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LEAN Farming System
138 Plays2 years ago
Improving efficiency can improve profits and enjoyment of work by reducing wasted effort. In this episode, the team talks about LEAN strategies and tactics as discussed by Ben Hartman in The Lean Farm (2015) and Jeffery Liker in The Toyota Way Fieldbook (2005) Whether you want to grow more food, save money, or just have fun, this episode will inspire you to try something new and improve your growing skills. Tune in and join the conversation!
Questions/Comments/Feedback/Suggestions for Topics: hortculturepodcast@l.uky.edu
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Transcript
Introduction to podcast and horticulture focus
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to hort culture, where a group of extension professionals and plant people talk about the business, production, and joy of planting seeds and helping them grow. Join us as we explore the culture of horticulture.
Happiness levels and free treats
00:00:16
Speaker
Hey friends, welcome. On a scale to one, two, you just got a free chocolate bar. How happy are you today? Need to know. Josh, go. Four. I didn't get a chocolate bar. So four. Wow. Okay. Brett.
00:00:31
Speaker
I would say like a two maybe. Oh, ouch. Okay. Right. Uh, asparagus. I feel like we're getting stumped it on by Alexis and her chocolate bar right now. I think she's blessing on the fact that she got a free chocolate bar. I got a free chocolate bar. I also have a new rainbow colored slinky that I've been playing with when I have a lot going on in my brain. So, uh, just doubling down on the happy here in my office today. So I hope you all listen. Have you ever walked down any stairs or anything?
00:00:59
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I mean, it's, it's, I don't have stairs. It's an extension office. We don't believe in stairs here. So down some piles of publications or a Kentucky proud recipe cards. We have all those hanging in like a shoe organizer on the walls of our conference room. It's like the whole wall is just a bunch of shoe organizers with an extension. We don't have stairs. We have to have innovation.
00:01:24
Speaker
That's all I'm saying. We learned a lot from COVID. It was how to pivot and how to innovate. Yeah, pivot.
00:01:32
Speaker
Well, anyways, I'm so sorry that you all are at asparagus level while I'm over here eating my- But I kind of like asparagus. Yeah, I was going to say, maybe he likes asparagus. Yeah, so you just made a value judgment on me. I don't know nothing about
Can asparagus predict the future?
00:01:46
Speaker
that. Asparagus is fine. Honestly, I just saw, apparently some people read asparagus, like they read tea leaves, so I just popped up on it.
00:01:55
Speaker
Don't ask me how it's done, but I saw that. Did that just pop up in like a visualized dream you had or what are we talking about? I mean, it popped up on Facebook, so pretty much, yeah.
00:02:07
Speaker
The slinky, this linky, she's been using the slinky like a magic eight ball. Let me tell you. Outlook likely. Most likely. They're asparagus spears. I'm kind of wondering if they use them like the water. Um, what are those things called? We've talked about. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm kind of wondering if that's how they use asparagus spears. Just doesn't have the same, um, it doesn't have the same swagger asparagus rods. No, it just asparagus spears. That sounds a little bit better.
Lean farming: Efficiency and value
00:02:37
Speaker
It's not very descriptive of devining rots that's why asparagus comes out early it's a first to market kind of thing so you don't compare it to everything else available no it has to have that competitive advantage you use the crossed asparagus to find your market. Josh is ready for the top look at him he's already leaning into lean.
00:03:01
Speaker
I was hoping the segue to lean would be you all commenting on how I have an obvious six pack.
00:03:11
Speaker
I mean, underneath your, so Josh's camera is about reference and he's wearing a very big flannel. Are you filming from a drone? Yes. The answer is yes. Yes. But anyways, we're talking about lean farming today. And if you don't know what that is, well, you're in the right place. Uh, so tell us about, tell us about, give us a, give us a definition, give us a,
00:03:41
Speaker
dictionary definition of lean okay lean in the general abstract sense is about looking at your whatever it is you're doing so some kind of let's say a farm
00:03:55
Speaker
your farm's capacity, the central dogma is that the capacity is equal to the work being put in, in addition to the waste. And lean is about reducing work being defined as something that adds value for your customer, and waste is any activity that you're engaging in that does not. And so lean is about reducing that second half to increase the value that you're creating for your customer.
00:04:23
Speaker
You said the word customer a whole lot, so I'm assuming, Josh, that that's a pretty important part of the equation or part of the concept of lean. Yes, very much. A lot is talking about trying to figure out what it is that your customer is valuing in your products and services and making sure that you're working to deliver that.
00:04:43
Speaker
And if you are a home gardener and you're like, well, this isn't for me because I don't sell anything. Your customer might be, you know, your kid or your spouse or you are customer. So, or your tummy. So it says this is for everybody. Right. So yes. I think would, would efficiency be a nice word to throw out, but one of the buzzwords to throw out around lean.
00:05:07
Speaker
Yeah, I would say so. But to kind of, you know, be prepared to question maybe assumptions you might have about efficiency. I'm prepared. Okay, good. Because there's a lot of association with efficiency about, you know, just reducing the need for human labor, or, you know, reducing the number of employees, like there's kind of a
00:05:30
Speaker
a negative association with efficiency, like the efficiency consultant coming in and laying off a bunch of people. It's not that kind of efficiency. It's more about efficiency of production and time being used. Working smarter, not with fewer workers.
Continuous improvement vs. expansion
00:05:44
Speaker
Correct. In a more enjoyable, less drudgery sort of way.
00:05:50
Speaker
And I saw something associated with lean. It's been a while back and I was trying to, I don't want to misquote this, but it was something to the effect of, you know, as you're striving to make your, you know, you're not always striving to be bigger, you're striving to be better. And that's a, there's a lot to unpack there. It's not always the goal to be a bigger operation that may not be your goal.
