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Hiring Potential Winners

3/3/2016

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Ken Blanchard (no relation) says that there are three basic approaches that you can take when hiring employees:
  1. Hire a winner.
  2. Hire a potential winner.
  3. Prayer.
Hiring winners is unlikely – even the pros don’t succeed consistently. And there just aren’t that many winners out there.

Prayer is probably not the best strategy when it comes to hiring, and I don’t advocate it as a strategy.


​But potential winners are out there. They usually cost less to hire than established winners, and they’re easier to find. And you can train them to win on your farm, in your systems, instead of on somebody else’s.

Three Characteristics of Potential Winners

Potential winners possess three basic characteristics: good character, potential, and fit.

You can train somebody to do a job, but you’re unlikely to change their fundamental character. When I hired employees at Rock Spring Farm, I looked for applicants who were honest and eager, and who cared about their work. Were they polite and forthright in their communications? Did they dissemble when asked uncomfortable questions? Did their resume line up with their references? At their interview, did they show up on time and wear clean clothes? Were their communications free of spelling and significant grammatical errors? Were they responsive to communications and did they follow up in a timely fashion?

You want people who have demonstrated potential, so we looked for applicants with experience that showed they had hustle and determination. For our harvest crew, we didn’t seek people with experience picking vegetables – in fact, unless an applicant had years of experience, we generally considered working on other vegetable farms to be a liability rather than an asset, as workers with some training generally had to unlearn one way of doing things so that they could learn to do it our way.

Some things we found, year after year, that pointed to potential: experience in food service, whether it was cooking or serving; running cross country; getting excellent grades; participation in non-sports extra-curricular activities; musical excellence; completing a term of service in the Peace Corps; and outdoor leadership training.
​

For workers at a higher level we looked for the basic skills necessary for those jobs. For crew leaders, we wanted to know if the applicant had experience telling people what to do? For a machinery operator, we wanted to know if they had they driven a tractor on a vegetable farm? We didn’t need for them to have lead crews on a vegetable farm, or driven our tractors and our implements – we could train them to do that. But without the basic skills, potential would have been lacking in these more advanced positions.
​

The best applicant won’t succeed unless they fit in with the rest of the crew, and with the boss. If I didn’t like somebody, I didn’t hire them. If I didn’t think my crew would like them, I didn’t hire them. I know the personality traits that I can handle spending time with, and I never felt like it was my job to fight an uphill battle with myself to make the position work for somebody.

Winnowing

To find potential winners at Rock Spring Farm, we winnowed in four steps:
  1. A self-winnowing process, where we provided information about the farm, our mission, and our values;
  2. A simple test to determine some basic character and potential;
  3. A written application;
  4. An in-person evaluation and calling references.
To encourage potential applicants to self-winnow, we provided ample information on our website about the job and our expectations regarding it. I didn’t take the try-to-scare-them-away route; instead I played on the upsides of working at Rock Spring Farm:

GET DIRTY, HAVE FUN, EAT WELL!

Are you looking for an exciting workplace, an opportunity to stimulate your mind and exercise your body? Rock Spring Farm is at the forefront of the organic market garden renaissance in Northeast Iowa and Southeast Minnesota. Our diversified organic vegetable and herb farm offers the chance for motivated individuals to enjoy the outdoors and be a part of developing a sustainable agriculture in the Upper Midwest.

We hire our largest work crews from June through August, but we are always interested in talking to qualified individuals for our year-round vegetable and herb growing and packing operations.

When it comes to farm work, we live by the motto, Eat Well, Get Dirty, Have Fun. Rock Spring Farm enjoys a diverse workforce with plenty of respect and a positive attitude. We believe that good work, done mindfully and well, has the ability to transform ourselves and our world.

Local organic farms change the food system by becoming robust businesses and consistently providing large amounts of high quality organic food to their customers, with whom they build strong, professional relationships. We are looking for employees who embody this attitude.


