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Stack the Deck

12/24/2015

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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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Setting the Stage

11/19/2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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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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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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Order Propagates

12/18/2014

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Order begets order. And, sadly, order takes energy to maintain, because without energy, things tend towards chaos.

And chaos, wherever it exists - in the field, in the shop, in the office - can be overwhelming. You can't get on top of everything all at once, so you don't get on top of anything. And because the chaos surrounds any small bit of order you do carve out... well, chaos is always nipping at order's edges, and small bits of order have more edges than large bits of order, and things tend to fall apart.

Unfortunately, chaos doesn't just exist without energy. It sucks energy out of the everything that has to interact with it. Weedy fields take more energy to harvest, more water to irrigate, and more inputs to fertilize. Chaotic shops make it hard to find tools when you need them, to maintain equipment so that it doesn't break down, and to fix stuff quickly when it breaks. Disorganized papers and messy desks make it hard to access needed information and track important commitments (like bills).

And they all create resistance. Clean, orderly spaces and systems invite us in and invite others to participate; messy spaces do just the opposite.

My recipe for dealing with chaos? Carve out some order. Get one space, however small, that feels good - that invites you to participate - and ignore the rest for the moment. Weedy fields? Get one bed cleaned up, really well, and commit to keeping it clean. Chaotic shop? Clear off one workbench. Throw the tools and hardware spread across it into a bucket - it's no worse then having them spread across the workbench. Disorganized office? Clear out one file drawer (put it all in a box, if you have to), buy some file folders, and start using them. Get a little success. Let it feel good. And work your way out from there.

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Capturing Pain Points

8/7/2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Checklists

5/22/2014

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My first real farming job was at a farm on the outskirts of Santa Barbara. We would wake up early every Wednesday and load the pickup truck in the dark before heading south to a farmers market in Santa Monica. Just the thought of driving the overloaded little truck through L.A. rush hour traffic added a nice touch of stress to the morning.

My first week on the job, we arrived at market and began to set up a rather elaborate stand that included an overhead structure to hold long, gorgeous garlic braids (this was back when garlic braids were still new and kind of unusual). The structure had to be nailed together, and, unfortunately, we didn’t have a hammer.

The farmer sent me off to find one. One vendor finally directed me to an old Japanese farmer: “He’s always got his tools.” I got the hammer, we put up the stand, and the market was a success. And I came to two important conclusions:
  1. When I got my own farm, I intended to be the guy with the tools, if only to help the poor kid who got told to go find a hammer on insufficient coffee; and
  2. We had to do something to make certain we had what needed at farmers market.

I went home that night and put together a checklist to make certain we would never again get to farmers market without everything we needed to have a successful market. I’ve been a big fan of checklists ever since. We used them on our farm for deliveries, farmers markets, washing and packing workflow, opening and closing the packing house, and hooking up implements to the three-point hitch.

Here are a few tips adapted from The Checklist Manifesto for creating a great checklist:

  1. Make them precise.
  2. They should be efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations (hung-over, tired, or emotionally stressed).
  3. Do not try to spell out everything. (again, brevity is important).
  4. Provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps – the ones that even highly skilled professionals using them could miss.
  5. Above all, make sure they are practical.

(The Checklist Manifesto is a great read, and even a pretty engaging audio-book!)

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Supercharge Your Office

3/20/2014

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The office has always been an important part of my farm. Unfortunately, the farm’s office work often takes a back seat until the sun has set and the kids are fed. Too often, that back seat also means that we don’t take the time to make our office a more efficient, smooth-running part of our operation.

Here in northeast Iowa, we still have some snow on the ground. Before things get too crazy with spring planting, it’s a great time to look into some key time-saving performance upgrades.

Monthly Filing for Financials.  Stop filing your paper financial documents by vendor, account, or anything else. Start filing them by month, instead. After you’ve processed a receipt or a bill into your accounting program, just put it in a file labeled, “March, 2014.” If you find you need to refer to it later, you’ll be able to look up the transaction in QuickBooks, and cross-reference it to the correct month; finding the occasional receipt this way will take far less time than filing every receipt in its own alphabetical system.

Get a Headset.  Market farming is all about communication. If you have to kink your neck or use a hand to talk, you can’t take care of other things at the same time. You can’t type notes on the computer, you can’t enter orders or take messages quickly, you can’t water the plants while you’re waiting on hold.

In any case, you’re a farmer, and you don’t need a kinked neck leading to yet more chiropractor bills.

Learn Some Keyboard Shortcuts.  Every vegetable farmer knows that time spent moving your hands is time spent not working. When you have to move your hand from your keyboard to your mouse, that takes time; and then you have to move it back. Every program has keyboard shortcuts, and most of them are the same across every program on your operating system. Learn them. They take a little more time than mousing when you are first getting used to them, but a few sessions spent intentionally not using your mouse will pay huge dividends.

