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.)

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.

We used to have a problem with counting. Every week, the harvest and packing logs would say that we had 180 bunches of Swiss chard, but we'd have 178. Either way, each week the CSA line would grind to a halt, and we would scurry around to harvest a couple of additional bunches, which wouldn't get properly washed and chilled before we packed them into the remaining CSA boxes.

Or we'd have 210, meaning that 30 got composted because they didn't have a home.

I tried emphasizing that getting the count right mattered. I talked about quality. I talked about 30 composted bunches represented wasted money and wasted resources. I explained how it held up the CSA line. I pleaded. And nothing worked.

Finally, I added a new column to the harvest and packing logs where the person responsible for the count and the quality wrote his or her initials. I was certain that this would provide me with the tools I needed to find the responsible people and take corrective - or even disciplinary! - action. I had every expectation that I would soon have the opportunity to open a big ol' can of whoop-ass and solve this problem.

But that didn't happen. Instead, suddenly, every count was right. It didn't just improve, it changed completely. We went from regularly mis-counting items to nailing the count time after time.

As a result, I implemented this accountability all over the farm, anywhere we were keeping records or requiring tasks to be done. Pallet stacking sheets, closing checklists, tractor work directives, and bathroom cleaning logs all came with a place for the responsible worker to make his or her mark.

A recent article in the New York Times shared the results of a study that monitored restaurant employee behavior for signs of theft. The surveillance did cut down on theft, but it also had the surprising side effect of encouraging employees to do the right thing: savings from theft were modest, but after installing the monitoring software, the revenue per restaurant increased by an average of 7 percent. Workers pulled back on unethical practices, but they also put more efforts into things like prompting customers to have dessert or a second beer. No whoop-ass necessary.

Monitoring employee performance, whether actively by tracking productivity or passively by requiring accountability, changes behavior. The same people making mistakes, moving slowly, or simply not making the effort to do their job well can be set up to succeed. And that's a win for everyone.

A few people actually enjoy bookkeeping. For most of us, it’s a tedious job that we have to do, and all too easy to put on the back burner since it doesn’t produce the same visible, visceral results that building a fence or harvesting carrots does. Since it’s such an easy job to put off, it doesn’t take long to create a seemingly insurmountable pile of stuff with something scary likely lurking somewhere in the middle of it – and you don’t want to find yourself behind on paying bills when the weather’s finally right for killing weeds.

Fortunately, modern bookkeeping tools and a good system for using them can make a big difference when it comes to cranking the bookkeeping widget. December is a great time to set up a new bookkeeping system, or revamp your old one, since the fiscal year starts on January 1, and you want to input your data in a consistent way throughout the year.

A successful bookkeeping system has three important outcomes: facilitate cash flow budgeting, monitoring, and decision-making throughout the year; make it easy to analyze profitability; and provide documentation and data for taxes. Contrary to the way many bookkeeping systems are set up, the last of these is the least important. – completing a schedule F is a once-a-year event, and the data can be easily extracted from a good bookkeeping system that is organized around the priorities of providing you with the information you need.

A successful bookkeeping system also has to be easy to use. Most farmers I know do their own bookkeeping, and even if you don’t, good bookkeepers don’t come cheap. That means you need systems that facilitate fast data entry and filing with a minimum of thought, especially if you are prone to doing bookkeeping after the field work is all done, or with a beer in hand.

I use QuickBooks for my bookkeeping, and will refer to it throughout this article. I’ve looked at other bookkeeping software, and I know that everybody has their preferences, but I keep coming back to QuickBooks because it’s the industry standard. You can use the same organization and workflow described in my Growing for Market article with any bookkeeping system.

The rest of this article is available from Growing for Market, as part of the November/December issue.

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.