If you've got weeds that have already made and ripened seeds still standing in your fields, consider letting them stand through the winter.

A 2006 Iowa State University study suggested that making weed seeds less accessible to predators resulted in increased weed densities the following year.  Tilling your weed seeds into the soil buries them, and keeps them away from scavenging field mice and birds over the winter. Leaving them standing makes them accessible to birds throughout the winter, and shattered seeds can fall on successive layers of snow throughout the winter.

Standing weeds also slow the wind down as it blows over your field. And the wind then drops some of the snow it’s carrying.

It may not feel as pretty or as clean as a freshly tilled field going into winter, but leaving your weeds standing should reduce your weeds the next year, and provide a better moisture boost for your soil.

October is a busy month. Anywhere but the south, it’s time to get the crops in, get the garlic planted, and get the fields ready for a winter’s nap and spring’s hustle.

Actually, every month’s a busy month for farming. And just about every other business out there.

When the pressure’s on, it’s easy to get focused on marking tasks off the list before the deadline bears down on you. Add in the additional pressure of keeping costs under control, and it’s even easier to try to get the work done with the bare minimum of resources – especially labor.

But it’s not enough to get the tasks marked off the list. If you want to maximize outcomes, you’ve got to take the time and expend the resources to get the tasks done right.

Pilots go over the pre-flight checklist even when they’re running late because the cost of a less-than-optimum outcome when you’re miles up in the air isn’t a pleasant thought to contemplate.

Even when the fall harvest is in full swing, take the time to get things right – especially where consequences are significant. When you undercut the carrots before harvest, use a spotter to pull out roots every fifteen feet  to check the depth of your undercutter. When you plant garlic, make certain the spacing and row markings are correct, and make your crew take the time to separate every clove. Take the time to through the tools and materials you need before you head out to cover crops ahead of a frost. Keep checking the oil in your tractor.

A focus on outcomes will create long-term results. Your carrots will have nice tips, and you won't discover missing ends that keep them out of the wholesale market or make them look sad at market. Good clove separation means more big bulbs. And checking the oil in your tractor every day - too busy or not - not only keeps it running, but gives you a moment to breathe, take notice, and think about your next move.

The price that a customer is willing to pay has everything to do with how much value they ascribe to your product.

It has nothing to do with your cost of production and marketing.

The cost of production and marketing determines how much you have to charge for your product in order to not lose money, or in order to make a certain margin or realize certain returns from your business.

But it has nothing to do with the price a customer is willing to pay.

Unless, that is, you decide to make the production and marketing part of the story that adds value to the product you are selling. The fact that it costs more isn’t interesting, and isn’t likely to add value to your product. The story of why is interesting, if you make it so.

My daughter just started algebra, and as I’ve looked over her shoulder at her homework, I’ve been reminded of the best math teacher I ever had. On our first day of Trigonometry at Seattle’s Roosevelt High School, Mr. Ames showed a video of Galloping Gertie, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge that collapsed in 1940.

“The engineer who designed that bridge,” he said, “got ‘partial credit.’ And I don’t give partial credit. Your answers are right, or they are wrong.”

In much of agriculture, you get partial credit. If you fail to take good care of your corn crop, you may suffer reduced yields, but rarely ever a complete crop failure. Even in livestock, you may have high mortality or reduced feed conversion, but rarely ever an absolute loss.

But in the world of vegetables, absolute losses are much more common. Buttoned broccoli, beetle-chewed arugula, and lettuce with rusty-butt are all unsaleable. Weedy salad greens can’t be harvested effectively, and nobody wants bolted cilantro or tomatoes covered in sooty mold growing on aphid juice.

You’ve got to get it right, and you’ve got to get it right every step of the way. Seeders and cultivators must be adjusted correctly, soil fertility and pest control need timely attention, and employees need to know precisely how to get a twist tie on a bunch of kale and get it into the cooler. It isn’t enough go through the motions.

If you’re going to settle for partial credit, don’t plan on success – in Mr. Ames’ trigonometry class, or on the farm.