00:06:12
Speaker
But I thought that was really interesting that it was kind of explicit. Someone had wrote that down in association with lean farming was it was their goal to always be better. And that's one of the concepts. This thing has been adapted for manufacturing, this lean concept. But the final
00:06:28
Speaker
tier in lean manufacturing is perfection. But I guess that's where that was coming from on the farming side. They said, we don't want to be bigger. That was not the goal in this operation. They said, we are always striving to be better. I guess that's the efficiency, Josh, Brad? Well, yeah, I would say because I read a similar kind of case study, which one of the things I'm referencing is a book called The Lean Farm by Ben Hartman. It's about 200 pages and it was published in
00:06:53
Speaker
2015, it's not very expensive or hard to find. But he talks specifically about their farm, which is a smaller mixed vegetable operation. And that for them, improving efficiency wasn't necessarily about growing more or otherwise grow becoming a bigger operation, like Ray said, more about like what they wanted to focus on was to kind of scale down some of their production, but still adding value and they
00:07:22
Speaker
you know, demonstrate that over time they're plowing less space, but improving their profitability each year and focusing more of their time on things that add quality as defined by the customer, kind of value added products, things like that, or focusing on like servicing the customer in conjunction with, you know, providing them vegetables, say providing them with like recipes and things like that, sort of things that connect the customer with the farm because that was something they were looking for.
00:07:52
Speaker
So yeah, like Ray said, it's not about using your efficiency to get big necessarily, but to focus on, you know, quality is delivering value.
Customer demand and adaptability
00:08:02
Speaker
Right. I think, you know, one of the things when we jump into any topic, we think about like, what is it that we want to do? Like, what are the interventions we're going to take? What are we going to change? What are we going to not change? And I think one of the things in lean thought
00:08:19
Speaker
Partially, there's quite a bit of opportunity for data collection and analysis and understanding of processes and communication of those different pieces of information to different people involved in the organization. That's always been something that has jumped out at me about, you're trying to start from a place of better understanding in order to make changes that are effective and to some extent predictable.
00:08:45
Speaker
That's what I've read under the value, which is like the first thing that I see discussed a lot in the lean process is value in terms of knowing what the customer wants and needs versus what you want to produce. And that's part of that value statement.
00:09:03
Speaker
I guess Josh, that's also sometimes called pull in that concept, you know, producing what is needed versus, you know, what you want to push out. You want to see where the market pulls you or where the pull is, but that's the value statement of what the customer needs. And that's not an easy thing, is it? Annoying exactly what the customer, not only what they want,
00:09:22
Speaker
but how much of it they want and when they want. It's sort of a three-part thing there and guys you have done so many programs on a state level over the years and you've worked with so much data and so many cool modeling activities and a lot of it speaks to those three things you know as customer preference and needs and and desires and it's not an easy thing and you guys made me appreciate the complexity of really knowing that and how much you have to be very deliberate to know that.
00:09:48
Speaker
And it specifically mentions also that even if you manage to nail that target, there has to be an understanding that the demand, the pull of customers, what they value can change. So being prepared to reevaluate what is value as defined by your customer. To make a grounded connection back to something else that I often mention in those statewide meetings and things that I go to is that
00:10:14
Speaker
When we have it, when we're growing products, I'd say some of the most difficult conversations I have with people is when they have decided to bring a product to market for which there is no local demand and then local consumers don't buy it and they get frustrated.
00:10:31
Speaker
And it often happens after it's already been grown and that could be a particular crop. It could be a particular certified organic or certified naturally grown or ash free beef or whatever the thing is. And I think one of the ways that I describe it in terms of efficiency and ease is that it's much easier to sell a person a product that they already want.
00:10:55
Speaker
And then the, I looked into, so in the food world, this was a couple of years ago, just fast food marketing spends 55, or sorry, $11 billion a year on marketing their products to try to get people to make a decision they weren't already gonna make. And fast food's pretty tasty. And so they're already, you don't have that kind of budget. So to try to convince people, and we talk about educating people into wanting our products,
00:11:23
Speaker
There is some truth to that, but there's also a really nice opportunity to sell people what they already want or help them to understand how your product is something that they already want. And it just kind of speaks to that same, on the marketing side, it speaks to that same meeting the actual desires and values of the customer.
00:11:42
Speaker
high quality local foods, for instance, most people who buy local food are buying it as their top reason is freshness and quality. And then there's things like food safety, there's things like supporting local farmers, those all factor in. But if you're delivering, if you grow at local, they will come approach and it's really bad quality. You're not meeting customer demand and you're not you're shooting yourself in the foot by having gotten bigger to produce more lower quality stuff. And so just a different
00:12:11
Speaker
little different angle on that. But I think that's a really interesting thinking of the the customers purchase decision and the production decisions and the marketing decisions. All is this one system with different components is really interesting part of lean.
00:12:24
Speaker
Yeah, and like I had already mentioned, it's the pull, right? That that is sort of the focal point of looking at this system. It's like the pull of those customers pulling products through your system and what activity is facilitating that pull and what is not necessarily and can be reduced.
00:12:45
Speaker
And if you can get to the pool, that seems like a great place. If you can truly target and be accurate on the pool, that just means that there's less resistance for you getting products out the door. And you've provided great value for the customer because you're providing what they want
Organizing practices for efficiency
00:13:01
Speaker
when they want it. So yeah, value, value, value, value.
00:13:04
Speaker
I know with me it's easy for me to get too focused on some details of this and one of the things that I liked about Lean and in some ways it's kind of parent system of, you know, sometimes referred to as like the Toyota way of these like kind of larger efficiency projects is that understanding two things. Your goal is perfection.
00:13:26
Speaker
but also understanding that it's going to be a continuous process. So like you don't have to be perfect in understanding your pull to start trying to implement other things in the kind of like lean model. You can definitely spend some time and try to figure out what it is your customers value.
