While farming is certainly human-driven, attaining machine-like consistency and efficiency can increase farm profits.

The concept of lean farming encourages farmers to become better organized in their processes.

“Lean is not a new concept,” said Troy Rice, CEO of Farm Brigge. “If you’re familiar with the work on Ben Hartman’s book, ‘The Lean Farm,’ it’s really a tool to help you better the process efficiencies on your farm.”

Rice spoke during the “Lean Farming Practices” webinar put on by Michigan State’s Product Center and Center for Regional Food Systems. While working in the insurance industry, Rice became a certified lean green belt and led programs on business process improvement. He realized the same principles could be applied to agriculture, so he launched Farm Brigge in May 2019 in Grand Rapids, Mich.

The business helps farmers become more economically sustainable while also providing nutrient-dense, local food.

Lean is “a customer-focused approach to improve quality, cost, delivery and staff satisfaction. It comes from the Toyota manufacturing company,” Rice said. And though it may seem like an odd fit for farms and agribusinesses, lean principles “have been adopted and ingrained in many industries,” he said. “They apply to any process improvement. You can run a profitable business and do what you love.”

Lean is all about eliminating waste and becoming more efficient, regardless of the farm size.

“It is a method of continuous improvement,” Rice said. “We all think of things that need to be improved, but sometimes we just don’t do it.”

It’s not about the leader barking orders to inferiors. Lean is a teamwork approach so each person holds the other accountable, but it’s not a perfect model. Lean also is not a one-time effort.

“I’ve done projects in the past with corporations or farms, and they think it’s over with now and they’re done with it,” Rice said. “It’s a continuous journey.”

Lean principles specify value as seen by customers, identifying and creating value-stream maps, making value-creating steps and basing production on pull, not push. Where farmers can find value for themselves is realizing that doing too much is not good.

“I can continue to increase my workload, and things will slip a little bit because I’m doing too much,” Rice said.

But once a standard of quality has been met, the farmer can move on to the next higher standard. Lean tools emphasize improvement and goal planning, starting with talking to employees.

“Uncover what the concerns are,” Rice said. “This could be a five-minute huddle once a day or 15 minutes once a week.”

Then establish an expectation. For example, a concern might be, “How can the farm be profitable in today’s market conditions?” The expectations for improvement could be higher profits measured by a specific dollar amount.

'Five S’s '

The “Five S’s” are another lean tool: sort, straighten, shine, standardize and sustain.

Sort refers to identifying unnecessary things, “like tools around the farm, the layout of the barn or the layout of the farm in general,” Rice said.

Straighten is just as it sounds. Tidy up, remove unnecessary items and keep things neat.

“If someone on the farm is looking for something and you ask them to grab it, they don’t know where to go because things are placed anywhere,” Rice said.

“Shine is how clean is your environment?" he adds. "Do you have your layout that helps you from the flow perspective? What does that process look like? Is it clean or dumpy?”

Part of shine is figuring out what processes work and what doesn't work to keep the farm efficient.

Standardize means to replicate a good process so that everyone on the farm can do it, and anyone on the farm can easily train someone else to do it.

One these processes are built in, it’s important to sustain that model, the final S. “Once I implement a process of lean, how can I keep it going?” Rice said.

Rice describes process thinking as “the flow of process steps during production leading to an output for the customer." The process starts with the end in mind: Who needs what by when and the level of quality. Farmers need to think of each step of their work — supplier, input, process, output, customer — and look for areas where the steps are inefficient. Structured problem-solving could help a producer discover the root cause of a problem on the farm so they can resolve it.

“Any process we do, we like to think about it like a cycle,” Rice said. “Plan out what we want to do and improve on the farm. We do it, we check the results — it’s important to measure that — then act. Once you identify that process, you need to check that it’s the most important process you have. You get the team on the same page.”

Know the lean phases

The phases of lean are scope, diagnose, design, implement, and manage and sustain.

Scope involves “dissecting what you want to change on the farm, the voice of the customer,” Rice said. “What do they care about?”

Look for problems on the farm and think about why these things are going wrong? Rice said that gathering baseline data can start an improvement project, and generate data that can benchmark improvements made later.

“Your team can collect that data, and there’s software to capture that or plain old Excel,” he said.

One thing you could do is draft a problem statement that gives details on why that problem has occurred. Then, write a goal statement on how you want to achieve it, by when, and without stating possible solutions.

Here’s an example from Rice: “To reduce the amount of waste of peaches by 50% in the next 90 days. One hundred percent elimination of waste would be ideal, but not realistic.”

Then it’s time to diagnose the root cause. Is the farm generating so much waste because it’s growing too much? Is storage inadequate? Has the market declined, or is the farm not marketing its goods correctly? Perhaps a certain commodity isn’t making money because inputs, handling, processing, packaging or transport have become too expensive.

Rice said farmers should brainstorm ideas to solve identified root causes, then design solutions that will address the real reasons for it.

“Avoid settling on the first solution as issues may resurface,” he said. “The best approach is to ask ‘why’ five times when evaluating a problem.”

Team approach

It’s not just up to the farmer to implement the plan.

“If you want to make a change happen, you need the whole team on board,” Rice said.

The farm owner might manage and sustain the plan, but they need the cooperation of others. And to ensure the plan is effective, a farmer needs to measure results and compare that with data gathered beforehand.

“This is where you decide if you want to adopt, adapt or abandon” the plan, Rice said.

As a farm process improves, farmers should create new standards and continue improving. Rice suggests making a visual aid of the plan and posting it where workers can see it and follow it.

Sergeant writes from central New York.