We outlined the characteristics of the people we wanted to work with: hardworking, communicative, reliable and responsible; punctual, and arrive for work ready to work; have reliable transportation; receptive to feedback and adjustments for work processes; and so on.  By outlining our principals, and the traits we looked for in successful employees, a certain percentage of potential employees simply walked away.

Finally, we encouraged people to look around the website and get familiar with the farm, then click on a link to find the instructions for applying.

Clicking on that link and following the instructions was a test of basic character and potential. Could an applicant follow instructions? Did they want to? I was always surprised at the number of people who couldn’t follow these simple instructions:

HOW TO APPLY

To apply for a position at Rock Spring Farm, send an email to [email protected] with the following information:
  • Your contact information.
  • A letter of interest.
  • Your resume and/or qualifications for the position you are applying for.
  • The names, relationship, and contact information for three references.
  • The dates you are available to start and an end date, if any.

We only accept applications via email; mailed or walk-in applications not accepted.

See how I did that? If an applicant can follow directions, I’ll know in short order.  And if they can’t, I’ll know that, too.

Because handling employee applications appropriately says a lot about a farm, I wanted to portray that we, too, had good character, so I replied promptly with a boilerplate email that let people know that I had received their application, and what the process would be going forward.

With an application in hand, we now had the tools we needed to evaluate the applicants. Applications and attachments were printed and stapled together. At this point, we made quick judgment as to how well the applicant demonstrated their character, potential, and fit, and wrote a rating of 1 – 5 on the front page of the packet. I used a spreadsheet to track information about applicants, including start and end dates, ratings, and communications.

When we had received enough applications that we felt good about, top applicants were called with an invitation for an in-person interview. Interviews were conducted with an outline in hand, and started with a discussion of our farm, including our marketing strategy, production highlights, and standards for work. Questions referred back to these, with an effort to flesh out their potential and their character traits. This was also the point at which I could fundamentally determine if I liked somebody. Overall, I felt that engagement in the interview process, combined with a demonstrated interest in the farm, were far more important than the answers to any specific question.

I conducted interviews in the farm office in private, then sent applicants out to where work was taking place to spend a few minutes talking with other employees or my farm manager. It was important that the applicant’s potential teammates have the chance to make their own impressions, and relay them back to me; they often picked up on things that I missed in the more formal interview.

Ratings were made again on a scale of 1 – 5 on the applicant tracking spreadsheet.

At this point I would contact references for those applicants I was still interested in. In general, I didn’t feel like I got great information from references; most managers and supervisors were reluctant to provide detailed information. I found that it was most beneficial to focus on facts (dates of employment) and tone, more than anything else. Most potential winners had somebody who was strongly in their corner; my mis-hires almost never did.

Successful applicants were notified by phone, with a follow-up email to confirm details, and their acceptance or rejection of the position noted.

At the conclusion of the hiring process, we notified unsuccessful applicants by email: Thank you for applying for a position with Rock Spring Farm for the 20xx season. We had a number of qualified applicants this year, and have filled all of the seasonal positions that we have available at this time.

By using defining success and implementing a system to achieve it, we were able to substantially improve our hiring practices while not getting bogged down in the details and guesswork of trying to separate the potential winners from the applicants that were unlikely to succeed.

1 Comment

Winnowing Employees

2/25/2016

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For every twenty applicants to Harvard, one in five meets the basic qualifications to attend – the grades, the test scores, the determination, the extra-curricular folderol that indicate a reasonable likelihood of success.

But past that initial winnowing, the admissions staff does not have consistent success in picking the winners and losers. Admitted students drop out or fail, and students who are turned away go on to achieve success in equivalent venues – and in life.

The same thing happens with recruiters for professional sports. Nobody who gets into the NFL or the NBA lacks the skills to play the game at a high level, but once that basic requirement is met, recruiters have an inconsistent record when it comes to selecting the players who will take a team to the championships.

Think about that for a moment. For admissions staff and professional sports recruiters, selecting winners and losers is a full-time job, one that’s backed up by a lot more data than we usually have on potential members of our farm crews. And they still can’t consistently pick the winners and the losers.

