Status Updates From The Lean Farm: How to Minim...

“If I have more greenhouse space or more cultivated land than I know what to do with, the. I am working for my farm rather than letting it work for me,” Paul explained to me. In recent years the Arnold’s have scaled back from 7 acres to fewer than 5 in cultivated production, “and we’ve seen our sales go up, not down.”

Farm-to-farm partnerships often add value for customers.

Many crops or animals are fun to care for yield low returns. Take the energy you were spending on low-return projects and put it into producing more of your best-selling items, it might sound obvious, but it is surprisingly hard to do.

Eliminated waste leaves a vacuum of time and resources to fill any way you please.

Cutting costs is an equally legitimate way to grow [profits] and comes with several benefits.

With vegetables it’s best to put together an accurate list of items you need to fill orders, then harvest precisely this list. This is more efficient than harvesting first and scrounging for markets second.

Farm meals can be a good way to turn extra produce into profit

Anytime you make a sale before you spend money on production, you create ideal conditions for controlling production.

Forecasting is hard work but absolutely worth the effort. The best way to forecast is to presale, as in a CSA model, which was a Japanese invention. CSA, which involves customers paying at the beginning of a growing season, eliminates almost all over production waste because the farmer knows exactly how much to produce.

The role of a business is to produce for others in exchange for cash. Business people are not reported for producing over abundance and holding onto extras. They are punished. Their net profits suffer. Reigning in means fighting our instincts.

In the first few years of a farm, you need to try out new crops or animal products to test your markets. But after that, profitable farming requires discipline to produce the right amount. This is surprisingly hard to do.

Examples of managements waste include choosing the wrong crops, producing too much or little of a product for sale, or bogging down your farm with experiments. These originate in the management office, behind the scenes, not in the field. But they are just as pernicious.

Were there ways to grow even more profitable in the next five or ten years without getting bigger? Brenneman told us about 3 such tools: produce only what you know will sell, cut costs to grow profit margins, and replace low-dollar-value items with high-dollar-value items.

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb mail.

— Henry David Thoreau

Costs do not exist to be calculated; costs exist to be reduced. — Taiichi Ohno

In many cases, others can more efficiently complete farm tasks than you can. My advice: let them.

In short, if your market and scale don’t call for mass-production equipment, then don’t use it. The principle sounds simple, but machines that are too large and expensive are a common source of waste on farms. Better process, not bigger machines, is what many farms need.

A lean principle we follow: add as much value as possible to the item in your hand before setting it down.

The challenge is to see your work from the point of view of the object you are producing rather than from the perspective of your equipment, buildings, workers, organization, or anything else. What does the OBJECT need to move forward in a continuous, smooth manner? Surprisingly often large batches and queues ass bumps and interruptions, while single piece flow keeps work moving ahead efficiently.

I include in the definition of overproduction waste the practice of selling items at lower prices to clear out excess inventory or oversupply.

Displaced energy is wasted work.

In farming, overproduction in the form of unsold crops or animals is among the most odious kinds of waste, because of poor planning (erroneous forecasting), a bumper harvest (unpredictable weather), or market volatility.

Ten types of waste on farms

1. Overproduction 2. Waiting 3. Transportation 4. Overprocessing 5. Inventory 6. Motion 7. Making defective products 8. Overburdening 9. Uneven production and sales 10. Unused talent

Many tasks that add value are really joint ventures in which the farmer creates an ideal condition for nature, through the power of the sun, to do the real work of adding value.