

If you know of similar resources for other states, we’d love to hear about it in the comments.