Category: Farm Wisdom - Purple Pitchfork

SWSWSWN

6/18/2015

When it comes to dealing with sales, it's important to remember SWSWSWN.

Some will. Some won't. So what. Next.

Some folks will buy what you're selling. That's great.

Some folks won't buy what you're selling. It doesn't matter how good it is, how fair the price is, how righteous your growing practices are.

So what? That's business. Rejection of your product or your offerings or your price is not a rejection of you.

Move on to the next prospect, the next product, the next project.

(This works with crops as well as sales. Some crops will make it. Some won’t. It’s not about you, and it’s not always about your skill as a farmer. Sometimes things are simply beyond your control.)

The Plan Never Survives First Contact with the Enemy

6/11/2015

Farming, like war, rarely goes according to plan. But farming, like war, rewards careful planning.

The Prussian general, Herman von Moltka, noted that the plan of battle never survives first contact with the enemy. But he also knew that you never to go battle without a plan.

Why do all of that planning if it doesn’t survive first contact with reality? Because it’s the process, not the plan, that really matters.

Time spent planning is time spent assessing the objectives you want to achieve, the benchmarks you’ll need to achieve along the way, the resources you can bring to bear, and the activities you will need to coordinate to get there.

When you spend the time and focus to develop a plan, you develop a deeper relationship to the constraints and opportunities present in the field, whether it’s a field of battle or a field of vegetables. This increased awareness helps you make better decisions when the plan inevitably doesn’t work out.

Don’t abandon planning just because your plans don’t go the way you expect them to. Plan because it provides the information you need to know if you are on track, and, if you aren’t, how to bring things back to the center when it comes to meeting your objectives.

The Month of Getting Things Done

6/4/2015

In the North, June is the month of getting things done. Crops are flying into the field, weeds are growing, strawberries and peas are ripening. For us type-A farmer types, it’s time to get out there and Do, Do, Do.

But it’s not enough to just get things done. We have to get the right things done, and the things done right. More than at any time of the year, in June we need to take the time and set aside the mental energy to manage activities on the farm.

I don’t think anything is harder in the long days and fast pace of June. And I don’t think anything is more important.

Getting the Right Things Done – Now is the time to take the process of capturing, collecting, deciding, acting, and reviewing more seriously. When you’re standing in the firehose of reality, it’s the hardest and most necessary thing to do.

Pay attention to what has your attention. When you see something that may need a response, make sure you have a way to capture that information without having to solve the problem right that minute. Whether it’s a notepad or the camera on your phone, you need a way that the million distractions on the farm – I need to weed that field, what’s that bug, what if I had this tool – can get out of your head and into a place where it can actually do you some good.

Collect that stuff all in one place. Scraps of paper and pictures in the Gallery on your phone don’t do any good unless you get them into a place where you can focus your attention on decision-making. Email pictures to yourself, and put those notecards into an inbox on your desk so that you can…

Decide what to do. The time to decide what to do is not when you are standing there looking at bugs on your broccoli but need to be leading your crew. Set aside time each day to process through the items in your physical and email inbox and make decisions about what to do. Make decisions and write them down so that you can…

Do. Don’t let management turn into an excuse for inaction. (This is one my foibles.)

Review. Review. Review. You’ve got to stay on top of whether things are getting done right, and have a systematic way of gathering information about what’s going on with the things we’re managing. Review to-do lists at the end of the day to make sure things are getting done. Confirm with your employees that “we’re done weeding the carrots” means “the carrots have been weeded.”

Take time every week to walk every field on your farm to determine what needs to be done. You’ll notice things as you move throughout the farm every week, but taking time every week to intentionally observe what’s going on everywhere on your farm is a key success factor.

Then take time to allocate the time and labor you have available to get it all done, so that you can prioritize the things to do that will get you the biggest results, and head off potential problems at the pass.

Focus on Success Instead of Failure

4/9/2015

When I started working on farms back in 1990, I got pretty lucky. Early on, I got to work on farms like Santa Barbara’s Fairview Gardens and Wisconsin’s Harmony Valley Farm, and moved through several research operations and even managed the gardens at Seed Savers Exchange – places where weeds simply weren’t tolerated, and where crops were, by and large, successful, even in adverse conditions.

My first year at Harmony Valley Farm – back then it was about 35 acres of vegetables, although it’s much larger now – was 1993, one of the wettest years on record. Despite the horrible growing conditions, not a weed went to seed on the farm (that sounds bold, but I am not exaggerating) – I clearly remember weeding crews bucketing weeds out of the fields so that they wouldn’t re-root in the ongoing rainfall.

