Category: Farm Wisdom - Purple Pitchfork

Target Fixation

3/10/2016

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.

CSA Marketing Triangle

2/18/2016

Mark Boen says CSA members want three things: choice, convenience, and connection to the farm.

Which is why he’s moving away from CSA as a way to market his produce.

The choice, convenience, connection trio of the CSA is similar to the contractor’s trio of fast, cheap, and good. Everybody wants all three, but you only get two at most.

It’s your job to decide which ones you’re going to promise. Making the right promise will be key to retaining members.

Urgent or Important?

2/11/2016

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.

Don’t Be a Wreck

2/4/2016

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.

It’s a Trap

1/21/2016

Poor performance begets poor performance.

When things don’t go well on the farm, you have less money, so you try to get by with less.

You skimp on fertilizer, so you don’t get good yields. Labor efficiency goes down because less-than-vigorous crops take longer to pick per harvested unit than high yielders. Now you’ve got less money, so you have to find another place to cut.

You skimp on hired labor, so you have less time and energy to focus on managing your operation and creating a rich family life. Without adequate help, timeliness of operations suffers, so you don’t get crops seeded, transplanted, and weeded on time, which reduces saleable yields and increases labor inputs. Again, you’ve got less money, so you have to find another place to cut.

Your shop’s a mess, so you don’t put your tools away, so the next time you need them, you have to spend extra time hunting for them, so by the time you’ve finished cranking that nut you’re in a hurry to get back out to the field, and the wrench goes back in the pile instead of getting put away where you can find it again.

One farm I worked with even tried to cut seed expenses to the bare bones, until the managers had a vigorous debate over whether they could buy seeds for the fall storage crops since they had already spent their seed budget!

And so it goes all across the farm, round and round and round again. Until, like the fabled and quite endangered Malaysian Concentric Bird, which flies in ever-smaller circles, you finally disappear up your own backside.

Unlike manufacturing, on the farm, many of our expenses are actually investments. Buying more charging ports doesn’t result in more iPhones. But adding more fertilizer will result in more crops, improving yields and income at a rate great that the increased expense. Adding more water – pumping more water and spending the money to manage the irrigation system – can dramatically increase yields (and, sufficient water is key to maximizing the utilization of soil fertility). Properly managed labor increases the farm’s productivity by accomplishing tasks in a timely manner that frees you up to focus more of your energy on actually managing the operation.

(Of course, this is only up to a point – but most market farms I work with simply aren’t at that point.)

The only way out is to invest more time, energy, creativity, intellect, or money into the things that are holding you back.

[HT to Edward Abbey for the Malaysian Concentric Bird.]

Low-Hanging Fruit

1/14/2016

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.

Three Investments to Save Labor

1/7/2016

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

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.
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.
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.

The Deck is Stacked

12/31/2015

Last week, I wrote to you about how you can stack the deck for success on your farm (today’s the day to check those bank and credit card balances!).

Here’s the good news that I forgot to mention: the deck is already stacked in our favor! Market farmers today have incredible advantages and resources that we wouldn’t have dared to imagine twenty-five years ago.

We have aware customers and markets. Organic and local have become part of the food lexicon, to the point where even conventional stores stock organic produce. Many stores have even dedicated entire sections of the store to “natural” foods. Michael Pollan is, at least in some places, a household name.

We’ve got restaurants and grocery stores clambering to jump on the local food bandwagon.

We have the idea of CSA - something that was only the glimmer of an idea in most of the country in 1991. Look back at the text that many of us relied on in the early 1990’s, Eliot Coleman’s New Organic Grower. No, not the new edition – look at the old one. Eliot talks about a “food guild,” but the idea is so fresh that the words Community Supported Agriculture aren’t associated with it.

Oh, and that text? About that. That was the only text available about organic market farming. Now you can fill entire bookshelves with excellent, accessible books about the details of organic market farming, orcharding, organic farm business management, medicinal herb production, crop planning, organic soil management… the list goes on and on.

And information? Talk about information. Growing for Market broke new ground in the early 1990s by publishing a newsletter by and for market farmers. Outside of the conventional agriculture and large-scale wholesale vegetable publications, that was really it for a long time.

