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Tips For Creating On Farm Systems
- Can you replicate what you know? Knowing that you can will give you a better understanding if your own systems.
- Have clear objective each day. That climates scrambling and time wasting.
- You don’t want to hire someone until you have systems. If it isn’t systematized how you are you going ot make sure that they do what you want them to do?
- “If your paying for someone else’s trial and error, then you’re wasting money.
- Teach employees the reason behind the thinking. Get them to to understand the thought process.
- Have standards in the way that things are done. You have to have everyone doing everything the same way. If not, and something goes wrong, then you can’t backtrack and figure out what happened. Was it user error or system error?
- There are no easy answers. You will make mistakes, accept that. Learn from them and evolve.
- “How can I be more like water and flow around this thing.” Sometimes the easiest path is best.
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chris Yoder
awesome episode. Hey Curtis, you should look into Nextdoor.com as a resource for people to find land. Its like Facebook for your neighborhood and gives access to people in a non intrusive, i.e. a post to the news feeds, way to connect with the neighborhood.
Diego
Thanks Chris.
Was there anything in particular that you found especially relevant from that one, i.e. – what made it awesome?
chris yoder
no one in farming ever talks about farming as a business. I grew up on a farm and I was so frustrated by the lack of clarity around numbers – my family simply farmed and hoped they’d make money. Hope doesn’t feed the family. I really liked your idea that there is enough information now that someone from Silicon Valley could learn how to farm and then apply certain principles to make it into a thriving business. It’s just interesting to me how so many farmers are so bad at the business aspect of the business (this isn’t meant to be critical – i’ve simply lived in the world for a long time and seen the disfunction).
Diego
Thanks for sharing Chris. You’re right on the idea that hope doesn’t feed the family. It’s a sad reality that has become pervasive in farming and wanna be farmers. Slowly trying to change that.
Shane McKee
Great stuff, Curtis (and Diego)! I’ve been recommending that anyone involved in startups & small business/entrepreneurship listen to The Urban Farmer podcasts as there is a lot of wisdom there. It would be great to see more people doing this across the world. I particularly agree with Chris’s point above – a lot of farmers don’t think about the numbers side of the game, and sadly that (here in Northern Ireland anyway) seems to make them easy prey for aggressive supermarket cartels forcing down commodity prices below the real cost of production, and making the industry reliant on subsidies and unsustainable production methods. There are plenty of exceptions, but the urban farming model strikes me as a brilliant way to get younger people involved in production, and to shift reliance away from pure commodity into quality. And there are analogies there in terms of other industries – manufacturing, data etc. Turns out that this permaculture thing has applications in all sorts of unexpected areas!