00:13:43
Speaker
and then start looking at the production process and implementing some lean ideas there and going back and forth and understanding this is going to be a thing that changes over time and that you're just kind of on the lookout for ways in which you can improve and that there's this kind of continuous improvement rather than looking for
00:14:03
Speaker
the final system, I guess. So just a side note. Um, so in my bonsai world, there's this one guy who is probably the best practitioner in the United States. And he studied his name, Brett Wolf, Brett Wolf. I mean, that's, that's not for me to say.
00:14:20
Speaker
I'm going to leave that one to the historians. His name is Ryan Neal. He's a polarizing figure. Like many brilliant people, he is a bit crazy, but he named his business Bonsai Mirai. This is a Japanese term. Mirai, according to him, refers to an ever unattainable future. Nice.
00:14:42
Speaker
And it kind of is a similar thing of this like, you're not ever going to arrive. Like it is lean as an effort and a directional movement based system. It's not an arrival point or a starting point. It's like a continuous point. Yeah, right. Yeah. If you can fall in love with the process, you're there.
00:15:00
Speaker
Something like coke like Kobe or somebody. This is all the value. You know, we've talked about the customers and wants and needs and trying to figure out all that which we need to we could talk about that all day that that's some good stuff.
00:15:20
Speaker
But the next thing that I see that sort of talked about is the value stream and we've sort of already touched on it, but that's mapping the kind of the steps and processes on your farm to kind of bring the product with minimal waste to the customer.
00:15:36
Speaker
I'm trying to think of some practical applications of that. I mean, it's everywhere. That's really the farm side of things is the value stream. That side of it, I mean, as important as it is to know what your customers are looking for and what they value and how to feel that pull. The part that I get really excited about and in love with the process is
00:16:01
Speaker
things associated with that, like improving the production process side of things. And there's, you know, this kind of, I don't know if mnemonic is the right word, but one of the tactics or tools of Lean that's really popular to kind of mention is this like principles of 5S, that there's like five different S's that you look at your process with.
00:16:24
Speaker
And, you know, I'll just list them real quick and we can talk about them. But, you know, there's sort, which is kind of eliminating unused tools and non-essential items from your process, setting an order, sort of basically storing things where they're used and where you can see them according to their frequency of use. Wait a minute, this sounds like a, almost like a, what's the name? Condo, the person that was famous for organization. Thank you. Yes, that sounds very similar.
00:16:53
Speaker
Sure. Right. And there's some notion. No, not quite. But it's also similar to like, you know, when we had the episode on permaculture, like the zone sort of system having names near that are used frequently. So yeah, sort set in order. The third one is shine. And that's about like kind of keeping the workplace clean and tidy.
00:17:15
Speaker
Standardize is another one in essentially like the process, standardizing the process of production across all the people who are engaged in it. So it's not that big one. Yeah, it's like, wow, a task performed a task is performed the same way, no matter who's doing it, putting tools back in the place that they were kind of cleaning workspaces in the same way every day, like a standardization of production. And then the fifth one is sustaining, like making that part of your
00:17:43
Speaker
farm or organization's culture to kind of have accountability for these things occurring frequently and continuously. This one really resonates with me because I know even when we were producing as a family, but even now when my desk is messy at work, that means my mind is messy. That's how I work.
00:18:04
Speaker
And when I want to kind of put things in place in my mind, I physically organize my surroundings. Doesn't matter if it's a tool shed or the piles of paperwork on my desk. When I organize that, there's a part of my brain that also gets organized and helps me kind of.
00:18:20
Speaker
you know, prioritize things and help me work through things. So yeah, this, this is a part that, that I really like it. And once again, it doesn't matter if it's unused tools that I'm trying to figure out why is that junk sitting there in my operation or why is that stack of paper smeared all over my desk? It doesn't matter. But yeah, cluttered work environment means my mind is cluttered literally. It affects me in that way. It doesn't affect everyone. Everyone has their own organization, you know, principles and the way they operate. But for me, that is, yeah.
00:18:49
Speaker
the organization of disorganization. I mean, I can confess that I used to be somebody who had kind of a, I always had a sloppy work environment because that was what I came up under. The people that I worked for were also sloppy. And, you know, part of getting good at the job was understanding how the mind works of the person who originally like scattered things around. Right. And I associated that with like, you know, just doing better and
00:19:17
Speaker
going through and learning this kind of system changed me completely in the way that I am with organizing my workspaces and cleaning stuff and having a clean workspace honestly to me makes engaging in work more pleasant. I spend less time like there's nothing more frustrating than looking for a tool when you need it right then or looking for some kind of device that is like draining.
00:19:44
Speaker
And when that doesn't happen. Talking about you, Alexis, and your operation. I mean, you, you produce things and I mean, is this any of this ringing true for you? How does this apply for you as far as, and this also relates to flow, I guess, Josh, that's the next thing we usually talk about. But as far as just, you know, what we're talking about here, how does that, I mean, can you think of like situations, Alexis, where that relates?
00:20:07
Speaker
Yeah, the whole like, can't find a tool when you're looking for a thing is the most frustrating because for me, I think of it as like, I mean, time is money, right? So it's like if I spend 10 minutes walking around, and when I have such limited time to be doing the farm work that I need to be doing, if I'm wasting 10 minutes,
00:20:28
Speaker
it is so incredibly frustrating and that makes the whole process more frustrating makes me in a cranky mood like so i i've been really trying to improve my processes it can be hard i think. The wind like we're in winter right now and the reason we want to talk about lean farming. Now for you all is that from a lot of us it is a good time or a little bit more slowed down a lot of the things that we can do are inside and we can work on some of those like organization and the process is and.