And the crops performed well; in fact, I still have nightmares about the bumper crop of celeriac that year, which I spent day after day trimming and washing.

At Fairview Gardens and Seed Savers Exchange, the gardens were public or in public view, and image mattered, so fields were clean and the fields were well maintained.

At all of these farms, trucks and tractors were expected to start. Machinery worked when it was hooked up. Greenhouses didn’t freeze or overheat.

I was also very fortunate to be exposed to farm after farm where there was an internal expectation of success. Funny how that works – successful farmers tend to refer you to successful farms. When I saw farms that didn’t work, it left a deep feeling of unease that kind of gnawed at my gut – that’s not how things were supposed to be.

So when I started managing a farm on my own, and again when I bought my own farm, I expected the fields to be free of weeds. They weren’t, but I knew that it was possible, and had an expectation that I would be able to create that result. I expected tractors and trucks to start, and machinery to work, and when it didn’t, I had an expectation that things would look different. It wasn’t always easy, and I didn’t always succeed, but my early farm experiences had created a frame of success that I could picture my own farm inhabiting.

Too often when we face failure, we focus on what went wrong, the mistakes that could have been avoided and the factors that kept us from getting the results we wanted. It is far more profitable to focus on what success looks like, so that you can begin to frame a model of what your farm’s success could look like.

Find successful farms – not farms that are a little bit successful, but farms that have withstood the test of time, that have respect in the community, that look like they work.

And when you do find success, work to understand what has fostered success on those farms: What are the circumstances that made this farm work here, and how do they apply in your situation? What skills do the farmers have that make them stand out, and how can you develop or hire those? What attitudes and attributes does the farm’s team bring to its work, and what you do to foster those same attitudes and attributes in your approach to your farm?

It's Not Just About Fast

12/25/2014

I love to work fast. When I worked on a fish-processing ship in Alaska, I would simply show up to work twice each day and put 120 fish each minute into the filet machine, heads down and bellies to the right. What a great job! - I just showed up and cranked all day, then ate and slept and did it again. I lost track of time more than once in that fever dream of fish, as the days and weeks slipped by in the fluorescent hold of the ship.

But it's not just about fast. You can be the fastest fish slinger in the world, but if the filet machine doesn't work, or the fish aren't in the hold, or the crew is sick, you don't get to crank.

I love throwing twist ties around bunches of kale as fast as I can, watching the harvest crates and little kale palms pile up in my wake.

But it's not just about fast. A thousand things have to be done right and at the right time before you get to throw twist ties on the kale leaves.

Before you can even think about the harvest, it's about having the tools and the techniques and the people and the energy you need to get the kale seeded and watered, the ground ready, the plants transplanted, and the weeds and the diseases and the bugs taken care of.

It's about endurance If you blow out your back or push yourself to exhaustion getting the kale plants out to the field, you won't have what it take to seed the rutabagas tomorrow.

When comparing investment opportunities - whether for spending money on equipment or spending time on systems development - the mental exercise of figuring out how much money a new tool or system will save is an easy lure, and with harvest labor taking up such a large share of a vegetable farm's expense, it's tempting to put the time and money into those systems. But we need to think about more than just the cost savings - we have to think about getting the crop in ahead of a rain, getting the rows straight to make cultivating easy, and getting each job done without leaving yourself gasping for breath at the end of it, too tired to do it again tomorrow or next year.

Six Things My Tractor Taught Me

11/6/2014

When necessary, a tractor works all night. A tractor doesn’t quit because it’s dark, or cold, or because Monday Night Football is on. I don’t think many farm tractors work all night, every night, but when it’s necessary, they perform. On the farm, every year, there are a few days and nights that make a critical difference – to run a successful farm, you’ve got to be willing to get out there and go the extra mile.

Maintenance matters – and there’s more maintenance to do than you think. Putting the time and money into maintenance makes certain that when the tractor needs to work all night, it can. And maybe more importantly, it means that when you need the tractor to start because the crew is waiting for you or the rain is on its way, it will. Too often, I see clients skimping on the necessary maintenance over the winter due to financial or time constraints – that’s a mistake that just costs more down the road, in increased repair expenses and lost opportunities.

When a tractor’s off, it’s off. On the flip side, a tractor doesn’t do the work half way. It’s either on, or it’s off. When you’re off work, be off work. Find something to do , even just for a few hours a week, that isn’t farming: take Taekwondo, join a reading club, go bowling. Find something to do that allows you to turn off from the farm.