My conclusion: When you’re hiring employees, it doesn’t pay to spend the time and the effort looking for winners. Expecting to outperform Harvard admissions staff and NFL is folly.

What if, instead, you focused on that initial winnowing to ensure that applicants meet the basic requirements to succeed as part of your farm team? Then, put the effort you would have put into additional winnowing into training and developing the staff you hire to provide them with the skills, information, and perspective they really need to succeed in your unique circumstances.

(HT Seth Godin)

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Urgent or Important?

2/11/2016

1 Comment

 
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.

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Don’t Be a Wreck

2/4/2016

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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.

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Mid-Level Management

1/28/2016

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Part of maturing as a farm and as a business often includes the recognition that you could use some help getting results from the people on your farm. Welcome to the wonderful world of mid-level management.

Regardless of whether you call them a Field Manager, Crew Coordinator, or Team Leader, when you put somebody between you and some or all of your employees, you have thrust that person into a management role. You’ve made them responsible for the results of the work that other people are doing. That means that you must be prepared to precisely define your expectations, and provide people with the resources they need to perform in their new role – including how to do the work of coaxing performance out of people who used to be their peers.

When a worker becomes a manager, they’ve lost their peer group, at least at work. Supervisors must be willing to monitor and correct the people who work under them – including friends, relatives, and their former peers. Before elevating somebody into a position of crew leadership, be certain that they understand this, and that they are willing to do it. If they aren’t, they shouldn’t take the job.

Managers need to be prepared to embrace ambiguity. When you have responsibility for creating outcomes, you have to balance the conflicting demands of quality, speed and schedule – as well as the morale and happiness of your crew. You no longer get the luxury of simple positions like, “Quality is more important that speed.”

And managers lose their relationship with their peer group. Even if, outside of work, they are still friends with those they work with, under the work umbrella they have to be separate to do their job well. No longer can they engage in grousing about the boss’s unreasonable demands or stupid decisions, because now they are on the boss’s side of the gulf between labor and management.

Managers – especially those who have been promoted because of their technical proficiency – are also in the unenviable position of it suddenly being their job to facilitate getting things done, rather than just doing those things better and faster themselves. Even if they can cut salad faster or make prettier bunches, crew leaders have to put themselves in the position of monitoring the work that others are doing, correcting and adjusting for deficiencies, and anticipating and planning for needed logistics, supplies, and transitions.

Too often, the only reward mechanism we offer to outstanding performance is to give them a management role – but a job title doesn’t make somebody a leader or a manager. Effectiveness in those roles results from a set of behaviors and attitudes that have very little to do with the ability to bunch cilantro quickly and well.

(On a related note, I think we need to do more to reward excellence at technical tasks without moving somebody into a position of responsibility for the performance of other workers.)

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It’s a Trap

1/21/2016

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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.]
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Three Investments to Save Labor

1/7/2016

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

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

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Stack the Deck

12/24/2015

1 Comment

 
I think it’s fair to say that most of the success factors in market farming can be described in a bell curve. As the bell curve implies, most of us have okay access to markets, and we farm ground that’s okay for market farming. We have okay business acumen, okay marketing skills, okay land-access arrangements. Our available labor is largely okay, we have okay innate organizational skills, and okay willpower to get out there and get the right work done on the right day.

Most of our models in farming, however, have something more than okay: they’ve got several factors located far out to the right on the bell curve. They’re located close to concentrations of wealth and enthusiasm for social righteousness and good food. They got into the market at just the right time. They inherited land or bought it on the cheap. They acquired business acumen in another line of work. They discovered what they wanted to do early in life and had a few dominoes tip in just the right way. They’ve inherited or developed the traits that help them stay organized, intuit what needs to be done, and relate well to people.

That’s not to say that our models don’t work hard, develop new skills, enhance value, innovate, and do a thousand other things right day in and day out. If you’re going to succeed in this business – any business! – you’ve got to do a lot more than get lucky. And “getting lucky” is almost always a function of hard work and smarts in addition to having life’s dice roll your way. “Making it” in market farming, especially over the long haul, is never handed to you on a silver platter. (If it is, I haven’t seen an example.)

