S4 ● E114 LEANing the farm

So there's only two more weeks till people go away. Now I wanted to make a quick video about some of the ideas coming up about how we're going to lean the farm and we're already starting a lot of discussions that we're going to further implement in the month of November. We're moving to online training and that's mostly complete now. I just need to set up the back end of bank charges and things like that and we're going to be releasing that hopefully before I go away in 26th of November. Still got a lot of details to plan with that, so I'm not saying much more about it at this point. So it's all clear. But Nicholas and Matt are staying until that time when Matt and I go on holiday and we're going to design the whole business structure for next year year. But naturally we're beginning to think a lot about it and so we're having a lot of discussions about ways to improve efficiency whilst aiming to double the revenue at the farm. Things are going really good in the production sense, but I think we can double productions on this already very productive farm whilst minimizing the work input. So I think we're going to aim for 40 hour work weeks and it's going to look like most of us are operating the farm enterprises with the layers and the boilers and probably a new sheep flock, but then coming back to work in the market gardens. And so something we've been doing now is just going through all of the crops that we grow in the market garden and thinking about how it would look if we invest in the paper pot transplanter. So we've been looking at how that affects our spacings and how many plants are in a bed therefore, and how many beds we'll do in each year. And that leads us to the sort of cost that we'll need to invest. We're going to probably invest in a paper pot transplanter with 10 and 20 centimeter spacings only we don't need the 5 centimeter one. And so working that out in terms of the cost, we're going to be importing that from Japan. It's about €500 a year in seed trays, but that's a bunch of money for some people to put into seed trays. However, the time saved even on our 10 meter long beds is going to be huge. I mean, pretty much everything we grow can be transplanted. We'll be using the six row seeder for things like rocket carrots, garlics, obviously hand planted mescaline mix radish peasants, squash things that there's not many in the bed turnip. They'll be done by hand still, but pretty much everything's going to be going by paper pot transplanter. We might invest in a couple of caterpillar tunnels that we can use in the beds over here. And we're basically going to eliminate all forms of waste around the farm. I'm going to just pull up the. We've been watching Ben Hartman's videos recently together as a team. Lean essentially comes from the Toyota motoring company who you know, after the Second World War were pretty bombed out and basically wanted to reinvent their way of producing to make it as efficient as American manufacturers with basically no capital. And one important principle in Lean and Lean is used in Scandinavian farming quite a lot and there's many principles about it. I recommend if you're farming, then read Ben Hartman's book the Lean Farm. It's a wonderful book and he's bringing out a new book about applying that to his farm for people that want a bit more clarity around that. But the big thing for me has been looking at like eliminating all forms of waste, multiple forms of waste and we often don't clarify and identify those on a farm system, for example, I can just talk briefly about all of these and so of how we relate to them. But defective products, it could be, you know, early in the season. Just having a caterpillar tunnel out on the field allows us to monitor the environment in, you know, we're so far north here that early crops are unpredictable as well as late crops in the year. Over production, like producing things we can't then sell is just as costly as not producing enough. You could say we got that one quite dangerous down because we're selling up in advance. We sell eggs on six month subscriptions and we can produce things like broilers to order. Time for waiting. That's something about workflows. And we've got our process down in our slaughtery here in the middle of the farm. This year we're processing at double the capacity of last year and it feels like that's really optimized, but it's about inventory and management. So we're talking. One thing we're going to do now with Nicholas and Matthew and Johanna and I is to totally digitalize all of our record keeping and also digitalize our task management, which is something I haven't been willing to do in the past because there's been so many people here that having any kind of automation just brings in Too much scope for error. But now we're whittling down to the core amount of people needed here. That I think that's going to work really well. And then really understanding people's gifts, strengths and talents and putting them in the right place so we're not losing any value through unutilized talent. Something that's been going really well for us is transportation and selling through Rico ring. We have a 50 kilometer selling radius around the farm and the biggest population that we sell to is about 50 kilometers away. And we don't spend much time in selling and transportation. We do drop off points for the last three years and we've put a lot of energy, especially Hannah, into creating drop off points. We had our own farm currency. Not sure if I got a picture of it here. Here's an image of it here. So when we first started selling chickens, we made this currency. It's a play on the farm's name, but also on the original Swedish currency. And people would buy that. It's the equivalent of two kilos of chicken. And the birds would come out at 2.2, 2.4. And so we'd be able to take some cash on collection. But really in our enterprises, the slaughtery is working really optimally now. We've been doing the new trials with the new pens and that's been working really good. That's going to save us hundreds of hours just by being able to pull the boiler pens on wheels you might have seen in past videos. So it's not so much to optimize in that we're going to start a smokery. It seems like we're going to move the intern wagon that's not needed anymore possibly over the roof of the slaughtery and have it inside the yard here. So we have a hatch where we can put birds through from the chiller straight into brine for smoking. But that's working really well. And same with the layers, really. The layers are much better