00:20:58
Speaker
I know for me, it can be hard to get started, but once I'm doing it, it's exciting. And I always think of what is my problem and what were all my problems last year? What frustrated me? What got in the way? And maybe the problem is that you had too many cherry tomatoes. Maybe you could find all your tools, but you didn't have enough cherry tomatoes. So asking yourself,
00:21:22
Speaker
why you had all these, this waste or, you know, if this, why you were looking for tools, is it because you didn't tell your workers how to put them away properly? Did you not take the time to educate someone? What is it? And so just kind of stepping through like a flow chart is the way my brain works as like, yes or no to this, yes or no to this to find in a product, I think is kind of part of that lean. Yeah.
00:21:49
Speaker
idea. Philosophy. Yeah. And I would say when it comes to I mean, I love doing this stuff, organizing and setting things in place and kind of creating an efficient workspace, just for my own, like, enjoyment and hobbies and things like that. But I think when it comes to a circumstance where you have workers, right, who are entering your workspace,
00:22:14
Speaker
that this becomes so much more crucial because people, different people use a tool and it doesn't necessarily go back in the same place. And you've added this layer of complexity for finding things and onboarding people or bringing people into an environment.
00:22:29
Speaker
you know, where things have changed a little bit day to day just requires more mental bandwidth and time, right to like get them up to speed to what's happening. And nothing will give you a rude awakening quite like hiring someone or having help. Like that was my
00:22:46
Speaker
When someone else had to find and follow my processes, it was like, oh damn, I really messed up. It works for you and maybe it's not a bad process if you're alone in your garden. Maybe it's efficient for the way you do things and the knowledge that you have, but when you're bringing somebody else in,
00:23:11
Speaker
their brain does not think like yours does. And that was a, I was like, whoa, okay, I got to solve my role here when that happened. And I brought on somebody to.
00:23:20
Speaker
be like, this is where I put things and they're like, why? How is this organized? Like, according to a thing I can't really articulate. I cannot tell you exactly. Because this thing looks like this thing and I associate it with the color blue. And like, that's not how it works for most people. That brings up an interesting kind of more specific tactic.
00:23:43
Speaker
you know, when it comes to places where there's lots of employees, it's really crucial to figure a lot of these things out, like your process and onboarding people. And one of the tools they use is color coding in organization, right? Like things that are, you can associate tools with certain colors. You could put some kind of a label on them that's a color and have them in a place just that there are these ways that, so somebody could, I mean, the, so the perfection ideal that I like to think of is,
00:24:10
Speaker
To me, a perfectly organized workspace is somebody walking in who has never been there before.
00:24:17
Speaker
understanding where everything is and how to do the thing. If they've done it somewhere else. I have kind of an interesting example. It's not from agriculture, but it carries over pretty well. So there's a place in town here called Brokespoke, which is a community bike shop. And the idea is that not everybody has access to all the tools and bikes are actually really important mode of transportation for people who can't afford cars in addition to the
00:24:44
Speaker
you know, people who ride it for health or for transportation reasons or whatever. And so it's a space where people literally are doing exactly what you said, Josh, people are coming into the shop for the first, maybe the only time and you can go up to this work stand and use space and they have a whole, all the different tools, all the different Allen wrenches and other wrenches and chain tools and all that kind of stuff. And what they did was they laid all those out on like a pegboard kind of situation, all the tools.
00:25:10
Speaker
And then they took and they spray painted over everything. So the tool becomes the color and each stand is a different color. So one of them is pink, one of them is blue, one of them is purple. So when you go in with your buddy and she's on the pink stand and you're on the purple stand and you come over with your tool to help her get something off, hold one side while she gets the other side off and then you put it down.
00:25:33
Speaker
It's obvious where that tool goes, because there's an outline on the board of where it goes. And it's obvious where it goes, because it's color coordinated. And like that going in there and being like, Oh, you all, you all do that this a while, because this is awesome. Because they have some tools that like, no right minded person would buy because they need like one time. They work with a lot of volunteers, don't they, Brett? And that's probably the motivation. Yeah. Yeah.
00:25:54
Speaker
different people all the time and broke spoke. So that was probably the motivation and all of the ultimate goal of everything we're talking about is what to increase the value stream, you know, facing towards the customer. We're also talking about
Addressing problems in farming operations
00:26:08
Speaker
a lot of stuff that sort of bleeds into the next concept of flow. But another interesting example, Brett, that I had somebody kind of and I guess it fits into this, but we were talking about refrigeration on their farm, which is absolutely necessary in a lot of instances. But after reviewing,
00:26:23
Speaker
their farm and what they wanted to do and what they wanted to be and the products that they wanted to deliver the eliminated refrigeration i was like whoa what because you know refrigeration is a very integral component of a lot of operations that has to be but they really took a hard look at what they wanted to do the products they wanted to deliver
00:26:41
Speaker
Instead of holding products for longer, they produced fewer products and delivered them fresh only. Only fresh, which takes a lot of planning. That is true. Lean philosophy of delivering just what is needed on time. After they had been doing that operation several years, they were able to do that, and that really struck me as that seems like they were eliminating refrigeration. As you eliminate refrigeration, that seems like it's more risk on your side. They're like, yeah, but
00:27:10
Speaker
we can pass along the savings of not having the electrical cost, we can pass along the savings, the value onto the customers. So what fits into this and the flow, they manage the flow of their farm operation to take that into account by delivering, you know, just what was needed at that time. So something that really stood out to me as a radical concept when I was first getting into this and starting to like internalize some of the ideas, like these abstract concepts,
00:27:38
Speaker
was in that flow concept that in lean systems, you do not want to hide problems. Like you confront them and that process, right, of getting rid of refrigeration acting as this kind of buffer of production, right? You can throw things in there. Exactly. That's what it was.
00:27:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's like you can moving in the direction of like, you know, you don't put you don't hide your messes, you force yourself to confront these conflicts in your process, so that you will address the root cause of them instead of hiding my therapist might be in the lean production.