(By the way, the Tacoma Narrows bridge bounced and rolled in the wind every day until it collapsed. And the wind was only 40 miles per hour the day Galloping Gertie collapsed – not an exceptional gale by any means. Accepting ongoing less-than-good results can be one way to set yourself up for failure.)

When customers complain, it can feel like a blow to the gut. You’ve put your heart and soul into growing and delivering your crops, and after that kind of effort, rejection really hurts.

But complaints result from one of two things: either you’ve got a problem with your product, or you’ve got a problem with your customers.

If customers complain about the quality of the product they get from you, you need to determine why they’ve gotten low quality produce from you. Did you pack rotten vegetables in their boxes? Do you lack the cooling capacity or procedures to get product cold fast, reducing respiration and increasing shelf life? Do you understand the commercial requirements for the product you are selling? Do you need to up your disease-control and insect-control game, or make changes to your soil management practices? Do you have what you need to maintain the cold chain – or at least a semblance of a cold chain – from the time your product leaves the farm to the time the customer takes control of it?

Or does the problem lie on their end? Did your farmers market customer leave their salad mix in a hot car for hours before it found its way to their refrigerator? Does your wholesale buyer adequately manage their stock rotation? At Rock Spring Farm, I offered a no-questions-asked refund or replacement the first time a customer complained about quality issues; but if customer-specific quality issues arose again, I turned into a detective to figure out the source of the problem.

If customers complain about prices, either you aren’t providing the value they expect, or you’ve got the wrong customers. Value – what a bundle of goods and services is worth to a customer – has little or no relationship to your particular cost of production; it’s a function of customer perception. You need customers who value local, organic, family-farmed vegetables (if that’s what you’re offering), and you need to provide them with a quantity and quality that matches what they expect. No small feat!

The price you need for your products is based on your cost of production and marketing. But the price you get for your product comes down to value.

And value is subjective. In my first year at Rock Spring Farm, I couldn’t get $1.00 per pound for our tomatoes at the Decorah, Iowa, farmers market – but I could sell exactly the same tomatoes for  $2.50 a pound in Rochester, Minnesota! The same tomato, sold in the same way, had much more value for my Rochester customers. Guess where I sold my tomatoes?

I also found that I could sell my salad mix at a higher price than my competitors in Rochester. Why? Because it looked better in the bag and lasted longer in the refrigerator than the other salad greens at the market. We consistently nailed the production on salad greens, and followed it up with great post-harvest handling. Same market, same crop, but with a significantly higher value.

If you aren’t getting the price you need for your products, you’ve got four choices:

1. Reduce your cost of production, marketing, and distribution, so that you can charge a lower price for your current value proposition;
2. Decrease your value proposition;
3. Increase your value proposition; or
4. Find new customers.

To make money farming, you absolutely must match your value proposition to your customers.

In marketing, it pays to match the range of products and services you offer to the breadth of the market you offer them to.

Think about a triangle, with the point at the top. The point represents a narrow range of products and services, while the base of the triangle represents a very broad market – that’s how a company like Grimmway (the giant carrot producer) sells carrots: they’ve got a very narrow product offering (carrots), and they market them to everybody possible.

If you broaden out the product and service offerings (the point of the triangle) while keeping the market (the base of the triangle) the same, you end up with a square – a broad range of products marketing to a very broad marketplace. An extreme example would be growing everything from radicchio to Burbank Russet baking potatoes, and selling the whole lot to everyone from urban foodies to Iowa corn growers.

When you market with a square, it’s just plain hard to stand out from the crowd. Because the definition of value and quality varies with different segments of the market, it’s almost impossible to provide a wide range of products that is perceived as high value to a broad marketplace – so you end up competing on the basis of price, instead.

And that’s not sustainable.

Now, invert that triangle so that you’ve got a very broad range of products and services, but you’re marketing to a very narrow market. Most farmers in the organic and local food movements are already doing this to some extent by marketing to customers with an elevated commitment to those values. But too many small growers continue to try to be everything to everybody who might be interested in the product categories they have to offer.

You need diversity, but too much diversity at both the top and the bottom of the triangle becomes too difficult to manage effectively. Think about how to narrow the bottom of that inverted triangle: instead of marketing CSA shares to an entire city, what about marketing to a select neighborhood, or to a select self-identified community? Instead of marketing through a CSA, wholesale, and farmers market, what about picking one segment, and doing it really well?