But it does mean that many of our models in farming can get away with things that those of us without a stack of lucky breaks at our backs can’t. They can get away without a monthly cash-flow budget, or filling out financial statements, or getting a line of credit at the bank. They don’t need to understand financing because they don’t have to incur debt in order to reach their goals. They don’t require a system for employee management because it just comes naturally to them.

The rest of us need to stack the deck – and the best way to stack the deck is to increase the intentionality that we bring to the management of the farm. And that means increasing our use of the plan-monitor-control cycle.

And if there’s one area that drives everything else when it comes to management, it’s money. Because money is the bottom-line expression of value and ability to continue farming in our world. That’s not to say that money has to guide everything you do, but money provides the foundation that allows every other expression of our values to be present in the world. It allows us to farm another year.

And this time of year – right now, as a matter of fact! – is the best time to put together the three key tools you need to monitor your farm’s financial performance: a balance sheet, an accrual-adjusted income statement, and a statement of cash flows. As we move towards the start of the new year, it’s the perfect time to take inventories of our supplies, and set aside an hour on New Year’s Eve to check balances on our bank accounts, accounts receivable and payable, loans, and credit cards.

These three tools, conventional as they are, can provide insights into your farming operation, especially when compiled year after year, when plugged into various farm financial ratios, as described in resources such as this Farm Financial Scorecard. Tracking these year after year can provide not only important measurements of your farm’s performance, they can also help diagnose problems and provide an early warning of negative trends in your business.

(Please see the October and November issues of Growing for Market – available here if you don’t subscribe already – for my articles on assembling financial statements, as well as the book, Fearless Farm Finances, which I coauthored.)

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Good Luck, Bad Luck

12/17/2015

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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.

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Decided a Long Time Ago

10/22/2015

2 Comments

 
Between coaching clients and discussion groups, I’ve heard a lot of people ask lately, “Any suggestions on how to keep crew members motivated through the end of the season?”

Sorry. That was probably decided a long time ago.

Like most relationships, your relationship with your employees as it stands now is most likely the result of how they feel about the totality of your interactions, not just what you decide to do tomorrow.

Have you ever noticed how with a significant other, it’s almost impossible to make things better in a hurry? Ever tried giving somebody flowers when they were unhappy with you? On the other hand, when things were already a little unsteady, have you ever had things go south in a big way over something that seemed small?

That’s October on the market farm. If your crew is fundamentally motivated – if they feel good about the place they work, the people they work for, and the way the work is going – things are probably going to be okay. If things start to sag with the short days, you can kick it up with the equivalent of a bouquet of flowers: a small bonus, pizza ordered in for lunch, lattes brought to the field.

On the other hand, a crew that has arrived in October feeling less than positive about things is not going to be swayed by anything you can do at this time of year.

That being said, everybody, regardless of attitude or motivation, performs better as the days get shorter and colder with attention to a few things:
  • Make sure people have what they need to stay warm and dry.
  • Make allowance for the fact that the shorter days cause a natural tendency to slow down, especially for workers who aren’t used to working with the rhythm of the season. Let people off work before it gets too dark to see, and start them when the sun is up.
  • Warm drinks can go a long way towards keeping people going.
  • Cut people a little slack. For seasonal crews especially, October and November can induce symptoms similar to the “senioritis” we all went through in high school.

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Stress Degradation

10/15/2015

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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:

  1. The cost of reducing stress is almost always less than the cost of the consequences of stress.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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

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Forget about the Vegetables

10/8/2015

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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?

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Five Great Investments for Your Farm

10/1/2015

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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?

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Farming Ahead

9/24/2015

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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?

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The Right Time to Learn

9/10/2015

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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?

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Transition Times

9/3/2015

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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.

2 Comments

Another Perspective on Management

8/13/2015

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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?