00:28:16
Speaker
This reminds me of the refrigeration I've had. So there's this thing in like the flower world, right? And everyone will tell you the first thing that you need when you get started. If you're serious about selling flowers is a cooler, right?
00:28:30
Speaker
Unlike vegetables, flowers often do necessarily have to have cooling to be a good, solid product. There is that, but I didn't have a cooler. I had just an air-conditioned room for the first two years that I produced. It definitely set some limits, but what it taught me was how to move my product.
00:28:52
Speaker
How to move it better, when to harvest. Like I said, I had an air conditioned room, but it wasn't a room I could drop down to 35 degrees or something like that. So when people come to me and they're new growers and they say, hey, do I really need a cooler? Because that can be an investment even if you're doing something like a cool buy. I mean, you're looking at...
00:29:13
Speaker
several hundred dollars, if not a thousand dollars to see it started. And that's just not really practical for a lot of people. And I just said, well, you either need to get a cooler or you need to get better at marketing your product. Uh, and, and that works out, right? Cause then when you do get a cooler, you are really good at that. And so I think that that's part of it. You're less likely to use it as a crutch and rather like really blow things open. Right. Right. And so as.
00:29:38
Speaker
I have a question about kind of what you're talking about Alexis and other things like that. So right now we're sort of saying, or thus far what I've gotten is kind of like, think about your process and make adjustments based on what will be better. And that's great if you are a heavily repetitive thinking analytical person like Alexis or I am, but is there like a
00:30:03
Speaker
how do you prioritize, how do you get those places for improvement out in the open or made more clear? Is it like a weekly meetings kind of thing? Is it like a conversations with employees? I know in the Toyota way, there was a mechanism for employees through this Kaizen mechanism to this continuous improvement idea that an employee knows their task better than anyone. So they should be able to inform and say how things get better. But I'm just curious like,
00:30:29
Speaker
When I'm looking at different shelves to buy from my house, I make a spreadsheet of all the shelves to compare and contrast their ability. How do I assemble the data? How do I assemble the information?
00:30:45
Speaker
Am I supposed to just sort of freeform, come up with the lean ideas that I want to make? What's the, is there, are there mechanisms for that for discovering and bringing those things out into the open? To me, it's what the customer wants and you work from the customer perspective and figuring out how to deliver that with the most minimal inputs and the most, in the most efficient way possible. To me, it goes back to, you know.
00:31:08
Speaker
ground zero, you know, goes by shelves, right? You are the customer. Like, what do you want from these shelves? What are you trying
Standardization and modular setups
00:31:17
Speaker
to do? What is comfortable for you to do? You know what is, and that kind of leads me to something like the idea of what's comfortable to use and interact with. One of the books, the other book that I would recommend it for somebody who wants to go hard into this is the Toyota way field book from 2005. It's about 450 pages. It's pretty hardcore.
00:31:38
Speaker
a lot about philosophy and things like that. But that the only, one of the things that mentioned in the book is that the only place you can receive formal training in essentially the West to be taught about efficiency and workplace design is to go to culinary school, which is where they, everything is like down to the minutes of science and things and moving around and being prepared for like very diverse processes to make things.
00:32:06
Speaker
but being in this adaptable, fast-moving environment where timing is key. And so, you know, they have it down really hard about like, how high should the shell, how high should shelves be? How high should a workspace be in comparison to like the hip height of your body?
00:32:26
Speaker
and how far you need to be able or should reach that's comfortable for your shelf mounting and all those things. So to me, when you're figuring out your shelves, it's like,
00:32:37
Speaker
really knowing intimately what you want from that shelf. I guess my question before was kind of related to that in the sense of like, okay, so I'm carrying a box of carrots from point A to point B. The thought goes off in my mind. It'd be really cool if actually I got a bike with a little trailer on it to make this go faster. And then if it's me, that thought evaporates from my mind and is now gone and all of the lean insights that I'm having throughout the day
00:33:05
Speaker
are probably, you know, they're going away. So is it like you set structured time, you need to have like a notebook on hand or a phone app, whatever, to write this stuff down? I'm thinking about like how I would try to implement it.
00:33:20
Speaker
Yeah, as as an individual person where you don't have employees to consult because that that's in the in the Toyota way It's like routine consulting with employees. They get you know paid bonuses if they identify like efficiency improvements that are implemented and how far and wide they're implemented can it can scale the bonuses but when it's just you I mean, I think that sounds the individual but I'm
00:33:45
Speaker
my first farm. And every time I've been on a farm, I always have in my pocket, like a little notebook that I scribble things on. And then it's, it's there. And yeah, maybe I don't look at it for like months. But then I do. And
00:33:58
Speaker
I star things and circle things a lot where I'm like, I really liked that idea and then can come back and, you know, start to try to like integrate it into the process or consider it when I'm not in a rush carrying my care. But you have some way to capture that. And that's the main thing, I guess. And that's going to look different if you're working with five new farm workers and on average one new farm worker per month, Alexis, as far as communication. Are you trying to say I run people off, right?
00:34:24
Speaker
Is that what you're trying to say? You work with a lot of good people, see. You're expanding rapidly. Yes. I think you got to live in a space. So I have been
00:34:44
Speaker
I've had a lot of steps, right? Like I've gone from like running farm space. And I think a lot of people, whether you're gardening, right? You always go, you go from one raised bed to two raised beds, you know, to you're having half an acre garden or whatever, right? We all kind of have this level of scale. And that's part of that process is living in that space. So I've moved my studio in my barn, which is right next to my cooler. It's not as fancy as it sounds, but I had to name it something.