The transition from July to August isn’t easy. It’s hot, the battle with the weeds isn’t getting any easier, and you’ve still got to get the turnips planted.

But that’s your problem, not your customer’s.

When you’re greeting a customer at farmers market, or writing a newsletter for your CSA, or engaging with your employees, don’t forget to smile. It’s a good life, people, and we’re all lucky to be here. Smiling reminds you, and everyone around you, that that’s true.

Every so often – especially as pea-picking season winds up and the bean-picking season gets started - I’ll hear a farmer or a manager say, “I’ll just make that person so miserable they’ll quit. That way I don’t have to fire them.”

I think this approach stinks.

First, it’s mean. And it lets everybody else on your crew or staff know that they don’t know where they stand. If you consistently dump somebody on the garbage jobs without telling them what’s going on, you aren’t just making them miserable, you’re demonstrating your inability to communicate clearly about your expectations and to hold people accountable for meeting them.

Second, it’s cowardly. Yes, firing people is a difficult thing to do. Get over it. You’re the boss. It’s your job to do the hard things, especially the emotionally hard things. Anybody can muck out a pig pen, but it’s another matter entirely to have a frank discussion with an employee about the termination of their employment.

Don’t make people miserable. Cut them free so that both of you can get on with it. It’s uncomfortable, horrible, and one-hundred percent the right thing to do.

Risk is the sum of probability and seriousness, less the preventative and contingent actions taken to reduce it.

To get all math about it:

Risk = Probability + Seriousness - (Preventative Actions + Contingent Actions)

In the context of food safety for fresh produce, it's easy to forget this. So many resources spell out the things we can do to mitigate risk - from washing your hands and keeping food off the floor to using sanitized pallets and requiring workers to bathe daily - without providing any context about the probability of contamination.

Prevention in food safety comes down to keeping the poop off of the food. Preventative actions vary in their effectiveness. For my money, good hand washing - thorough scrubbing in running potable water with soap and drying with a single-use towel afterwards - provides the single biggest risk reduction. Everything else (except not dumping raw manure on your vegetables) pales in consideration.

Operating under the assumption that our produce is contaminated, we take contingent actions to keep the bacteria from spreading or growing. Washing in running water, sanitizing wash water, and cooling produce to slow enzymatic activity all reduce risk.

Of course, the seriousness of a food safety outbreak is high - E. coli 0157:H7 and Salmonella enterica can kill people. But the probability is relatively low - in the 2006 spinach - E. coli 0157:H7 outbreak, only three people died, and a couple hundred were sickened, despite over 250 billion servings of fresh bagged salad greens having been sold in the United States that year.

Effective food safety plans leverage preventative actions that are relatively straightforward and common sense to reduce the risk of a contamination incident, and back them up with contingent actions that reduce the risk of a single contamination incident spreading or multiplying.

When you are considering a food safety plan for your farm, focus on those preventative and contingent actions that yield a high return. A series of one-percent reductions in risk will add up, but you get far more bang for your buck by focusing first on those actions that yield big results.

When I started as a white belt in Taekwondo, I felt like a bumbling klutz - forming a proper fist and putting my hips into a punch didn't come naturally, much less trying to move my left leg in a sidekick. Four years later, I don't require the kind of careful instruction for every new move that I did for those first kicks, punches, and knifehand strikes. My body understands how the different moves all fit together, and what once felt like advanced fumbling has become second nature.

The motions of vegetable farming require a different set of motor skills than texting, driving, and typing, and many employees don't arrive on the vegetable farm with a ready ability to adapt. If you are able to harvest quickly yourself - and I hope you are! - pay special attention to exactly how to do it: put your thumb here, position your wrist this way, slice towards/away from you. Then share that information with your crew, explaining that this is exactly how to do the job at hand. As your people learn the fundamentals of bunching, cutting, and trimming, they will find their own unique styles and be more able to adapt to new crops.

