Over the past 3 years+ I've been trying to answer the "what are you going to do with Habit Farming" question. After a year of dedicated planning and questioning, I can (finally) answer that question! One of my driving motivators has been to create what you wish existed in the world, so over the past year I've started to do just that. (Scroll to the bottom for the TLDR version!) Farming is chalk full of advice on how to grow plants, but there is very little about the business side of farming. True, there are some resources on budgeting/cash flow, marketing, employee management, etc, but the question that has always plagued me is, "Yes, but HOW?" I am so busy with farming that I'd love to be tracking my cash flow, but I can't make myself prioritize the time and effort needed to learn how to do it, create a system, update that system regularly, and use the resulting information to help inform farming decisions! Instead my focus has always been to learn how to decide what to focus my limited time and energy on, which led to the birth of Hippo Camp. Hippo Camp is all well and good, and helps to identify what to work on in the coming season, but it is still missing the how. The "how" has still relied primarily on the individual farmer's ability to create and maintain (and use) systems for carrying out their well laid plans. But as you and I know, well laid plans have a habit of going to you know where in July (or February for you Southern Hemisphere readers). So, how do you carry your plans through a too-busy season? Over the past year we've been trying to answer that question.
Our farm is small, so most of the decision making and planning has fallen to my husband Jake and myself. We plan in the winter and tell the crew the day's plan in the summer. That has worked just fine until baby #1 shook it a bit in 2020. We stabilized then a tough second pregnancy and loss of childcare rendered that system defunct in 2023. Instead I've spent over a year testing different communication systems with my crew, trying to find ways to relay The Plan effectively and succinctly when I can't be present physically. The result has been threefold:
The road to creating these resources has been bumpy. Primarily because methods that work for me, or seem like an innovative solution, haven't made sense to my team. Therefore when thinking about other farms or businesses using these resources I've realized that there are three levels of both ability and comfort level when it comes to adopting a new system. People seem to either like to keep things in their heads (and maybe on a few scraps of paper), on paper (in binders perhaps), or electronically. And within each category there are further comfort levels. I, for example, love a complicated cloud-based project planning solution like Monday or ClickUp, but those programs are meant for office-based businesses, so when applied to a farm they need to be able to be translated to paper or word of mouth (unless your team likes to use devices with muddy fingers perhaps). Instead of going fully to the cloud, we've found the right balance to be a mix of electronic (mostly Google Drive) to store data, and paper or white boards to communicate day to day. These are the resources that I will be sharing with Habit Farming. I won't tell you how to use an accounting software, that information exists, but I will give you some ideas for how to carve out time to keep up with reconciling your books, and how to streamline the annual process of collecting the paperwork needed to file your taxes. Most of these resources exist in some form right now, but are catered to our farm. Over the next 12 months I will be updating them to work for any business, with different resources for different systems styles, and I will roll them out as I am using them for my own work. In the end I hope to have a nice little (or not so little) menu of SOPs, tips and techniques that you can use to make the back end of your business run just a little bit more smoothly. I hope you'll join me, weigh in on resources you use, and help to build this library for the next generation of farmers. -Taylor TLDR: I'm creating a set of replicable office-based SOPs for you to use for your business. They'll roll out in real time as I finalize them for our farm, and will (I hope) end in some sort of pretty package that can be shared far and wide.
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AuthorTaylor Mendell. I grow things for people to eat. Archives
February 2024
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