00:35:14
Speaker
to like I think three times now and part of that is because I got some grant money and could you know upgrade and stuff like that but I waited to do a lot of those upgrades until I figured out how I like to work and so some of that is just like figuring out the way you like to do things or the way the staff likes to do things and you know depending on who's working with you like I know that no one else on my farm is really ever gonna do design work right so it's about the way I like things and if I bring in people occasionally
00:35:44
Speaker
they can adapt, but it really needs to be the way that main person is doing stuff. So if you have someone who usually does your wash and pack, they're the ones who should be telling you how to set up a system. I mean, within, you know, reason, but so every time I've moved studio or moved farm or put in a new bed, I've changed something and then re-standardized everything else if it was needed. So like my irrigation, if I'm like,
00:36:10
Speaker
I found out there's a new way. It's part of this process. It's easier for me to keep track of. And so then eventually I convert everything over into one. And so I think that like, don't the, we said it earlier, but like, it's something that I have to constantly remind myself of is don't let, you know, this idea of perfection be the enemy of the good. And I get really stuck in that. And what lean really is, is just the fact that like, you'll never reach perfection, but you're going to try to
00:36:40
Speaker
get there continuously improve and it's really yeah it's hard about like someone with a like the way my brain works to like know i've never have it perfect is like really difficult so i'm trying to settle in with that but just live in a space and that's what i've done like my my new studio space like i know for sure i love to move in this fashion right so i know for sure my tables are going to go one place because i that's just the way it works but there's so much of it that
00:37:06
Speaker
I have learned not to jump ahead and just be like, Oh, this just shelves will be great here. Because once I started actually doing things, I might find out that those shelves are not there and it would have saved me more time to just wait and figure out where I wanted them. When I actually was using them versus then assuming I needed them somewhere or letting someone else tell me where they should be. So live in your space a little bit, I think is important. Yeah. And I like that recognizing that it's something that's going to be
00:37:36
Speaker
repeated over and over again and just remembering that like when I was putting in some of my own shelving and organizing some of my like my kitchen space or whatever where I was putting things at first I was like wait where does everything need to go to be most efficient and I let that thought go instead just start putting things where they kind of make sense for right now if the understanding that probably in a month you're gonna reorganize this and probably in another month you'll reorganize again and it'll always get
00:38:06
Speaker
a little bit better as you use it. And something like when we were talking about like, what do you do with the ideas when you have them, you know, while you're doing something else and the notebook thing.
00:38:17
Speaker
I realized that about myself about having a pocket notebook at, you know, that was 20 years ago. At this point, like in every room of my house, I have a notebook with its own pens so that I can, like, I never have to walk more than five steps to write an idea down so I can go back to whatever I was doing. Yeah.
00:38:38
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I think, you know, one of the, one of the things about your, your kitchen space and some of the spaces that I have in my house that, uh, I really like for workspaces is this idea of like modularity and easy reorganization. So like, Josh has these shelves that are on this like French cleat kind of system. And so moving the shelves around, reconfiguring them as a matter in his case, cause they're heavy duty shelves of.
00:39:05
Speaker
backing out a screw, moving it to a different spot, putting a screw in. And I think too, it's important to recognize that the way that you have done things in the past has a real powerful gravity to it. And as an example, so we have a vacuum, right? And in theory, we try to be a clean house. And so to vacuum up the things is part of what we need to do. We used to have a vacuum and we kept it on the back porch
00:39:35
Speaker
in a closet and sometimes things would get put in front of it and so there's this whole step and rigmarole and lack of efficiency and it's a pain and it's also literally additional time to go out and do that. We now have a smaller vacuum that just hangs on the wall that inside the house can just be grabbed, go and as a result, we vacuum more often and less things get less crazy.
Evaluating and improving farm tasks
00:40:00
Speaker
florist friends who said, uh, when they put it in there, two separate floors that share a studio space. And they said the best thing that they ever did was put everything on wheels, except they have like a couple cabinets that, you know, are heavy and they put right up. They know, you know, nothing's going anywhere, but everything else they put on wheels. And I was like, duh, like it's, it's sometimes like a stupid light bulb goes off and you're like, why wouldn't you do that? And just to have that freedom to move things around.
00:40:28
Speaker
is huge because you are going to continue to change it depending. I mean, it might go back like the season changes. If I'm doing reeds, it's going to be a very different system than if I'm doing bouquets. If you're washing lettuce, it's a very different system than packing tomatoes. So like having that modular, I think
00:40:47
Speaker
Yeah, I think a tool that I'll mention just as a because you know, Alexis, you were mentioning about how you have you add another employee in the mix and suddenly realize how crazy everything is when you try to explain it to them. I can relate to that having people work with me in my shop and I'm like, Oh, yeah, I don't know why that's there. But I think, you know, to the to the practical side, there's this there's this
00:41:12
Speaker
technique of executing these things called time studies in work. And we're working with this really brilliant woman out of Oregon called Tanya Murray. She has this tool called Know Your Cost to Grow that we're learning how to use and hopefully hoping to work with growers. But it has definitely has some elements of lean and it's specifically aimed at deciding whether or not to grow more or less or any of a given crop depending on how much time it takes. And
00:41:40
Speaker
to cut to the chase, you go through processes that you do normally and you time them. So I know that it takes me 40 seconds to start the timer, 40 seconds to walk from my house out to the tractor. It takes eight minutes to hook up a given implement.
00:41:59
Speaker
It takes three minutes to drive out to the field. It takes, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I think, A, accounting for your labor time is an important thing for record keeping, for lean, for everything. But interestingly, when you have a clock on you, suddenly, just like if you have to ever do a food journal, you start to pay attention to the things that you're doing in a more clear way and looking to ask, like why?
00:42:26
Speaker
Why am I walking back and forth twice to go and do this thing? If I moved both tools to the same place, I wouldn't have to do that. And I think it's just any structures that you can put in place. And not to say you have to go do a time study, but it can be a helpful way of accounting for it.