It’s either the gas, or the spark, at least on a gas tractor. I have all the mechanical aptitude of your average ape, so dealing with old tractors isn’t easy for me. However, a neighbor helped me understand early on that you have to go after root cause – if your tractor isn’t working, it’s either got a problem with the amount or quality of the gas the engine is getting, or it’s got a problem with the spark that fires the pistons. Once you know that, the detective work to figure out what’s wrong becomes a lot simpler.

Unless it’s the muffler belt.

In an emergency, step on the clutch. The third farmer I drove tractor for told me that, unless you’re in road gear or going down a hill, if something starts to go wrong with the tractor, just step on the clutch, and you’ll come to a stop. Then you can start to deal with everything else. Despite the generally slow operating speed of a tractor, things can go wrong in a hurry. Stepping on the clutch, killing the PTO, and dropping the forks brings everything to a stop, allowing the operator the chance to take a moment to consider the situation – not a bad lesson in any situation, no matter how fast-moving it seems.

Not everybody can drive straight – especially in the creeper gear. It actually gets harder to drive straight the slower you go, and not everybody can maintain that kind of focus. But it’s exactly the focus you need as a farmer – every bit of attention you pay to keeping that row straight pays off when it comes time to seed, so you figure out how to keep the tractor straight and the beds evenly spaced. Care and attention matter, and the little things add up.

Capturing Pain Points

8/7/2014

Lee Zieke, of northeast Iowa’s Willoglen Nursery, told me a long time ago that, “You’ve got to capture the pain while it’s fresh.”

Since we can't remember everything we encounter, our brains have a mechanism for purging information that isn't needed any more. As circumstances change, your brain dumps the information it had been keeping immediately accessible, making room for newly relevant data. And in the middle of the market farming season, there's always a ton of newly relevant data!

The unfortunate implication of this is that the problems that created the most stress and misfortune in August - the inability of employees to properly cull tomatoes, the grain drill that wasn't cleaned out after spring cover cropping and now needs to have the mice and birds cleaned out of it before seeding that first crop of rye and vetch, the discovery that you don't have sufficient spinach seed to seed your fall crop (and Johnny's is sold out of the variety you need!) - fade by the time you really have time to implement long-term solutions.

That doesn't mean you have to solve the problems while they're staring you in the face. You just need to capture the problem now, and put it in a place where you can come back to it after the crops and the work slow down.

Keeping a Universal Information Capture Device close at hand is a sure way to be able to capture pain points. My two favorite UICDs are pen and paper (I like the Hipster PDA and a Fisher Space Pen), and the camera on my smart phone. You don't need long explanations - "tomato culling issues" will make a find stand-in for "The crew has a difficult time knowing when a blemish has reached a sufficient size to warrant culling," and a picture of the bird's nest in the grain drill chute will remind you of the problems there.

Captured information needs a place to go where you can find it easily at the right time. Notecards from the Hipster PDA go into a file folder labeled "Pain Points to Review in November". Smartphone photos are instantly emailed to myself, and tagged (if you use Gmail) or filed (if you use Outlook or Thunderbird) as "Pain Points to Review."

In November (or when your season slows down in your climate), review the pain points, and decide what to do about them when you have the time, energy, and focus to develop effective solutions.

Don't Forget to Smile

7/24/2014

The transition from July to August isn’t easy. It’s hot, the battle with the weeds isn’t getting any easier, and you’ve still got to get the turnips planted.

But that’s your problem, not your customer’s.

When you’re greeting a customer at farmers market, or writing a newsletter for your CSA, or engaging with your employees, don’t forget to smile. It’s a good life, people, and we’re all lucky to be here. Smiling reminds you, and everyone around you, that that’s true.

Keep Greasing the Zerks

6/5/2014

When the pressure’s on, it becomes all too easy to skip the little things that keep things working. In the long days of June, make sure you take the time to grease the Zerk fittings, check the oil in the tractor at the beginning off every day, and tighten the bolts. No matter how fast the weeds are growing, and no matter how little time there is before the next rain, you’ve got to take the time to do the small things that make sure that the big things don’t go massively wrong.

By the way, that goes for relationships just as much as it does for machinery.

Weekly Field Walk

3/13/2014

Many years ago, I asked an organic shepherd how to raise sheep without relying on the standard heavy doses of medication. She told me that the real trick is to spend time just watching the sheep – not moving them, not medicating them or feeding them or watering them, just leaning on the fence, watching and observing.

