Design Philosophy
When we change how we look at things, the things that we look at change
The farm has both production and business sides. When designing a farm, both the farm business and the farm operations must be Clean, Efficient, and Profitable. This is addressed by using Lean systems. Kaizen manages processes while Kanban addresses workflow and inventory.
Consider the following Permaculture guideline:
- Any need for an element that your system cannot provide results in work
- Any yield of a function that cannot be used by your system results in pollution
- Work and pollution create drudgery which is the punishment for poor design
Tacota Coen – Mixed Farmer Canada
Table of Contents
The Design Timeline
We use the Scale of Permanence as a guide for the design timeline. We design the more permanent components first. This saves much unnecessary work if we make a change at any time.
From most to least permanent this is:
- Climate
- Landshape
- Water Supply
- Roads/Access
- Trees
- Structures
- Subdivision Fences
- Soil
Upon reflection you will notice that roads tend to last longer than trees and sheds. Soil can be ruined or repaired in 3-4 years.
Resilient Farm Business Design
There is a lot to consider when designing an agricultural business. A useful Business Design is:
- Clean
- Efficient
- Profitable
The Designer Acres design system is deep and not just a load of fluff. It is designed with resilience in mind using planned redundancy.
This will change the way you think about your business. Every business places more effort on different processes, but they must all be considered, resilient and integrated.
Resilience through Redundancy
The strength of a web is in the number of ways it can support load. Each strand is connected to multiple other strands.This shares the load and ensures that the whole structure is strong. There are less points of failure.
The same can be with a farm – redundancy is key. A tractor can fail but the trailer can be pulled by the 4 wheel drive.
Multiple dams can be supported by chaining their overflows on contour. Excess water entering any filled dam is shared with other dams in cascade to maximise on-farm storage. Use keyline dam design with a central pipe outlet for easier water management.
Redundancy in design is to ensure that is one part of a system fails, it can be carried by others until rectified – no one point of failure is catastrophic.
A Clean Business
A Clean business is tidy, ordered and produces minimal waste.
Ensure that a workstation is clean and orderly. The components are:
- Eliminate whatever is not needed by separating needed tools, parts, and instructions from unneeded materials
- Organise whatever remains by neatly arranging and identifying parts and tools for ease of use
- Clean the work area by conducting a cleanup each morning. Light coloured paint to improve light reflection and make the workplace pleasant
- Embed this practice in the company culture
Zero waste is more than just a buzzword. The types of waste are:
- Excess Inventory
- Making defective parts
- Unnecessary Movement
- Over-processing or re-working parts
- Over-production
- Unnecessary Transportation
- Unused skills and knowledge
- Waiting
- Inefficient use of raw materials
mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.
An Efficient Business
An Efficient business :
- is vertically integrated
- shows continuous incremental improvement
- is process driven
- has written processes for everything
- manages workflow and inventory
- does regular reviews
- manages risks and issues
Is vertically integrated
Component costs increase rapidly every time a new enterprise is added to the supply chain.
Consider a tractor – there may be more than 20,000 separate components to be manufactured and assembled by more than 200 suppliers. Each business in the chain adds its own costs and profit margin to the purchase price of the sub-assembly.
A vertically integrated business creates and assembles most if not all of the components itself. This will allow it to reduce its costs by at least the profit and administration costs for each production layer it owns. Further, it can manage its component construction to be delivered Just In Time (JIT) which is a large saving. Inventory has multiple costs.
So how does his affect rural industries?
If your business is producing secondary or tertiary products, the cost of the primary product is reduced to real costs.
Consider something as simple as a market garden producing preserves or soup as a method to use marked product. The cost of the raw materials is reduced to the real costs of production. Otherwise components are purchased from a retailer who has a supply chain of grower, manufacturer, aggregator, distributor then the retailer. Each step is less expensive if supply chain costs are avoided.
This means that the costs are reduced allowing for a much higher profit. The output is then sold at the wholesale price. It is possible to achieve retail pricing if selling at the markets or a roadside stall.
Shows continuous incremental improvement
The core of Synergistic culture is a willingness to improve each process to make it better and easier.
This leads to staff thinking of ways to improve their work practices. If your business has 5 staff and each makes a 1% improvement each week, that is 5% per week. It adds up very quickly.
Compound interest is one of the most powerful forces in existence.
Is process driven
A process driven enterprise has documented Standard Operating Procedures (SOP).
What we are doing here is freeing you from micro-managing your staff. Each task is written down. It is clear and simple and can be accessed by staff when they need it.
You request that the staff weed bed 23. The staff understand what that entails because they have read the SOP. They know that each bed is clearly numbered to avoid weeding the wrong bed. The bed beside number 23 has just sprouted after being seeded last week and so looks different to the more mature beds. Could be a load of young weeds! Not nice to lose a bed and a week in a tight schedule to a mistake caused by inattention.
If you change the way a task is performed, the SOP is updated to the new way, the staff is informed that the process has changed so it is done the new way.
Now you can bring in new people and they will easily understand what is to be done – your way. Their training is based upon the SOP which contains both words and pictures.
Seems like a load of work?
If you have to explain each task twice to each person each time it is to be done, you have spent more time and effort than it would to write it down once and you still have nothing to show for your effort – more efficient. It also means that you know how each process is done by your staff. Because it is written there is less “but you said“!
You and they both know that keelhauling is the natural result of not following SOP.
When people have ideas different to the current way, respect them, ask them to explain then test their idea. They then change the documentation if the new concept is an improvement. Sign off on the changes to the SOP to ensure quality.
After a couple of cycles, the number of hare brained ideas will be reduced and the good ones will start to flow.
Now, because your staff know what to do and how to do it their time is used more efficiently and your time is freed to work ON the business rather than IN it.
You may also take short holidays without worrying too much. You will still need to touch base regularly, but that can be done with a phone call.
Has written processes for everything
The aim is to have all processes documented. This means that a process is not the responsibility of a person, but instead the responsibility of a role. This makes training much simpler. It is better to have multiple people trained for any role.
Everyone knows their position, so know their duties and how to perform them. Multiple people can fill a position and it is also easier if one or more are on leave. Short term promotion is easy as the duties of the new position are clearly defined.
Manages Workflow and Inventory
Processes, Workflow and Inventory are automatically managed as part of the standard procedures. This is best done by the people who produce the goods, purchase the goods and use the goods.
Does regular reviews
Manages risks and issues
Risks and issues must be identified then paired with a detailed mitigation strategy which is included in the SOP under a disaster recovery procedure set.
Risk management is part of Tactical and Operational planning. If you do not have a well thought out risk and mitigation list you will be bitten by the next event – too much to be thought out and no standard procedures.
You need to be prepared for whatever is coming. Winging it under stress is not a good plan.
A Profitable Business
A profitable business has multiple income streams – Income Diversity. It also has a high return on investment (ROI) – as part of the business planning, it produces high ROI products.
Prior to devoting my time to Properly Organic and Designer Acres, I served as a contracted super tech in the bleeding edge of satellite imagery, business management and accounting software, then telecommunication software bringing SMS and Mobile Application Protocol into Australia. I then decided to return to the land. I quickly discovered that apart the shape of the bales and the colour of the tractors little had changed.