Some hints for moving faster, whether you are just starting out or want to refine your skills:

• Drag containers rather than pushing them.
• If the last motion of harvesting leaves the crop in your left hand, you should be working from left to right, so that your left hand is trailing you.
• Keep the container near the hand that the product ends up in, and never cross your body with your hands.
• Keep supplies like twist ties and rubber bands right at hand, next to the hand that grabs them.
• Don't set down your tools; if you are putting a twist tie on a crop that you cut with a knife, learn to hold the knife while you put the tie on.
• Keep tools sharp; if you can feel the knife when you cut yourself, it isn't sharp enough (but don't bleed on the produce).
• Track progress from week to week throughout the season where employees can see it; that will provide an reinforcing feedback loop for your team.

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!)

People feel better when they do things right. Unfortunately, conveying expectations about just how to do a job can confound even experienced managers – especially if you have inexperienced workers with very little idea of what a successful outcome looks like.

Even for experienced workers, incomplete instructions on the part of a supervisor can result in poor performance, even if they have done exactly what they understood needed to be done.

When you give somebody a new task, make it a point to check back in fifteen minutes later. That’s enough time for somebody to get started, but not enough time to do too much damage in most situations. Make it clear that it isn’t a matter of trust – you want to be certain you’ve conveyed the instructions and parameters correctly.

Management is its own job, and you only get the results you want by managing.

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.

You can buy tools, or access land, or hire people, to increase your likelihood of success. But you can’t buy success.

Too often, we think that that one tool (one field, one person) will prove to be a game changer. But they almost never turn out that way.

The real game changers are:

• Farming skills – the real nuts-and-bolts knowledge gained through years of experience about how to get the work done.
• Acquired instincts – the year-over-year acquisition of that gut feeling that tells you when you need to plant instead of cultivate, harvest instead of transplant, or get back home to roll down the sides on the greenhouse.
• Real markets – where enough people are willing to spend enough money to buy a quality-differentiated food product.
• Business management systems – the development of systems on the farm that keep the important work of sales, employee management, and financial record-keeping and decision-making on track so that you can focus on farming.
• Knowing what success looks like – understanding what healthy crops, weed-free fields, and properly prepared produce actually look like. If you can’t visualize it, you can’t create it.
• Getting it right – you can spend all of the money you want, but if you (or your crew) overwater your transplants, drive the tractor crookedly down the row, don’t set the transplanter right, or don’t provide workers with the guidance they need to perform their jobs correctly, you may as well flush that same money down the toilet.

It’s easy to look at another farm and see their shiny tractors, fancy packing house, or automatic watering system and misidentify these as the source of their success. More often, success is the result of the unglamorous work of getting better at the game, rather than chasing after game changers.

I grew up in Seattle, so watching the Seahawks dominate the Super Bowl was a special treat. One of the best parts was watching coach Pete Carroll's postgame speech. Praise and praise and praise, all of it legitimate and all of it earned.

He praises the team members so much that they take it up themselves! Imagine what that means to everybody who worked so hard, to everybody that felt like they sometimes came up short, to everybody who doubted himself as he worked to accomplish something that stretched beyond his comfort zone.

I like to imagine a harvest crew having finished loading the truck for an early departure, and a farmer extolling their virtues: "We have done everything the way we wanted to get it done... I am so proud of what we've done... And how about that kale crew! Three people in two hours packed 240 bunches! And what about the CSA line! 200 boxes down the line in 87 minutes!"

It's too easy to let the small mistakes dominate, and we forget that at the end of the day - we got the truck loaded for market! We packed the CSA boxes! We hoed that broccoli!

"We're all we've got! We're all we need!" the players chant at the end. When we believe in ourselves, when we believe in our team, we play hard, we work hard, we have fun, and we succeed - together.

Employee performance is a function of outcomes compared to expectations.

If you want to get all math about it, Employee Performance = f (outcomes/expectations).

You can't evaluate employee performance without the ability to measure outcomes against defined expectations. If you haven't been clear about your expectations, you don't have any ability to evaluate outcomes - and more importantly, employees don't have a way to measure their own performance.

And ambiguity breeds poor performance.

When employees and teams fail to meet your expectations, the first question to ask yourself is, "Was I clear about my expectations?"