Organic research was pretty much non-existent twenty-five years ago. When I worked in the carrot breeding program at the University of Wisconsin, “organic” meant that you didn’t do anything to it at all – including cultivating. In my soil science class, I waited anxiously all semester for the one lecture on organic farming. On that day, the professor stood up with an empty bag of dried steer manure from the garden center and said, “Look at the analysis on this! 0.5, 0.5, 0.5. You can’t grow anything with this.” Now, the UW and most other land grant universities have entire faculty positions focused on organic production.

We’ve even got the internet! I remember the excitement of getting Steel in the Field on video and watching it on a VCR, pausing and rewinding to grab each little detail. I also remember calling Richard de Wilde to have him explain to me, without pictures, how to set up the cultivators on a farm I had just started to manage - he hadn’t seen them, and getting him pictures would have required having film developed and pictures posted. For most things, if we wanted to see it in operation, we had to go and see it. Today, YouTube provides an endless array of insights into how to get things done on the market farm. (Check out this video of asparagus harvest in California if you want to feel slow.)

On the finance side, we’ve got amazingly low interest rates, and bankers who don’t all think you’re crazy for wanting to start an organic vegetable farm somewhere outside of California.

And, yes, there are still shortcomings. We need more customers willing to pay a premium for local and organic food. We need distribution systems adapted to our needs as farmers. Land prices are outrageous in many places. Organic research is still a crazy-small part of the overall USDA research budget. We’re facing new regulations and expectations for food safety. And more.

But overall, I don’t think there’s ever been a better time to be a market farmer. And even if there has, this is the time we’ve got. So use the all of the tools and resources at your disposal and make the most of it!

Happy new year! Here’s to the best of fortune in farming, family, business, and life in 2016!

[HT Steve Pincus http://www.farmertofarmerpodcast.com/episodes/pincus]

Good Luck, Bad Luck

12/17/2015

I didn’t learn to use a chainsaw until I was 21, working at the University of Wisconsin’s Rhinelander Agricultural Research Station, up in northern Wisconsin. A couple of days after I started working on the research station, my boss taught me how to use a chainsaw and set me to felling some trees to make room for a new greenhouse pad. It being a state job, he insisted that I suit up properly, with protective chaps and a hardhat with earmuffs and an eye screen. I’d been around chainsaws before, but I’d never seen anybody working in such a ridiculous get-up, but I did what I was told.

(At this point, let me say that it’s really hard to kill a horsefly that’s chewing on your head when you are wearing a hardhat. Also, it’s hot and humid in Wisconsin in the summertime, especially when you grew up in Seattle [not hot] and spent the last two years in the desert [not humid]. The combination of horseflies, mosquitoes, and sweat was pretty darned distracting.)

(Also, I’m not sure that felling trees was the right job for a novice chainsaw user. But it was the work that needed to be done.)

Things got exciting at a number of points during the day, as I got the chainsaw stuck in the tree, and dropped a tree the wrong way and got it hung up in some branches, with nothing but my own youthful lack of good judgment to get it down. But nothing was quite as exciting as when I let the chainsaw bit full speed into my thigh – the chaps shredded and stopped the chain. I spent quite a bit of time digging the fibers out of the chainsaw, and then I had to explain to my boss why we needed new chaps.

At the time, I felt pretty unlucky. I felt like an incompetent fool, and I’d embarrassed myself in front of my boss and my new crew. But when I’ve looked back, I actually feel pretty fortunate to have made such a grand mistake so early in my chainsaw-using career. I learned my lesson and I learned it good, and I’ve never used a chainsaw without chaps and a helmet since, and I’ve never hit myself with the saw again. For twenty-some-odd years now, I’ve approached chainsaws with respect for how much they can get done, as well as how much pain and suffering can be caused by a moment’s inattention.

I had a different experience when it came to learning to manage people. In fact, I had the worst luck I could possibly have had when we hired our first full-time employee at Rock Spring Farm: he was great. Shaun was the kind of worker who bought into our enterprise just as fully as I did. He would match my speed and enthusiasm all day, and go in the house and make dinner for the family at the end of the day. When things didn’t work, he jumped in to figure out how to make them right, with no judgment at all. If the rain kept us out of the field one day, he’d stay out until dark to get the transplanting done when it did dry out. He rode his fellow employees hard so that we didn’t’ have to – and he did it with a smile on his face. And he’d come to farmer’s market after a 60-hour work week, and come home to watch the kids if there was something else that I needed to take care of.