A few of my favorites:
  • Ctrl + x = cut
  • Ctrl + c = copy
  • Ctrl + v = paste
  • Ctrl + n = new
  • Ctrl + s = save
  • Ctrl + a = select all text
  • Ctrl + z = undo most recent action
  • Home takes you to the beginning of the current line of text
  • Ctrl + Home takes you to the beginning of the document
  • Shift + Home highlights the text between your cursor and the beginning of the current line of text
  • Ctrl + shift + home highlights the text between your cursor and the beginning of the document
  • End works the same way, except that it takes you to the end of the line of text
  • Alt + Tab toggles between open windows
  • Ctrl + Tab toggles between tabs in your browser, or multiple windows in a program

By the way, most forms, whether in a database, in a spreadsheet, or on a website, can be navigated easily using the tab key to advance between fields. Type your first name, hit tab, and it takes you right where you want to enter your last name. Tab again to get to the address field. Shift tab takes you back to the previous field.

Browser-based apps usually have their own shortcuts. I use Gmail to manage my email, and the keyboard shortcuts (see this link) allow me to manage my entire inbox from start to finish without ever touching my mouse.

Besides, if I don’t touch my mouse, I can’t click on the bookmark for Facebook.

Supercharge Your Keyboard Shortcuts.  I have used a fantastic little program called ActiveWords since 2007 to do all kinds of things with just a few keystrokes. For example, if I type frwx, that immediately expands to “Flying Rutabaga Works”. Rsfx expands to Rock Spring Farm. Typing cellx expands to my phone number. Datex expands to today’s date in my preferred date format. Fsig expands to my business email signature; listx expands to the signature I use for list serves.

I find it especially handy to use ActiveWords for hard-to-type words, such as post-harvest handling or E. coli 0157:H7.

You can use ActiveWords to substitute text, insert formatted text, open websites, open programs, open files, open folders, and open control panels from anywhere you can enter text. Most of what you do on your computer you do over and over and over again; why not automate that, rather than clicking through multiple windows?

Over the years, I have used ActiveWords to facilitate answering emails (csafull could expand to the standard statement you use to explain that your CSA is full), make data entry consistent, share data that I can’t remember (whslx expands to the url for Rock Spring Farm’s wholesale sheet, http://www.rsfarm.com/WholesaleSheet.pdf; tfrlink (short for The Flying Rutabaga link) expands to the link to sign up for this newsletter), and input a formula in a downloaded payroll report.

Manage Your Passwords. Do you have time to deal with hacked accounts in August? Neither do I. Get LastPass to manage unique, high-security passwords for all of your accounts. LastPass uses a master password to bring all of your other passwords under one roof; an extension in your browser and an app on your phone make it easy to access and recall usernames and passwords for individual websites. I won’t pretend to understand the technology behind it, but I’ve seen enough referrals from people who do to go with it.

The LastPass browser extension also provides form filling; unlike the form-fillers that already live in your Chrome or Firefox browser, you trigger the form to fill. You can even use LastPass to store credit card information so that you can fill payment information quickly and easily, without having to let web stores store your information.

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Why You Need a Universal Information Capture Device

1/23/2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Working Harder

11/27/2013

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There comes a point in the growth of any business where working harder doesn't get you significantly more results.

When you start out as a farmer (or any entrepeneur) on a few acres or with a few hundred chickens, you can rely on hard work to get you by. The tractor breaks? I'll use the rototiller. The beans are weedy? I'll just take longer to pick them. Behind on the bookkeeping? I'll stay up late and get it done.

Unfortunately, this works. It works so well that a lot of farmers work themselves right into a successful operation based primarily on their ability - and sometimes the ability of a loyal crew - to just work harder. For a farm where a significant portion of the labor comes from the farmer, increasing the number of hours you work, or ramping up the intensity, makes a big difference. You plant more acres, pack more boxes, sell more at farmers market, piecing together equipment, working late, and figuring it all out until suddenly it stops working.

On a few acres, labor-saving implements just save labor: if you miss a timely weeding because the hydraulics go out on your cultivating tractor, you can put a couple of enthusiastic workers out on hoes for a day or two and clean up a lot of weeds. On twenty acres, not so much. And at some point, depending on your location, coming up with more people on short notice simply becomes impossible.

And on a farm with ten full-time employees, adding another day to the farmer's workload just doesn't make much of a difference in the overall output of the farm.

I've heard beginning farmers say, "We're so small that efficiency doesn't matter." But that's completely backwards. When you're small is the time to figure out how to make the most of your time, to set up the patterns of work that make certain the tractor has been maintained so it isn't going to break, to document procedures and communicate expectations so that you can attend to urgencies and emergencies while knowing that the work is proceeding and proceeding well, to put systems and processes in place that are transparent and linear.

If you don't do it when you're small, you'll have to do it when you're big (and if you aren't going to get bigger, this still applies - working harder is a lot easier at 30 than it is at 40!). And it's a lot easier to do it up front.

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Rhythms and Interruptions

6/26/2012

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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.

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Purple Pitchfork is a project of Renewing the Countryside, a non-profit dedicated to rural revitalization and collaborative farmer education that serves as the home for these resources Chris Blanchard created.
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