00:42:41
Speaker
can be a nice structure for questioning some of your assumptions about what you're doing to really say, I know for me, I'll think, oh, you know, such and such task takes about 20 minutes. So I'll just, you know, do it. And then if I actually timed myself and it actually takes 40 minutes and I'm like, why does it take 40 minutes? And maybe it does, but yeah.
00:43:03
Speaker
Then it directly relates to this, and I had completely forgotten about this activity until you were talking about it, but years ago, there was a leadership activity I was involved in, and you would think as powerful as it was, I would not have forgotten about it, but I thought about it for years. But there was this activity where a group, they divided the group up. There was about 30 people in each group, two groups, and they said, here's the activity. You had the place. It was like a ball or a bean bag. It has to go from one hand to the other and go around to everybody.
00:43:32
Speaker
You know, and they said time yourself and we timed ourselves and it took like two minutes and 15 seconds and we did it pretty fast. We got pretty fast. We got it down to a minute and there was a panel of judges that came around. I mean, they were serious about this and they watched it to make sure we were complying with the spirit of the activity and they gave us parameters.
00:43:49
Speaker
Long story made short, from that two minutes and a half, we got down to a minute and we were like, there is no way we can do better than this. But they said, now we need you to truly work as a group and evaluate yourselves and your processes to accomplish this goal. We went from two and a half minutes down to a little under 10 seconds.
00:44:08
Speaker
And we complied with the spirit of handing that from one to the other in a room of 30. And it was amazing. We were looking at everything. What does it mean to hold that in your hand? Can it just roll down our hands? And we just evaluated everything. It's amazing you all. When you really look at everything with the mindset of improving every tiny aspect. And it was an incredible activity.
00:44:33
Speaker
But we told the head trainer, there is no way our group can get under a minute. Then he forced us to work with each other. And then it got really competitive because there's two groups and we was like a little competition. And it was, we kind of, it blew us away that we took something that there's like no way we can do this in under a minute. Then we did it under 10 seconds and complied with all the parameters. It was amazing.
00:44:56
Speaker
You know, I guess his point being with that activity was you have to evaluate every single aspect, not only your movements, but what is the philosophical underpinning of what you're doing and why you're doing it. But it's really good. And I think it directly applies to kind of what you were saying, Brett. It was incredible.
00:45:14
Speaker
Yeah, that there was I remember when I was on some research for kind of nursery crop production and stuff like that. One of the understandings of kind of like looking at efficiency from the agricultural economic economists was knowing that for all of these potted plants, the more times that a worker has to touch them, the more money is invested in them. Right. And so trying to get down to the point where
00:45:40
Speaker
The plants are being touched less and less, no unnecessary moving them around, that kind of thing.
00:45:46
Speaker
That's why each of my bonsai costs $1 million. I touch it. I touch it a lot. You mean like touch it as in like do a process to it. Not just like chuckle, come watch me pack an order because I, even though I have a process, I like will second guess myself because God forbid I trust my process that I set up for myself.
00:46:16
Speaker
I am just like, this is here. Well, then no, it'll sit better in the bucket over here. And it's like, I get so mad at myself. I was watching that. It's like I see myself as a bird-eye view and I'm like, why are you the way you are? So if you're asking yourself that, pick one thing maybe. Don't overwhelm yourself with efficiencies. Just kind of pick one thing.
00:46:42
Speaker
One problem you might have whatever that is and maybe it's not from a customer point of view maybe your customers are great maybe it's the fact that you walk back and forth from your high tunnel. Eighteen times because you keep forgetting things because god forbid your brain stay in the you know spot it's supposed to stay hypothetically.
00:47:05
Speaker
That reminds me of a specific example, and especially, you know, you had mentioned those, your friends who are flower farmers that put everything on wheels. One of the examples I remember hearing was, I can't remember the exact process, but it was something, you know, having to do in a production bed that I want to say was something like, you know, pruning and some other kind of process that they had to do to every plant in this bed. And they had several beds where that would happen. And it used to be they would go and, you know,
00:47:34
Speaker
grab the tools and kind of carry them out there and maybe you forget the tool and there's a lot of walking back and forth between the barn and the bed and instead what they did was they bought individual carts for each of the beds where this needed to happen and then each cart got its own color-coded tools and it was like you're going to that bed you take this cart you will always have all the tools you need you do the process you go back yeah and that may seem excessive but
00:48:00
Speaker
When you talk, you're talking about labor time. Like, like you don't have to spend too much time walking back and forth to pay for, you know, whatever a couple of tools.
Balancing efficiency and sustainability
00:48:11
Speaker
And it, yeah, did we have, I want to talk about the sustainability and worker experience thing. Did we have anything else we want to cover between now and then? Or is it okay to launch into that launch away? Well, that's part of it. You know, Josh, when you mentioned earlier, kind of the ways that we talk about the P word of productivity,
00:48:31
Speaker
in economic terms, in personal terms, all those things. There's different, people mean different things when they say that, but you were getting me fired up, you know, talking about, this isn't about laying people off and it's not just about, you know, turning the screws on people so that they work more or something.
00:49:02
Speaker
There is a
00:49:03
Speaker
sick worker, chronically depressed worker, a generally unfulfilled worker in one way or another is a bad thing. It's bad for the worker. It's bad for the business. It's bad for society. And I think that's something that kind of sometimes gets missed when we talk about lean and it gets kind of co-opted into what I would call a Western tech bro interpretation. So maybe we could talk about that just a little bit that like,
00:49:31
Speaker
maybe gets a little bit into the more touchy feely side of things that you tend to bring up on the podcast. But I do think efficient work toward a clear goal can be a tremendously morale boosting thing for a human being.