And it was the worst possible thing, because when Shaun left at the end of the year, and we hired new employees the next year, I expected them all to be Shaun. As we doubled our production, bought a bunch of new tools, and entered into what would be a disastrous wholesale lettuce contract, we leaned on our crew, but found that we had entered a post-Shaun world. Where Shaun saw what was right with our farm, our new crew found the flaws. Where Shaun jumped in to make things right, the new crew stood around and waited for things to be fixed – and assumed that what went wrong reflected something wrong with us. When five o’clock rolled around, morale went in the toilet if we need to stay a few minutes late to get a job done.

And we had no idea what to do about it. Instead, we flailed around and yelled and jumped up and down and generally did a bad enough job of managing people that we drove a crew of ten people off the farm in the space of two weeks.

If Shaun hadn’t been so good, maybe I would have had to learn a thing or two about managing employees before I got in over my head. I think I could have saved myself a lot of pain and suffering if I’d learned to protect myself earlier in the game, rather than just bumbling forward and assuming everything would be okay.

If we’re lucky, things aren’t too easy when we’re learning, and we get the chance to make some mistakes before the stakes get too high. If things are easy, and we don’t make a bunch of stupid mistakes – or if we’re lucky enough that we (or our businesses, or our relationships) are wearing the equivalent of chaps and a helmet – we have to work that much harder to get the skills and assume the attitudes that are necessary to continued success.

Thanksgiving and Golf

12/3/2015

At the Thanksgiving table last Thursday, the conversation turned to golf. My partner and my dad’s both play golf, and both tried to convince us that we should go along when the grass greens up in the spring. We both insisted that we have gone along for golfing, but they were both pretty adamant that mini-golf doesn’t count. Okay, fine, we said, we’ll come along and drive the cart with the beer cooler. Nope, they said. You should play. You’ll enjoy it!

Dad and I are both pretty clear that we would find it pretty frustrating, and would probably lose our tempers. At least a little bit.

My partner said that she gets frustrated, too. “You know, sometimes you have the game of your life, and the next time you go out and act like you’ve never held a club in your life.”

We all laughed, but I took out my Universal Information Capture Device (the note cards and pen that I carry in my shirt pocket) and made a note, which made everybody laugh.

I wrote it down because that’s the difference between an amateur and a professional. Professionals get consistently positive results. They don’t win all the time, and they may have an occasional off game (or season), but they consistently get it more right than not.

Consistency. And consistent improvement. Let’s go there.

(Just don’t make me do it while I’m holding a golf club.)

Why I’m Not Talking about the FSMA Produce Rule (Yet)

I’m not talking about the FSMA Produce Rule, which was recently released, because even the experts and people who have been immersed in it for the last several years are still parsing it out. Expect more information as we know more, including a podcast planned for release next week with Sophia Kruszewski from the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition about what we know at this time.

In the meantime, NSAC is posting rule interpretations here http://sustainableagriculture.net/category/food-safety/.

Please keep in mind that, for most of the regulations, farms will have between two and four years to come into compliance. And I’ll be doing my best to help you make the new rules work for you and for your farm.

Setting the Stage

11/19/2015

On one of my first farm jobs, at Wisconsin’s Harmony Valley Farm, I watched farmer Richard de Wilde come in from the end of a day of cultivating on the tractor and spend another five or ten minutes cleaning any accumulated soil from the knives and sweeps with a paint scraper and a wire brush. The job simply wasn’t done until the cultivators were ready for another round.

This wasn’t just something that happened on a prized piece of equipment. At the end of each day, every tractor was put away in its assigned parking space. Delicate equipment like seeders and transplanters was shedded, and other implements put away neatly along machinery row. At the end of every day, the packing shed floor was swept and hosed down, and the tanks cleaned and sanitized; and on Saturdays, while everybody else was off at farmers market, I was directed to clean and sanitize the packing shed from top to bottom.

At Harmony Valley Farm, we were practicing a classic productivity technique known as “clearing to neutral.” Rather than reaching the finish line exhausted and dropping everything where we finished the work, we completed the job and then brought everything up to the point where it was ready for the next time we needed it.

Having reached the end of the season – across the Midwest, farmers have just gotten rained out of the field at long last – now is a great time to clear your farm to neutral and to set the stage for the busy, urgent world of spring.

