Here in the Upper Midwest, we still have time to check over our equipment one last time before we get into the field. Actually, if this weather keeps up, we’ll have time to check over it a few more times before we get into the field – which makes it all the more important that everything is in tip-top shape and ready to go. Late springs mean that everything has to happen that much faster, and with that much less margin for error.

I’m always surprised at how much equipment that’s bolted together tends to shift over the course of the season. I’m sure that there are some farmers who don’t have problems with this, but I've always struggled with it. Maybe our bumpy field entrances shake things loose, or maybe I’m just not very good at turning a wrench.

Lots of my equipment at Rock Spring Farm has the three point hitch A-frame bolted to the toolbar that holds the seeders, transplanting units, or other working elements. I was preparing a seeder for sale the other day and noticed that the A-frame for the three point hitch was more than three inches off center. I don't think this is the result of freezing and  thawing over the winter, so this spacing discrepancy means that everything we seeded with that seeder last year - or at least the last time we had it out - was three inches off of the center of the bed.

Of course, if you do any kind of mechanical cultivating, this is a huge problem. One pair of outside rows is six inches closer to each other than they should be, so you’re likely to be throwing dirt on the first row of the next bed with your track sweeps; and on the other side, the pair of outside rows is too far apart, and you’re likely to be missing a strip of weeds down the middle of the wheel track – and that translates into either hand weeding or weed seeds, neither of which we really want more of in our world.

I've seen the same thing happen to cultivating equipment. My Buddingh basket weeder especially has a tendency to drift.

When bolting equipment onto a diamond or a square tool bar, you’ll get the sturdiest mount if you ensure that the faces of the clamps are all equally flat on the toolbar. Tighten one bolt a little, then the next. Taking your time with the initial setup will save time and headaches over the course of the season.

Take the time now to check over the spacing on your equipment, and add it to the list of things you check each time you take it out to the field, at least visually if not with a tape measure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I often find that it's the little things that make or break my attitude. Big problems I can handle, but something like not having the address on a pre-printed check show up in a window envelope will truly drive me crazy.

Of course, sometimes it seems like the world was designed to make me crazy.

Printed checks - the kind you can run through your computer printer after inputting the data in QuickBooks - are just enough smaller than one-third of a sheet of letter-sized paper that the addresses don't reliably show. You need a different-sized envelope than the one you might use for invoices to make it show just right.

For invoices that we send out, we use a double window #9 envelope - these measure 3-7/8 x 8-7/8 inches.

For checks, we use a double window #8-5/8 envelope, measuring 3-5/8 x 8-7/8. And, yes, that 1/4 of an inch makes a real difference.

Because I live in the humid Midwest and don't have air conditioning, I vastly prefer peel-and-seal envelopes to the press-and-seal type; this allows me to buy in lots of 500, even though it might take two years for me to use them up. For some reason, their availability through Amazon and the big box office stores seems to limited, which frustrates me to no end. It occurs to me that maybe I should store my backstock in my onion- and seed cooler.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Jack Hedin called me last summer to ask if I would take a look at some transplant production issues Featherstone Farm was having in their greenhouses, I had no idea or expectation that, one year later, Featherstone Farm would occupy such a large part of my time and attention. It’s been a great year, with many exciting and engaging challenges.

In over twenty years of working on and with organic vegetable farms around the country, including thirteen years of farming on my farm, I’ve noticed that most farms and their farmers just plow ahead, making decision after decision on what action to take next to keep the irrigation pumps running, the harvest crews picking, and the tractors in motion without consideration for larger impacts or processes. The race against the weather and the perishable nature of vegetable crops combine with scarce time and monetary resources to create a situation where farmers never get a chance to stand back and evaluate their operations, much less the time to make systematic and systemic changes to build the foundation for future improvements.

It reminds me a bit of parenting.

We put a lot of effort last winter into a rewritten business plan and refinancing. But just as importantly, we worked hard to put processes in place for the financial management of the business on an ongoing basis. Featherstone  Farm now has not only a financial plan, it has a system in place for the periodic and timely monitoring of performance to that plan, as well as mechanisms for making corrections and replanning as necessary. Each month, the leadership team meets to review the farm’s income and expenditures relative to the plan – then, where things are not going right, we figure out how to correct them and assign responsibility for following through.