00:49:49
Speaker
Yes, that it specifically mentioned the concept of like kind of overburdening, you know, as it applies to a resource, but it's usually talking about people, making them engage in unnecessary activity at work to the task at hand. You know, you can
00:50:08
Speaker
make people feel alienated, you push them too hard, people have to leave and that's not what you're trying to do here. Mandatory pizza parties. Right, right. And the thing that's ironic is sometimes the thing that you're trying to force the workers to do that is unnecessary and making their lives miserable is also detrimental to the business. Correct. There's literally no win other than exercising your control over the worker that you get up and off on that sort of thing.
00:50:36
Speaker
Right. It's pure waste, right? Yeah. That is not adding value to the customer. Correct. No.
00:50:44
Speaker
Yeah, the customer is not really getting anything from how angry your employees are at you. This sounds a little bit like the Happy Cows commercial. Do you guys remember the Happy Cows commercial? I mean, a lot of this is based on those principles. It wasn't by accident that they were like, hey, we want our cows to be happy. You know, I forget which dairy that was for, but yeah. Another part of the sustainability for me is the concept of ergonomics and
00:51:12
Speaker
considering the human body engage in a lot of these activities. And as someone who, at least I can speak for myself, I'm not getting any younger. My body, you know, the old things that used to roll right off my back, you know, it takes a little more and all the more reason to set up a process that actually works with me rather than me having to push through the process.
00:51:35
Speaker
Right, not having to be the hero, like lifting the thing up every day. You're talking about all the strawberry farms that harvest at a very low point.
00:51:43
Speaker
Well, and all of that, like kind of the treatment of the worker, including yourself as a labor on this. I think that was a key thing that stood out to me in the principles was, you know, your workers are this resource that can show you if they're the ones who are engaging in a certain aspect of the process more than you are, they can be a resource that shows you a more efficient way to do it. But the only way you're going to get that buy in from them
00:52:09
Speaker
or the way to make sure you never get that by them showing you how to do something more efficiently is to punish them by cutting their hours. They're not going to show you how to save time if the first thing that you do is take money away from them. You have to make them part of the process and share in that efficiency and create that culture where they feel an investment in improving the productivity of the place.
00:52:40
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. They'll tell you how to make it better. Right. Usually, you're just like, yeah, I know and I will get to it. Hopefully, you get to it a little bit faster so they feel like they're being valued.
Communication and feedback in lean farming
00:52:58
Speaker
Right. It would be a lot better, Alexis, if you fixed the wheel on this wagon I'm pushing. Yeah. I think also,
00:53:09
Speaker
I have heard, and it makes sense, and when I've first started to give people jobs to do, if they've never done it before, I think there's another part of it. If you consider yourself a really efficient weeder or something like that, there's going to be something that you know that you've nailed.
00:53:30
Speaker
at least for the time being until you find a better process but you you nailed it and you've done it enough times to know how long it should take telling your like help like hey this should be about this amount of time and obviously if they've ever done it before they're relatively new they're gonna it's gonna take them a little bit longer but i think that has been really helpful
00:53:49
Speaker
When I've communicated with with workers or people helping me because sometimes they're overdoing it right there a little bit too focused like it doesn't need to be so meticulously done or You know or they come up and they say hey I'm not getting this done anywhere close to the right amount of time is there what am I missing here? I'm gonna find out you know they grabbed the wrong tool and
00:54:11
Speaker
probably because you gave them bad directions, so it's not their fault anyways, but there's things along those lines. So those time studies can be really helpful even if it's not necessarily something you're going to change, but just so that you can communicate that with other people. Everything we've talked about today, it's almost like you have to look at the big picture through a certain frame of always improving, improving, improving every single thing you touch or see or do on the farm.
00:54:38
Speaker
And I know when things get busy, that's easier said than done. When you're really busy, when I get really busy at work, that's when my desk gets cluttered. That's when my mind is cluttered. When I'm doing something, things tend to get cluttered. But it seems like that's everything we've talked about today is you just have to be very deliberate in your approach of always improving. Yeah, building that time, especially when it's busy to like kind of maintain things where they are, it's only going to make it, you'll get more done.
00:55:09
Speaker
A practical investment, especially if you're working with others, that communication establishment is a practical investment. I mean, it's not always an easy concept to say, Hey, I need to dedicate some time to establishing some communication with people I'm working with, but that pays off in the end. And if it pays off in the end, it's better for the customers, a cheaper, better product, and it's going to pay off for you. I would like to think in the grand scheme of things.
00:55:35
Speaker
Awesome. All right. Well, I think, Josh, any lasting thoughts? I mean, you're kind of our lean expert here. Any, any. Yeah. Yes. I'll definitely make sure to provide links in the show notes to the reference materials that I like most leaned on. Didn't even mean to do that. That was like a Brett move, but Brett's like, he's already thinking about the next move. So he's 10 subs head.
00:56:05
Speaker
Yeah, I'll just say to check the show notes for the reference materials. But I think it's changed my life, my personal life, this stuff. So I can't really speak to it enough.
00:56:18
Speaker
Don't get overwhelmed. It can be really overwhelming to feel like you have to do all of these things at once. Just pick one thing. Just pick one and go for that. It's a snowballing effect. You start on one little thing and then you start getting into it. Right, exactly. It becomes a habit. We hope you immediately thought of something that you could do.
00:56:42
Speaker
to work on but if you have any questions about that of course reference those show notes or if anything we said resonated with you feel free to reach out to us you can do that through our email you can do that on Instagram and those are both in the show notes as well I believe so those can be easily I just want to be able to click something let's be honest
00:57:02
Speaker
So we hope you do that. Leave us a review if you did something or you have in the past done lean and something really worked out, put it in a review and just let us know. And maybe that'll help somebody else as well, uh, figure out some cool things. But we are so glad that you joined us today and hopefully this gives you some things to think about. And we hope that as we grow this podcast, you will grow with us and that you will join us next time. Have a great one.