Too often, I’ve been a part of farming operations (including my own!) that reached spring in a state of sheer panic: cultivator parts were dirty, rusty and dull; the flame weeder hadn’t been serviced; and we still needed to figure out how to fix the muffler belt on the Farmall. In the spring, everything comes hot and heavy and all at once, with a ton of pressure to get things done. It’s harder to make good decisions in that context, and even more difficult to successfully manage unexpected hurdles (wait – you mean there isn’t a muffler belt on the Farmall?). Moving as many tasks from spring to fall as you possibly can sets the stage for a cleaner, smoother start in the spring.

In the transplant house, now is a great time to drain water systems and hoses to prevent freezing over the winter. Draining the hoses reduces the build-up of slimes and other undesirable stuff, and ensures that the day you turn the furnace on, you can run water through your hoses. Remove any fittings from frost-free hydrants so that you can be assured that they will drain properly.

Clean and sanitize transplant production flats to reduce the likelihood of carrying over diseases. It’s important to remove any soil before sanitizing, because clay and organic matter typically inactivate sanitizers. Sanidate and Oxidate are two relatively benign sanitizers that have been approved for organic production and are approved for hard-surface sanitizing (always check the label, and check with your certifier!).

Test greenhouse furnaces or boilers now, and schedule any maintenance to happen in the next month, rather than discovering problems the week you are trying to get things fired up for production.

Clean the fan blades on the circulating fans and the furnace to increase efficiency.

In the packing house, drain the hoses when you’re done with them for the year. Give every surface a good scrubbing down and sanitizing, including equipment, walls, and ceilings in the packing area and in the coolers, and get everything as dry as possible to prevent the growth or harborage of bacteria.

Pull stored pallets away from the walls to make that space less inviting to rodents – most sources recommend a foot as being enough to allow you to observe any activity, as well as to reduce the desirability to the undesirables.

Take the covers off of the evaporator fans and clean and sanitize the fan blades – you’ll be shocked at how gross these can get over the course of a year. Cleaning them will increase efficiency and reduce the likelihood of spreading rots or diseases.

In the shop, and in the equipment yard, take a look at each tractor and implement to remind yourself of any repairs or improvements that need to be done, and organize this into a list that you can check off as you go through the winter.

For the implements that don’t need repairs, dig in on the maintenance. Change the oil, grease the Zerks, and tighten the bolts. Remove any soil from scouring surfaces with a wire brush or a brush attachment on an angle grinder. Sharpen the edges on your cultivating tools. Wipe scouring surfaces with a bit of oil or grease once you’ve got them cleaned up to prevent rusting over the winter.

(I spent too many years without an angle grinder. What a great tool for maintenance and cleaning. Relative to a bench grinder, the angle grinder makes it much easier to get the work done. After too many years of unmounting cultivator knives and trying to get the angle to work right with the grinder on my workbench, I finally treated myself to a cheap angle grinder; a few years later, I got a really good one and I would definitely recommend buying a nice one right from the outset.)

(Also – don’t forget to wear eye protection and, preferably, ear protection while you’re using a grinder. Dirt and sparks fly everywhere, and I’d really like you to be able to see next year.)

Clean and sharpen hand tools with the angle grinder or a wire brush and a file. Rub the handles with linseed oil, and coat the blades with oil or grease to prevent rusting; you can wipe this off again in the spring.

Pull the gaskets from any irrigation equipment so that they don’t dry out over the winter in the cold and low humidity.

In addition to preparation for next spring, get ready for winter. It will happen. Put the blade or the snowblower on the tractor after you are finished with field work. Find the snow shovels. Lay in a supply of salt for paths and stairs.

In the office, prepare to put together end of the year financial statements by inventorying any assets that won’t change between now and the end of the year.

Review accounts receivable so that you can clean those up with customers before too much time goes past. Review payables so that you can get those cleaned up by the end of the year, which will help with taxes and with your bookkeeping.

Getting the work out of the way now will reduce stress and increase effectiveness when spring comes around. And who wouldn’t like that? What else can you do now so that when the snow melts and the fields dry out, you are ready to grease a couple of Zerks and make the most of it?

You are Not Your Customer

11/12/2015

When you sell your goods, remember that you aren’t your customer.

Your customer has different values and different perspectives than you do.

You may look at an heirloom tomato and think, “I wouldn’t pay $4.00 a pound for that!” But you can grow it, and they can’t. And they’re watching Bobby Flay tell them how great it is. (Actually, if you’re a farmer, the fact that they have time to watch cooking shows probably tells you that you are not your customer.)

Don’t set your prices based on what you would pay.