Weekly meetings of the leadership team provide an opportunity to check in and get everybody on the same page about progress made on addressing those financial issues, as well as other issues on the farm. The CSA team meets on a schedule to decide what’s going in the box and what’s going in the newsletter. And every Friday morning, the entire crew has a short stand-up meeting to make certain that everybody’s on the same page about the little and big things that keep the farm running smoothly, from rolling the windows up on the farm trucks and holiday work schedules to the process for reporting accidents and injuries and the importance of communication and teamwork to the farm’s success.

Farming is governed by rhythms and interruptions. We plant, cultivate, and harvest in cycles and patterns big and small, seeding onions in at the end of winter, harvesting lettuce in the cool of the morning. We weather floods and droughts, scramble to solve personnel crises, and shuffle the resources we need to get a critical piece of equipment repaired while the rest of the farm keeps running. And while weekly staff meetings and monthly financial reviews may be a part of many businesses, these larger patterns – independent of nature’s cycles, and recognizing the interface of agriculture with the larger culture of individuals, finance, and governance – occur all-too-rarely in the world of organic and local farming operations. To have the opportunity to join Featherstone Farm’s efforts to harness these processes to further the farm’s goals of making a difference in the world is truly an honor.

Here's the original guest post on Featherstone Farm's blog.

I’m tired of hearing about how local food is fresher than produce trucked in from California, Arizona, and Mexico. “Freshness” relates to the amount of biological activity that has occurred from the time of harvest to the time a vegetable is prepared in your kitchen. Local food can provide tremendous benefits to a community’s economic vitality, to the flavor and selection of produce, and to a more-secure, less-carbon-outputting food system; but freshness is not a fundamental quality of locally-grown produce.

When I started Rock Spring Farm, I went to a meeting of growers for local food producers in Decorah at which the produce manager of the local natural foods cooperative commented that the lettuce she purchased from local producers didn’t last very long, while the produce from California had a shelf-life of a week to ten days. I had experienced the same thing with local produce on a farm I managed in Maine, and it all comes down to temperature. In both of those times and places, local growers hadn’t invested in the equipment and systems necessary to maintain produce quality.

Within the range of temperatures where plants survive, the rate of chemical and biological processes approximately doubles for every ten-degree increase in temperature. That means that produce stored at 45 degrees will last half as long as produce stored at 35 degrees; and produce stored at 55 degrees will last only a quarter of the time. When we pick a vegetable, we separate it from the source of energy and sustenance that comes from having its extensive network of roots expanded throughout the soil – at this point the portion of the plant we’ve picked begins the process of dying, which in vegetables is characterized by a decline in “freshness” and quality.

Getting produce cooled to the proper storage temperature is the first essential step in ensuring freshness; keeping it at the proper temperature is the second. The large-scale production systems in the vegetable-producing regions of this country dedicate a tremendous amount of infrastructure and energy to getting produce cold and keeping it that way. It is not unusual for a harvest operation to include refrigeration units right in the field, climate-controlled packing facilities, and refrigerated transportation from harvest right to the point of sale.

Furthermore, it’s not just the air temperature of the storage environment that matters – it’s the interior temperature of the produce. Grocery store coolers and home refrigerators do not have the power they need to actually suck the heat out of warm produce – that needs to be done by the farmer. And dunking in cold water (ground water comes out of the tap at around 45 degrees on the Iowa-Minnesota state line) and storing at ambient temperatures just can’t do that.

At Rock Spring Farm, we’ve invested in the cooling facilities and harvest systems that get produce cooled quickly, and keep it cold until it’s sold. Whether it’s planning for harvest to allow time for equipment to cool the produce, our rapid harvest techniques and shading in the field prior to transport to our insulated packing facility, adequate potable water to provide a continuous supply of cold water for initial cooling, our commercial-grade walk-in cooler, or the cold chain our delivery partners maintain throughout the delivery process, we work hard to ensure that vegetables will stay alive – and stay fresh – for as long as possible.

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

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

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

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