economically in terms of the time inputs. It takes only a third of the time to run the layer enterprise. Something that's changing is we're really going to optimize the market garden. So this is currently our egg packery that we use for sorting, grading eggs. But that's going to become a walk in chiller for the market gardens. It's going to be situated up by the new cleaning station which is up here. And so it's really the market guns that need the optimization because it's about, you know, three times the human hours to generate the same revenue as you would get from the layers or broilers. And so we're really looking into this paper pot transplanter. It's going to save US for a €500 input cost each year. It's going to save us a fortune. And our compost needs are going down dramatically because we've put all the major applications of compost down now that we don't need to do that. So it's an investment I'm really willing to make and play with because I think it will save us a thousand hours. And we're talking about like, hey, how do we double the revenue here and fit our work into a 40 hour work week? Now, farming is never, you know, a 9 to 5 job and it can't be if you want to do it effectively. But time has been the biggest limiting factor in my context since starting up and I don't need to work as hard as I do. We've been doing a lot of work to share information and share stuff and it's got to a point where it's like, hey, I've got things set up now in a way that's stable and we know what we're doing and it's clear and we can keep benefiting a lot of people, but without needing to effort so hard. So I'm looking to sort of halve my input time next year onwards and do a lot less training on the ground here, which some people will, you know, perhaps not enjoy. But it's, it's really important to get our working rhythm down now and really efficient so that we're working sensible hours. We're pretty good in our record keeping and like managing inventory, which is another form of waste, having too much stock and too much money put in stock, that affects your cash flow. But as we digitalize all the record keeping, that's going to become really clear and no room for error because we're all going to know all of the systems at the farm. It's the way we're setting it up so that everyone knows how to run the market garden, do the basic accounting, do deliveries each week because each person coming in the business will be looking after the farm for a month during the winter. So they'll need to know how to do that. But by having multiple people who know how to do everything, it means we've got some safeguarding going on in the background. Something that came up this year was additional processing and we dropped the quality control in the slaughtery a little bit for the chickens just because we were painstakingly, you know, making sure Every bird was absolutely perfect and sometimes little pin feathers or whatever. It's really important to create a workflow in something like a slaughtery operation. And so we really worked on that this year to make sure the birds are moving continuously with no traffic jam, log jam as it were. And so that's been working really great. There's no real drop in quality to the customer, but it's a much quicker process that doubled our speed this year. So it really is the market gardens and cutting out anything that's not necessary. So the sheep have all gone this winter. Cows are going over time for meat and we might get a new sheep flock because it's very low input time. But we're really just getting rid of. We're going to spend some time now walking around the farm, just eliminating any tools, any bits of machinery, any items that aren't needed in our operation, just get them out of the workspace. We're going to be moving all the market gardening tools to the garden beds. We're going to be setting up permanent irrigation in all of the beds so there's no movement of irrigation pipes around and just placing of things. We've done a lot with the broilers this year with the new pens and playing with feed trials so that we can eliminate all time of weighing feed and same with the layers. And it's really fun to see that. I think four of us operating on a normal hour work week with three out of four weekends off, rotating around, doing the chores so that other people can have time off, are going to be able to double the productions here. And it's super exciting because it's, you know, it's already one of the most productive farms in Europe per square meter. And I think we're able to double it. We know we can sell eggs from at least 1200 hens, but we're thinking to go into 1600 hens. So four egg mobiles moving two each day. And we have our neighbor's land which stretch out six hectares down here. And so we're thinking to do all the broilers off our farm next year and improve the neighbor's land as a long term strategy. And it will make that incredibly efficient because they will be moving in one straight line the entire time throughout the season. So it's really exciting. Another big one about eliminating waste is motion studies, unnecessary movement. And I've talked about that briefly with the garden. But we're thinking of having electric bikes as the basis of how people get around quickly. Lean is not about working harder and faster. All the time. It's about working really smart and eliminating waste and creating really good workflow, bringing really good products to customers when they want them, where they want them, in the quantity they want. So it's been really fun. Just these preliminary discussions we've been having about how we're going to increase efficiencies. But it's only just beginning. I think come 25th of October we're going to sit for one month hardcore planning. And as I said before, I'll try and document that because it's really interesting process for us and I'm sure other people will get a lot of insight from that too. And yes, some exciting announcements to make over the winter. We've got some really cool things planned for next year and we're changing the format of everything on the ground here. We'll only be doing very short trainings. We're going to have short, intense pastured boiler operation trainings, par steed layer operations. So if you want to come just for a long weekend and learn everything about the business, just as a focus business training, we're going to be doing things like that. So no longer trainings next year by looks of it, and a lot more time. Focus on the farm. Just perfecting what we're doing and turning this into the most profitable per square meter regenerative ag site going.