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A Mnemonic for Keeping a Task Moving

7/23/2015

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When you’re working with a crew, slowing down or stopping work is bad. It disrupts a crew’s mojo, threatens timelines, and costs money (if you have a crew of six stopped for ten minutes, that’s an hour’s worth of wages).

The best farm crews I’ve worked with don’t let the work stop, but too many crews and too many crew leaders are willing to let a job come to a stop when something disrupts the work - most often, the lack of supplies like totes or twist ties, or the the need to move product out of the field.

Of course, it’s better to keep ahead of crew and product needs, but when a bump in the road looms ahead or suddenly appears, it’s worth asking three key questions:

What resources do I have to keep this job going? If I’m out of the right harvest containers, are there other containers I can use? If I’m out of twist ties, can we pick product into containers and bunch later?

Can I get more resources to keep this job going? Especially in a larger operation, can you call on somebody else to get you resources so that your crew can keep on working - this is almost always going to be faster than fetching the resources yourself.

How can I make productive use of this time? If a break in the job at hand is unavoidable, find a way to make the highest use of the available time. Can you prep for the remaining work to do - for example, can you strip bad leaves from the chard plants you are going to harvest when the containers get back to the field? Estimate the time involved in the break - should the crew move to the shade to rest, or should they wait by the tractor?  Find another way to be productive - is there some hand-weeding or plant maintenance nearby to tackle?

Having these questions at hand, or training crew leaders to answer them, can help keep things moving, even when things are hot and frustrating (or wet and miserable).

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A Practical Template for Crew Leadership

7/16/2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Lottsa I Gotta

7/9/2015

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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.

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Is It Part of the Job?

7/2/2015

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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.

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It’s All Management

6/25/2015

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management
man·age·ment
/ˈmanijmənt /

1. The organization and coordination of resources and activities to achieve defined objectives.

Farm management.

Financial management.

Employee management.

Business management.

Holistic management.

Image management.

Social media management.

Relationship management.

Soil management.

They're all the same thing - management. And they all take dedicated time, energy, and attention to do well.

Management requires upfront planning – whether it’s annual crop planning, daily activity planning, five-year business planning, or even pausing to plan your very next action before diving into a task – and the positioning of resources – which may include money, people, knowledge, creativity, time, land, inputs, or just about anything else.

It takes monitoring and constant adjustment as the project or task moves forward.

It thrives on an ongoing awareness of all of the tools and resources you have available, and all of the activities that are happening as the thing unfolds.

And it requires knowing your objective, whether that’s ending world hunger or bunching today’s kale harvest.

When you work without a defined objective, or when you don’t monitor and constantly adjust, you’re stuck with the second definition:

2. The process of dealing with or controlling things or people.

And that’s just a whole lot less effective.

Not to mention, it’s not nearly as much fun.

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The Month of Getting Things Done

6/4/2015

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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.

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First Responses

5/21/2015

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I once had a trained wilderness first responder tell me that when they had trained in disaster response, his instructor had told them on first arriving at the scene of a disaster, responders should first stop and smoke a cigarette.

During the five minutes that it takes to light up and smoke down, the responder has time to assess, observe, and plan for how to create the best outcome in a stressful and chaotic situation. Otherwise, a wilderness first responder might find themselves trying to save somebody who can’t be saved while somebody who could have been saved worsens to a point where they can’t; or doing CPR instead of calling in a helicopter; or failing to remove injured people and themselves from an ongoing threat.

We deal with small “disasters” on the farm all the time, whether it’s a crew standing around talking when they should be working, a crate of dirty carrots that got stacked with the clean ones going to market, or a door that got ripped off the field van when somebody backed up with it open. I don’t recommend smoking a cigarette every time you discover something isn’t the way it should be, but I do recommend taking the time to figure out what’s going on, assess the situation for what it is and the outcome you want to create, and figure out how you’re going to get it.

Before you jump in to try to fix a problem, it’s important to create the space between stimulus and response so that you don’t create additional unexpected problems, and so that you can respond with actions that move you further towards your larger goals, rather than just relieving the pressure.

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Delegate by Focusing on Outcomes

5/14/2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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