Taking Up Space

11/5/2015

Things that you have, but aren't using, suck up resources.

Equipment sitting in the bone yard requires you to mow around it if you don't want a thistle patch. And sitting there, it occupies space on your balance sheet that could be converted to something productive.

An unread book sitting on your bookshelf provides a great excuse for procrastination.

Boxes that you no longer use take up space on the shelf, requiring you to work around them.

Policies that you don't enforce erode your authority as an employer.

Categories in your chart of accounts that you no longer use encourage mis-allocation of spending.

Items on a to-do list that you don't intend to complete creates a soul-sucking cognitive dissonance.

Resentment and bitterness occupy mental space that would be better used on love and kindness.

Cleaning up and clearing out frees up mental, physical, and financial energy. It allows you to focus on the things that move your farm, business, and life in the direction you want to go.

What can you clean up and clear out to free up your energy to more productive and rewarding uses?

It’s the Coffee, Not the Cup

10/29/2015

I grew up in Seattle. Back when Starbucks sold beans, but not coffee. Back when the mermaid still had her navel. My dad and I used to wait in line on Saturday mornings to get the beans for the office coffee, and the nice woman at the cash register would let me have a chocolate-covered coffee bean.

I remain a coffee snob.

Actually, I’m kind of half-assed as a coffee snob. I don’t have a fancy brewing machine, and I have a run-of-the-mill Braun grinder, and a Chemex coffee carafe. But I won’t compromise on the beans. I order the beans in bulk from Café Mam out in Oregon because they consistently supply me with the best coffee beans I’ve ever had.

If you start with good beans, you can make your coffee incrementally better with a burr grinder and a fancy coffee machine. You can even make it better by putting it in a good cup (white, thick ceramic with a nice lip). But if you start with crappy beans, no fancy grinder, high-priced machine, or solid coffee cup is going to make your coffee any better.

The most important part of any enterprise is the foundation – until the foundation is sound, everything else is just a distraction.

If you grow crops, manage your soil fertility before you worry about making compost teas.

If you raise livestock, see to your fencing, water supply, and feed before you dig into aromatherapy for your cows.

If you use a tractor to cultivate, master the basics of knives, sweeps, and shovels before you invest in the latest fancy weeding equipment.

If you manage employees, don’t just read books and go to seminars about managing employees – actually do the things they say to do.

If you grow vegetables, make sure you can keep them watered and get them cold before you make promises about delivery and freshness.

If you buy an app to manage your crop planning, make sure it handles planting dates smoothly before you worry too much about how pretty the maps are.

If you run a food hub, figure out how you’re going to get your margins so that you can pay your employees before you start promising prices.

If you want to speed up your vegetable harvest, master weed control and fertility before you expect your employees or harvest machines to perform miracles.

It’s the coffee, not the cup, that really matters.

Tools for Managing and Motivating Employees on the Farm

Employees make it possible to get more done, but managing workers and their work takes dedicated time, energy and processes. Whether you manage one seasonal worker or a large year-round crew, good management can make the difference between making headway on your farm's work or just creating headaches. Join veteran farmer and educator Chris Blanchard to learn how to create a productive, positive work environment by communicating clear expectations and implementing systems for efficiency and accountability. In this workshop, you'll learn how to: utilize practical tools to increase employee satisfaction and productivity, remove emotion from management decisions and actions, and build a team culture.

Upcoming Events:

Cedar Rapids, Iowa | Monday, November 30
hosted by Iowa Valley Resource Conservation and Development
10:00 AM - 2:30 PM

Columbia, Missouri | Tuesday, December 8
hosted by Missouri Young Farmers Coalition
10:00 AM - 3:00 PM

Stress Degradation

10/15/2015

Systems under stress degrade. Systems under more stress degrade faster. Degraded systems work less efficiently and are a lot less fun to be a part of.

Stress happens when systems operate beyond their normal capacity. The further beyond their capacity they operate, and the longer they operate there, the more stress is created on the system, and the less efficiently it functions.

On the freeway, traffic flows smoothly when there are less cars on the road. Add more cars, and the traffic flows less freely, although it still flows. However, there comes a tipping point where traffic starts to slow down for absolutely no reason. Normal function simply starts to break down when the system is pushed beyond what it can normally handle.

And worse, when some small thing does go wrong - when somebody has a fender bender and pulls to the side of the road - everything grinds to a dead halt.