This is the key to successful management: you have to spend time just managing. Not picking, not weeding, not planting, just observing and noting what needs attention.

In my experience, the weekly field walk is the key ninja move that makes the difference between managing and reacting. Every week, every field and every greenhouse should get a visit for the sole purpose of observation and noting the work that needs to done. By observing with intention, you increase the opportunities to catch problems before they get out of control, and plan the appropriate actions.

You Can't Buy Success

2/27/2014

You can buy tools, or access land, or hire people, to increase your likelihood of success. But you can’t buy success.

Too often, we think that that one tool (one field, one person) will prove to be a game changer. But they almost never turn out that way.

The real game changers are:

Farming skills – the real nuts-and-bolts knowledge gained through years of experience about how to get the work done.
Acquired instincts – the year-over-year acquisition of that gut feeling that tells you when you need to plant instead of cultivate, harvest instead of transplant, or get back home to roll down the sides on the greenhouse.
Real markets – where enough people are willing to spend enough money to buy a quality-differentiated food product.
Business management systems – the development of systems on the farm that keep the important work of sales, employee management, and financial record-keeping and decision-making on track so that you can focus on farming.
Knowing what success looks like – understanding what healthy crops, weed-free fields, and properly prepared produce actually look like. If you can’t visualize it, you can’t create it.
Getting it right – you can spend all of the money you want, but if you (or your crew) overwater your transplants, drive the tractor crookedly down the row, don’t set the transplanter right, or don’t provide workers with the guidance they need to perform their jobs correctly, you may as well flush that same money down the toilet.

It’s easy to look at another farm and see their shiny tractors, fancy packing house, or automatic watering system and misidentify these as the source of their success. More often, success is the result of the unglamorous work of getting better at the game, rather than chasing after game changers.

Why You Need a Universal Information Capture Device

1/23/2014

Ever think of something that you need from another room, walk to the room to get it, and discover that you have no idea what you needed?

Or notice an incipient problem or opportunity and forget to do soemthing about it until it's too late?

My favorite is starting the tractor to plow the first snowfall of the season and realizing that I need to add some anti-gel to the diesel, then forgetting to do it until everything gels up. (Yes, this has happened to me. More than once.) Or seeing a tire on a field vehicle that is slightly underinflating, but failing to fill it up before it goes fully flat.

A 2011 article in Scientific American describes a series of experiments designed to explain this phenomenon. Basically, some forms of memory are optimized to keep information immediately available until it isn't needed any more. Since we can't remember everything we encounter, the brain has a mechanism for purging information that isn't needed any more. When you change locations or situations - whether it's moving from one room to another, answering a phone call, or stopping to chat with the mailman while you're plowing the driveway - your brain dumps the information it had been keeping immediately acccessible, making room for new, now-relevant information.

It may not be the best for remembering what you need when you go to the hardware store, but it certainly helped avoid saber-tooth tigers back on the savannah.

So we can't rely on our brains to keep track of information that we can't act on immediately. We need a little bit of technology. A universal information capture device is in order - and the best version doesn't run on iOS or Android. A pocket notebook and a pen - I prefer a sheaf of index cards held together with a binder clip, and a Fisher Space Pen - is the most basic, reliable way to quickly record a piece of information.

In my experience, a one- or two-word note is enough to jog the memory. The words "truck tire" is enough to make the rest of the information flood back in - or at least enough context to remind me that the tire's going flat, and I need to fill it and decide if it needs to be replaced.

Combined with a system for regularly reviewing the capture information - checking the notecards daily for things that need to be done - simple notes keep your brain from losing the information entirely, ensuring that you notice and act on things when they show up, instead of when they blow up.

The No-Fault Setting

12/26/2013

The default setting is still a choice. We often don't do something different out of the fear of making a change, but doing the same thing you did last year is still a choice - it just doesn't require any intention.

The default option is the no-fault option. Nobody - not your banker, not your neighbors, not your partner, not yourself - will fault you for staying on the established path. We endure marginal profits, unsatisfying relationships, sub-optimal yields, dysfunctional organizational structures, and marginal results year after year not because empirical evidence says we should, but because it's safe.

The lack of a decision is still a decision, it's just not a conscious choice.

If you aren't getting the results you want, it's time to start looking at what could be different. Because the default setting doesn't seem to be getting you there.

Small Corrections

12/19/2013

When a ship maintains a heading, it's rarely on course - almost always, it's just slightly off, and the helmsman makes a small correction, then goes off course again and makes another small correction. But a good helmsman gets the ship to port through the course of these small adjustments.

