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?

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.

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.

For many of my friends in the northeastern United States, the spring of 2015 is starting off with a nasty dry spell.

Even in a non-drought year, water often goes lacking on vegetable farms because of a lack of infrastructure, poor practices, insufficient monitoring, and a simple failure to get out there and put the water on that your crops need.

In 2012, during the extreme drought that we experienced in the Midwest, I had the opportunity to work with and visit several farms, as well as to drag my own farm through the dust. It was a great year to learn about what to do, and what not to do, when it comes to managing irrigation on your crops.

Use a Pressure Gauge – Running an irrigation system without a pressure gauge is like driving a tractor without a tachometer. Nozzles and drip emitters are designed to work at specific pressures (drip emitters are generally designed to work best at 8 – 12 psi), and you can’t judge those pressures by eye or by feel.

You want to check pressure at the beginning of your distribution lines. For drip irrigation systems and other low-pressure systems, I like the pressure gauges that are mounted on a stake, with a barbed poly connector to tie into the header line.

Monitor Soil Moisture – Nobody has spoken to me more strongly about the potential for irrigation management to maximize yields than Jim Crawford of Pennsylvania’s New Morning Farm. Jim monitors soil moisture using a standard soil probe, and the “Look and Feel” method for analysis. A soil probe like the JMC Soil Sampler with Footstep from Gempler’s lets you take a core sample twelve inches deep without too much bending; you can buy cheaper ones, but this is a nice option for making water sampling easy.

Most guides to monitoring irrigation with the “Look and Feel” method for monitoring soil moisture just duplicate information. Louisiana State University has a guide, Irrigation Scheduling Made Easy, with a better-than-average presentation of the concept and practical applications.

Keep in mind that most vegetables have fairly shallow root systems, generally from 6 – 18 inches. If you aren’t keep that area of the soil profile supplied with adequate water, you’re hampering your crop’s ability to perform.

Size Your Supply Lines – Irrigation systems, no matter how small, have supply lines, header lines and distribution lines. The supply lines get water to the field, header lines get the water to the distribution lines, and the distribution lines put the water in the field. These supply lines should be bigger (or at least not smaller) than the header lines, and the header line should be bigger (or at least not smaller) than the distribution lines.

Too many farms that I visited had supply lines that were just too small, reducing pressure and restricting the flow of water, which reduces the efficiency of water distribution. Beginning farmers especially were relying on garden hoses, the most expensive and least effective option for supply lines.

Set up Overhead Irrigation Systems Correctly – For most irrigation systems, lay out sprinkler heads such that the arc of each sprinkler just about reaches the next riser, and so that the sprinklers are offset from each other in adjacent lines. This ensures full, even coverage.

Monitor Your System – You can’t just turn your system on and walk away. When you turn the irrigation system on, you need to check to make certain everything is operating correctly. Is the drip tape leaking? Are the sprinklers all rotating?

Water at Critical Growth Stages – If you have to triage your water supply, focus the water where it will provide the most benefit. Germinating succession crops is obviously critical if you want to keep a supply of vegetables in the pipeline. Pay special attention to water supplies during tuber initiation for potatoes; fruit set and sizing and tomatoes, zucchini, and other fruiting crops; and head sizing in crops like broccoli and cauliflower.

One farm I worked with during the drought had a massive crop of tomatoes that was essentially dry-farmed all summer long. Just as harvest was getting under way, they got the first drenching rain in months – and cracked every tomato on the vine, resulting in massive crop losses.

If You’re Not in a Drought – If you’re in the vegetable business for long, you will experience a drought sooner or later. In 2012, the farms – beginning and experienced – who had invested in adequate and practical watering systems had their most profitable year ever. Irrigation is one area of the farm where, when you need the capacity, you just can’t get by without it. And there is no reasonable work-around. I’ve watched vegetable farmers haul water in 1,500-gallon tanks during a drought, and it’s a money-losing proposition. Invest now. Not only will the investment pay off in a drought year, but an easy, efficient irrigation system pays off in increased yields every year that you use it wisely.

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.)