We can reduce stress by increasing capacity or reducing pressure. On the freeway, that means building more lanes or reducing the number of cars. Either way, stress is reduced because the number of cars per unit of road goes down.

On the farm, keep in mind:

The cost of reducing stress is almost always less than the cost of the consequences of stress.
Planning is the best way to increase capacity at the lowest cost. Knowing what needs to be done on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis gives you the tools you need to deal with the variations that otherwise cause everything to blow up.
You almost always have to reduce pressure to increase capacity. On the freeway, you close lanes to build more lanes. In organic farming, you might grow cover crops to increase output in future years, or dedicate land to hedgerows to provide habitat for beneficial insects and other creatures.
Filling things to capacity creates congestion. If you expand your acreage and immediately fill every square foot with crops, you haven’t changed the relationship between capacity and pressure - you’ve just put more cars on a bigger freeway.
Increased capacity - whether it’s soil fertility, staffing, irrigation, or cooler space - increases your ability to achieve high throughput without having to worry about the details.
You have to counteract stress. One car driving over the same freeway for enough time will eventually create the need for road repairs. You have to plan for time to reorganize, rebuild, and refresh, whether that’s in your shop, your crop rotation, or your family life.

Tools for Managing and Motivating Employees on the Farm

Employees make it possible to get more done, but managing workers and their work takes dedicated time, energy and processes. Whether you manage one seasonal worker or a large year-round crew, good management can make the difference between making headway on your farm's work or just creating headaches. Join veteran farmer and educator Chris Blanchard to learn how to create a productive, positive work environment by communicating clear expectations and implementing systems for efficiency and accountability. In this workshop, you'll learn how to: utilize practical tools to increase employee satisfaction and productivity, remove emotion from management decisions and actions, and build a team culture.

Three events this fall:

Hemmingford, Quebec | Friday, October 23
hosted by La Ferme des Quatre-Temps
10:00 AM - 3:00 PM
(1 hour from Montreal; 90 minutes from Burlington, Vermont)

Cedar Rapids, Iowa | Monday, November 30
hosted by Iowa Valley Resource Conservation and Development
10:00 AM - 2:30 PM

Columbia, Missouri | Tuesday, December 8
hosted by Missouri Young Farmers Coalition
10:00 AM - 3:00 PM

Forget about the Vegetables

10/8/2015

If I grow good soil, I can forget about the vegetables. - Nigel Walker

Over the course of the past nine months, I’ve interviewed over thirty farmers on the Farmer to Farmer Podcast, spent a day each on ten different beginning farms, and worked with several experienced growers in different capacities. And here’s what I’ve learned:

It’s not about the vegetables.

Of course, you have to know how to produce the vegetables. Or the chickens, or the cows, or the herbs, or whatever. You can’t get away from needing to know the basics.

And you have to do the work to grow the vegetables.

But one common theme among successful operators has really surfaced: when you put the rest of your world in order, the vegetables (or the chickens) just sort of get in line.

At Angelic Organics, John Peterson builds the soil for two years, uses an easy-to-weed crop to clean the soil, then grows carrots or salad greens that usually don’t require much attention to weeding.

At La Grelinette, J.M. Fortier has used created permanent beds and permanent pathways to reduce compaction, minimizing tillage requirements and driving up yields.

At Tipi Produce, Steve Pincus and Beth Kazmar put employees first, and have almost eliminated turnover in their crew. They don’t spend hours in May teaching employees how to work on a vegetable farm.

At Pleasant Valley Farm, Paul and Sandy Arnold have invested in smart infrastructure that creates high returns and drives costs and inputs down year after year, without taking on a mountain of debt. The farm gets smaller and more profitable every year.

At Spring Hill Community Farm, Patty Wright and Mike Racette have organized their CSA around creating community with their customers, creating a retention rate that approaches one hundred percent (and drives their marketing budget to down near zero).

At Eatwell Farm, Nigel Walker runs his chickens on the cover crops for a year, and gets two full years of practically pest-free vegetable production from the fertility and biological cycling he has created.

At TLC Ranch, Rebecca Thistlethwaite rigorously analyzed the time spent on chores to focus on the most profitable activities.

At Clay Bottom Farm, Ben Hartman cleaned up his work spaces to facilitate the smooth flow of workers and work.

At your farm, what can you do to set yourself up for success?

Five Great Investments for Your Farm

10/1/2015

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?