The only time you need to make a big correction is when you're way off course. But a good helmsman doesn't let that happen.

That means you've got to pay attention, even when it's not much fun. You monitor if things are heading in the right direciton. Catching budgets, crops, and employees when they've gotten a little off course is a lot easier than trying to spin that wheel round and round to make a major correction. Even if the ocean is boring - I've been there, and sometimes there's nothing but horizon and flat water as far as you can see - you've got to keep your hand on the wheel, and you have to keep steering the ship.

No Coasting

12/5/2013

You know that guy at farmer's market who sits on the tailgate of his pickup truck, looking down at the ground with his arms crossed? How much effort are you going to put into going up to him and buying his vegetables?

Nobody's obligated to buy from you. Wal-Mart has organic and local produce now. Yes, you work hard. Yes, you take good care of the earth. Yes, you suffer through droughts and floods and plagues of locusts, but that just doesn't matter. Your competition isn't asking for a break, and that means your customers aren't going to give you one.

I try to patronize local businesses, but I'm often greeted with an attitude that makes me wonder why anybody would shop there - the appliance store that charges an extra trip charge because their repair guy didn't bring the right parts, the clothing store staffed by young women who can't be bothered to talk to me, the Mexican restaurant that can't be bothered to bring a margarita in under fifteen minutes. These people are coasting, and coasting doesn't work forever (even if you keep going downhill, you eventually run into the ocean).

The small farmer needs products that have real value. Local and organic don't make up for salad greens that go bad in just a few days, dirty carrots, or bruised tomatoes. If you aren't providing fresh, flavorful, beautiful vegetables that actually last in the customer's refrigerator, you're coasting. And when things get tough - when produce departments change hands, or wallets tighten in a downturn - the customer is going to pick a produce supplier who's pedaling. And if not that, they'll just pick somebody cheaper.

Working Harder

11/27/2013

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.

Row Spacing and Bed Widths

3/9/2013

In my experience and observations, most vegetable growers base their row spacing on two factors:

Center-to-center wheel spacing on their tractors; and
Whether they are using a raised bed or flat bed system.

At Rock Spring Farm, we have a 60 inches center-to-center wheel spacing on all of our tractors. The Allis Chalmers G can be set to this width. This also means that most of our equipment also fits on, or is modular to, this spacing: our rototiller is 60 inches (which is a little too narrow), our tine weeder is 60 inches, and our drill is ten feet.

We've used a number of different row spacings in our thirteen years. We started off with the Eliot Coleman-recommended 3 12-inch or 2 24-inch rows. An equipment purchase the next year led us to work on 4 10-inch rows, which left the outer rows 30 inches apart. With this setup, we experienced quite a bit of disease pressure, and mechanical cultivation with anything other than a basket weeder was very difficult.

In 2005, we changed over to a system of 3 15-inch rows, and we have stayed with that ever since. This spacing has definitely improved our disease control by improving air flow, and it has made mechanical weed control much easier. We use our Buddingh basket weeder to cultivate either all three rows, or with an added sweep (purchased from Buddingh) to clean the middle row when we have crops on two rows.

When we stopped using soil blocks in 2009, we purchased a 2-row mechanical transplanter to replace our water wheel planter for every-day use. The new transplanter only plants two rows, so on transplanted crops we tightened up our in-row spacing by about 30% to maximize our productivity. Anne and Eric Nordell have done some in-depth analyses about planting more densely in the row to account for the wide-row spacings they used on their farm. The wider row spacing allows us to back the crops more densely in the row because we have plenty of air circulation; and the plant roots still have plenty of soil to scavenge in. See the illustrations in this online book to see how wide vegetable root systems are: http://goo.gl/S3kMF.

If I had it all to do over again, I would use a 72-inch tire spacing, and set my rows at 18 inches. My 30-inch 2-row spacing right now is too narrow to effectively hill potatoes. Further, my experience leads me to feel that the more dirt I can move, the more potential I have for effective weed mechanical weed control, and since that's such a key factor for yield, speed of harvest, and labor expenditures, it feels like the most critical thing to build an organic vegetable farming system around. However, the wheels on many older cultivating tractors won't adjust that wide without special spacers, which are available but which come with an additional hassle-factor.

Quote from Will Oberton

1/9/2013

Sales without profit is just work. - Will Oberton

A farming client brought Fastenal's Will Oberton in for a short part of a leadership team meeting yesterday, and Will dropped this little gem. It's all too easy to forget in the rush to secure market share, sell out of carrots, and be the biggest player on the block.