Effective workstations can have a tremendously positive influence on productivity by minimizing extraneous movement and avoiding discomfort or injury.

The top of the work table should be at elbow height – considerably higher than a standard folding table or kitchen counter. I feel that workers move faster when standing, so we’ve set up all of our workstations for that. Anti-fatigue mats reduce wear-and-tear on knees and backs. We have workstations at two different heights, to accommodate both larger and smaller members of the crew.

Everything the worker needs should be within easy reach. Keeping tools and supplies within a 24-inch radius to the side and front speeds things up enough to make a little nagging worthwhile. We provide a coffee cup at each workstation to store the tools needed for the job at hand. Completed flats are moved to a trolley or cart that requires only a turn and a step to get to; workers without easy access to the trolley slide flats across the table for handling by somebody who can pivot to it.

For filling flats, we’ve constructed a table with walls on three sides. We buy our potting mix in two-yard slings, so we shovel mix from the sling up onto the table, which has the additional benefit of breaking up compacted chunks. Workers mound the mix over the flat with their hands, then shake the flat hard once before using a flat board to sweep the soil from the middle of the flat to the ends.

We recently hosted a field day at Rock Spring Farm on the subject of saving labor on the market farm. Inevitably, the discussion at the end of the day – once we had moved into the shade of the packing house – turned to managing employees.

As I described the systems we use to communicate with employees about desired outcomes and the parameters for success, a beginning farmer asked, “But what do you do if they simply don’t do the work?”

I hear variations of this question a lot at farming conferences. I suppose it strikes right at the heart of the local, sustainable produce grower’s dilemma when it comes to hiring people: I grow this food not to get rich, but to make a difference in the world and in people’s lives. I hire people at relatively low wages to do hard, hot, and dirty work that few Americans really want to do. And I depend on them to do the work. Big corporations treat food and people like ingredients and automatons – so shouldn’t I be different?

It all begs the question, why do you hire people? I have a short answer for that: You hire them to make you money.

Put everything else aside for a moment. Forget that you like to surround yourself with people. Forget that you are training young people to be farmers, or to appreciate where their food comes from. Forget being a job creator, a sympathizer with the workers, or a role model.

That’s all good stuff, but fundamentally, you hire people to make you money. To keep your farming business alive. To further your own goals, ignoble and noble alike.

That doesn’t make you a bad person. And it doesn’t mean you have to behave poorly. It does mean that you have to do your job as a manager.

When I have an employee who isn’t doing the work I’ve asked them to do, or isn’t performing to the standards I’ve set, I sit down and ask myself:

• Have I outlined the desired outcomes and principles for success? In other words, did I tell the employee to go weed the herbs, or did I provide instructions that every inch of bare soil needed to be scuffed and all weeds uprooted in the south three beds of perennial herbs in field 112?
• Have I provided the tools they need to do their job? Did I use my knowledge of my farm and my resources to direct them to the right hoe? Did I provide a field map so that they knew exactly where I expect them to work? Did I provide the training for how to use the tools, and how to sharpen them, and how to work efficiently?

If I’ve done these two things – in other words, if I have done my own job as a manager – and the employee isn’t doing the work that I need done, I resort to a short, verbal reprimand. At Rock Spring Farm, we try our best to use one-minute praisings and one-minute reprimands where appropriate, per the short and excellent One Minute Manager. Often, we’ll combine a reprimand with a little bit of re-training: “If you hold the hoe like this, you can slide it under the soil like this.”

If the reprimand doesn’t work, a verbal warning is in order. At the end of the day, I will pull the poor-performing employee aside and tell them in no uncertain terms that their job is on the line. I include exactly why, and exactly what will need to be done by the employee in what timeframe in order to keep her job. (That timeframe has a lot to do with the length of an employee’s tenure. Seasonal workers who are only on the farm for ten weeks don’t get much time to fix performance issues.)

More often than not, this simply doesn’t work. If an employee’s work hasn’t improved after reprimands and re-trainings, it’s probably not going to improve at all. But I feel an obligation to let an employee know exactly what is on the line before letting them go.

If the verbal warning does work, it’s important to communicate that to the employee – they need to know that their head is off the chopping block.

If it doesn’t work, it’s time to let them go.

At the Sioux Falls Organic Conference last week, I had the pleasure of meeting visionary organic producer Bob Quinn, from Big Sandy, Montana. Starting in 1986, Bob transitioned his ranch from conventional alfalfa, beef, and wheat production to an organic powerhouse in northern Montana. Up in zone 3 with some 2,000 acres in production, Bob has even been experimenting with organic vegetable production without irrigation - and that's no joke in that environment.

With the vegetables, Bob has experimented with wide spacings to minimize plant demands. Last year, I read a book by Steve Solomon called Gardening When It Counts, which described Solomon's efforts to grow vegetables at low cost and in the most reliable way possible. (As near as I can see it, Steve Solomon is the real deal. He founded Territorial Seed Company, which carries all kinds of great stuff from gardening year-round out out in Oregon; he's written books on plant breeding and varietal selection for gardeners and small growers; and now he's got a modest homestead in Tasmania. Really, how cool is that?) Wide spacing was key to that. While a lot of attention has been paid in the last thirty years of market farming literature to the virtues of maximizing production on each piece of land, I think this idea of farming more land less intensively really makes a lot of sense. If you don't live in the city, why not use more land, less fertilizer, and less water, and make the work of weeding and mechanical tillage just that much easier?

As a movement of organic market farmers, I think we have tended to value high production per acre over high production per unit of effort. Yes, productivity-per-acre helps us put less acreage under plow, utilizing our land resource better and reducing up-front capital costs for land - but it requires more labor per unit of production than less-intensive production. Wider spacing can allow for better utilization of mechanical weed control, certainly - and if it reduces irrigation requirement as well, then you've saved on that labor, as well. Solomon writes that it encourages the development of more robust, more resilient root systems as well. 

Especially since good help is so hard to find, particularly once you get beyond one or two key people. For most of the expanding market farmers I have met, finding those good people becomes one of their biggest challenges. So why not do whatever you can to save on the expenses of weeding and irrigating, two jobs that nobody really seems to enjoy?