Farming Ahead

9/24/2015

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?

The Right Time to Learn

9/10/2015

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?

Transition Times

9/3/2015

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.

A Day in the Fall Is A Week in the Spring

8/27/2015

Here we are in the middle of August, and Wisconsin is experiencing a bit of a cold snap. It’s a reminder that the changing of the seasons is, as always, under way.

As we move into the fall, day length begins to shorten at the same time the high temperatures give out. As a result, plant growth begins to decelerate, and that deceleration has a cumulative effect.

Along the 43rd latitude, where I have spent most of my life, there were 890 hours of sunlight between April 15 and June 15; there are 728 hours of sunlight between now and October 28, which is about the time we’d like to be out of the field around here, and pretty much when it’s too cold for things to grow outside.

As a farmer-friend told me long ago, a day’s difference in planting in the fall is like a week’s difference in planting in the spring.

While timelines matter at all times on the farm, it becomes doubly important with fall plantings. Spinach seeded on August 15 will size up for a November harvest, while spinach seeded September 1 probably won’t.

Cover crop effectiveness is especially enhanced with early plantings. Barley and peas seeded now will put on substantial growth before winter-killing, building carbon and protecting the soil. Two weeks from now, that cover crop will still make a difference for holding soil, but won’t put much back into the soil.

Solar Calculator
If you like this sort of thing (I do), you can download a rather comprehensive daylength calculator from NOAA. It includes just about everything you would want to know about the sun’s location relative to your location. Pretty fun and geeky.

A Pricing Rubric

8/20/2015

Pricing can make or break your business, and you have to approach it with care - especially when making adjustments for customers buying in quantity. The less you charge for your product, the more certain you need to be that you are pricing it right, because the costs are going to be much closer to the price that you receive.

First, you’ve got the cost of the product. This is what it takes to actually make the thing - what it costs, including labor and overhead, to grow and harvest a carrot.

Second, you’ve got the cost of selling. This is the money and time that you spend to get the thing to market, sell it there, and get it back home. You might want to think of this as an entirely separate division of your farm - or even another “business” entirely - as the processes here bear very little relationship to those of actually farming.

If you do a farmer’s market, this is the time to load the van, drive to the farmer’s market, set up, sell sell sell, break down, load the van, drive back home, and unload the van. It’s the cost of fuel and a market stall. That’s a lot of time and money, and you should get a lot of money for it.

If you take orders from stores and restaurants, this is the time it takes to send out information about what you’ve got, answer questions, take the orders, put the orders on pallets, load the truck, write the invoice deliver the product, and drive back home. It’s the cost of fuel and boxes. It’s probably less time and money per carrot, and you’re probably going to get less money for it.

This is a key point: you lower your per-unit price when you lower your per-unit costs. If you are taking orders from a restaurant for one bunch of carrots at a time to make up a $25 sale that you deliver, that’s not a wholesale sale, even if it is a business-to-business sale. It should be priced at retail prices. (When my business shops at Staples, I pay the same prices that I do when I go there for my daughter’s back-to-school supplies.)

Likewise, when you sell something to a food hub or a distributor, it may not make sense to take a lower price than you already get for selling to stores and restaurants unless they are buying in a quantity that significantly reduces your cost per carrot sold.

Third, you’ve got the risk of selling. When you sell a product at farmer’s market, you harvest, wash, and pack that product without ever knowing if you will sell it. If it rains, if there’s a big game on, if traffic is bad… you might wish that you had taken less product to market. Every carrot you sell has to pay for the other carrots that you took but didn’t sell. (The bank charges higher interest for risky loans because they still have to make money on the loans that don’t get paid back.)

When you take orders before you harvest, you reduce your risk because you can harvest only what you’ve already sold. This lowers your effective cost per unit, because you don’t have the risk of harvested, but unsold, product.

Take the time to understand the why behind your pricing levels for different customers and different quantities, and you’ll be one step closer to making great pricing decisions.

Another Perspective on Management

8/13/2015

I really like this definition of management: the organization and coordination of resources and activities to achieve a defined outcome.

But how do you do it?

You plan. You monitor. And you control. If necessary, you make a new plan.

If I’m want to go to buy groceries, I make a plan for how to get there: I’m going to head down East Washington to Baldwin and turn left, then turn right on Willy Street.

