How to Streamline Operations on the Flower Farm
The year was 2013, and I was managing a farm for the first time. This photo shows the first time I was headed on a little vacation. But really what it shows, to me at least, is that every single process on the farm depended on my input. On my troubleshooting. On my hands and head and oversight. To put it simply, I had built a farm system where I was the bottleneck for everything that had to take place. What a nightmare!
Things don’t have to be so complicated. In looking at this whiteboard, where I listed out the week for two team members at the farm so that I could take a much-needed vacation, I can see ten things I could have set up differently. Twenty things. Ok, thirty things!
As small business owners, or solo-preneurs, or entrepreneurs, or farmers - whatever you want to call yourself - we run lean ships. There usually aren’t enough hands to get the job done, so wrapping your head around how to take yourself out of the equation for a vacation, injury, or sickness, feels impossible.
But it’s an inevitability. So don’t do as I did and scramble, fret, and call in all the favors you’re owed around town. What I would recommend instead is to start to set your farm up for these scenarios from the get-go, well before you ‘need to’. If you take these steps and say to yourself 'this feels like overkill for my tiny farm…’, well, then you’re doing it right! The sooner you can implement systems, the more time you have to tweak them over time. There’s that Lean principle of continuous improvement, brought to us by Ben Hartman in The Lean Farm.
Steps For Freedom From The Farm
1) Create SOP’s (Standard Operating Procedures)
One of the hardest shifts in growing a small farm is creating standard operating procedures (SOPs), or putting systems in place that others can jump right into. If you’ve been running the farm mostly on your own, you likely have informal methods, make slight changes to them all the time, and are used to getting things done here and there as you can rather than on a clear schedule.
You eventually learn that these tasks don’t all require as much nuance as you might think. Creating systems and standards caters to the majority of plants rather than the few with specific needs and leads to better overall outcomes. More to the point, it’s the only way to grow the farm. Your crew will feel the most empowered, will perform the best, and will ultimately best serve the business if there are clear, standard protocols described with enough clear detail so that even the least experienced person can jump in and complete the task well.
Streamlining procedures on the farm removes waste from the overall operation (the central point of Lean operations). In this case, waste happens when you have to repeatedly explain things, when team members stop to wonder how something is done and then create systems of their own, and when team members wait around for you to answer straightforward questions. The process for cleaning a farm’s wash station and packing shed can be explained completely on a few laminated photos posted clearly at eye height, showing exactly how the space is to look when clean. All it takes is a quick glance to know exactly how to leave the buckets, tools, and supplies. There’s no questioning and no subjectivity to it—the result either looks like the photo or it doesn’t.
2) Write Out ALL Job Descriptions on the Farm
Your work as a farm manager will change dramatically as your team grows. Once you get past three or four employees, you’ll find that your job becomes getting the team ready to complete tasks. By staying three steps ahead of them and anticipating their needs and problems, the days will run smoothly. If you have a big team and you schedule a full day’s worth of your own tasks, you’ll find yourself being repeatedly pulled away from your list to help the crew. This is frustrating for everyone. Learning how to be a good crew manager, how to set the crew up for projects, and then how to jump in at crunch times as needed is its own art form.
Put pen to paper and write down every task that needs to get done in the daily and weekly course of your business. You’ll essentially be listing your job description but as it is rather than as you want it to be or as you had hoped it would be. If there’s anyone else already working in your business in some capacity, list their main tasks as well. Once it’s complete, you then comb through the list to see what items you can remove from your plate and put on someone else’s whether that’s because it’s a task you’re not good at, one you don’t enjoy, or one that you can hire and train someone else to do just as (or almost as) well as you. What’s left in your column should be the things that only you can do
3) Find an Organized Way To Manage and Display Tasks
In my second year with full-time help, I created a Google spreadsheet that both my team and I could access at any time. It was my responsibility to create and maintain it and my employees’ responsibility to keep it updated. Down the left side were individual tasks or projects as row headers, and along the top were column headings listing who the task was assigned to, tools and supplies needed, estimated time it would take, actual time it took, a column for my team to report any notes or problems, and a big ol’ box for them to check off when it was complete.
This worked out perfectly for my farm. I would fill it out at a minimum every Friday for the upcoming week and check in with it as needed. Since I didn’t live at the farm and my employees might be working on days I wasn’t there, it worked better for us than a clipboard or a chalkboard.
We used a similar system for harvest days. I took Mondays off, and at least one person from my team would be there to complete the wholesale harvest, which often wouldn’t be finalized until Sunday, when I heard back from the florists. Table 13.3 is an example of the harvest spreadsheet that worked well for us.
4) Find Your Bottlenecks and Work To Eliminate Them
On every farm, patterns start to emerge wherein tasks are delayed or employees stalled in their tracks because they’re waiting on something. This is usually due to a step in the process that you haven’t clearly defined for yourself or others or a step that you haven’t systematized and allotted sufficient time for. I have a few poignant examples on my farm.
I can think of times when an employee has gone to plant some shrubs I’ve ordered, checking in with me to ask about the spacing or irrigation. I stall and tell them that I still don’t know because I need to read up on the crop, which is new to me. I then tell them to leave it until another time and go back to the to-do list. It then takes me another week to remember that I was supposed to find time to look this up.
If something happens more than once, it’s a pattern, and you need to fix it. Often for our small owner-operated farms, we fail to recognize that we’re creating huge bottlenecks as we struggle to create and adjust to our new systems. To solve my problem of never having bed space ready for plants, I started to plug all my big transplant pushes into a monthly calendar. If I knew that lisianthus plugs were arriving April 1, then I added the task of prepping 3 beds on the weekly list for March 23.
I hope these strategies can help you standardize operations on the farm, and that you can get away for a vacation sometime (very) soon.