Then I get in the car and start driving. When I’m in the car, I monitor things at all different levels - I check the tires before I get in, and glance at the fuel gauge when I turn it on. I watch the speedometer. I check my mirrors every seven seconds. And as a I drive down East Washington, I watch for the landmarks that tell me I’m getting close to Baldwin. I also pay attention to where the car is actually going - I’m almost always a little bit off to the left or to the right, and I make constant little corrections to stay on track.

If I stop paying attention to keeping the car on track - if I decide to send a text, or to check my email - suddenly a few seconds can go by and I’m waaaay off track, with potentially disastrous consequences. Constant monitoring and small corrections keep me on the road; when I stop monitoring and correcting, I’ve stopped managing, and suddenly things can careen crazily out of control.

(I went cold turkey on texting and emailing while driving over 18 months ago, and I’m still going strong. Nothing’s that urgent.)

I want to monitor the right things at the right intervals. I don’t need to check the fuel gauge as I drive down the road, and I don’t need to check the oil every time I get in the car (at least, not in this car. I’ve had cars where it was prudent to do so).

If something happens that’s very much not to plan - I miss my turn on Baldwin Street, or I run over a nail - I go back to square one and replan. This might mean that I need to turn someplace else (if I missed my turn), or that groceries are off the list of things to do today entirely (if I run over a nail).

Here are some monitoring schedules you might think about applying to your farm business (these are by no means meant to be exhaustive. Sorry.):

Crops
Daily - Do the transplants need water? Do freshly seeded or freshly transplanted crops need water?

Weekly - What needs to be done on the farm? Scout for pests. Scout for weeds and weeding opportunities. What’s ready to harvest this coming week? In two weeks? What needs to be seeded or transplanted according to the plan? Did the transplants or seeds do what I expected them to do?

Yearly - How did the crops do? Did we perform according to plan? What went right, what went wrong? Do we need to plant more, or less, or earlier, or later?

Finances
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?

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?

People
Daily - How is the work going? Are staff meeting standards? Is heat or cold an issue to be addressed?

Weekly - How are my people doing? Are staff meeting standards? Are there people on the crew who shouldn’t be? Do we need extra help? What’s coming up for family events?

Monthly - Do people know how they’re doing? What adjustments do we need to make? Am I spending enough time with my crew, my kids, my partner?

Yearly - Do I need more staff or less staff? Do we need to change the staff structure?

Yourself
Daily - Am I hydrated? Am I eating well? Am I giving attention to the things that need attention?

Weekly - What am I trying to accomplish right now? What do I need to do next? Am I getting enough sleep? How’s my healthy? Is my allergy season coming up? Would a visit to the chiropractor now prevent a bigger problem soon?

Yearly - Am I doing what I want to be doing? Am I heading in the right direction?

Lottsa I Gotta

7/9/2015

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.

Is It Part of the Job?

7/2/2015

We all want to spend more time focused on the things we want to focus on. We want to farm, not (pick one or more) clean the packing shed, do the bookkeeping, fill out the records, market CSA shares…

Likewise, our employees want to get their jobs done - they want to bag the spinach, pick the chard, transplant the broccoli, rather than keeping the records and adjusting the transplanter.

Too often, critical tasks end up being “not the job.” I’ve seen large farms without records, discovered fields of freshly transplanted lettuce with the top of the soil block sticking out of the soil, and irrigation running with only half of the sprinklers turning - but at least the water was on, the lettuce wasn’t in the greenhouse, and the crops were getting harvested!

On my own farm, critical tasks often didn’t get the attention they were due, because they were treated as extras until the moment they had to be done - writing CSA newsletters, bookkeeping, greasing zerks on machinery, even the record-keeping (and we had a reputation to uphold!).

It didn’t change until we began to make things “part of the job.” Rather than writing CSA newsletters after the kids were in bed the night before deliveries, we began to dedicate time early in the week. I set up a system to rapidly sort bills and receipts as they came in to make bookkeeping easier, and set aside an hour a week to entering them into QuickBooks. We developed a system of written plans and instructions that were incorporated into the same sheet of paper where the records were kept, so that the record-keeping was already in the same place as the work that was being done.

We also worked to be clear about what the job actually was: harvest wasn’t finished until the quantities and fields were recorded in the right place; and we stopped just “getting the lettuce out” and “getting the irrigation running” and started defining what done looked like.

To make something “part of the job,” you need to do one of two things: dedicate time and resources, or make the task inseparable from the work.