Jenny (00:31)
I'm starting off this podcast with a super powerful quote. So listen up. We don't rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the level of our systems. going to say that again. We don't rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the level of our systems. This quote was popularized by author James clear, and there is.
So much to be said for this over the years on my farm, have really leaned into streamlining our systems and our processes and have really just been trying to get super efficient at everything that we do. And it's probably saved us thousands of hours of labor time and tens of thousands of dollars. And I really believe that you can have the biggest goals in place, be really excited about achieving them. But if you don't put in the systems.
you need to achieve those goals, it's gonna be really hard for you to get there. So we really, truly fall to the level of our systems. Now the word systems can be intimidating and I totally get that, but it doesn't have to be. All it means is that you have a set of steps or a process, so you do something the same way over and over and over again, so you eliminate any extra brain work.
When you do something the same way every time it becomes a habit, it becomes second nature and you get super fast and efficient at it. Systems are just a set of procedures for how something is done. And it's usually in an organized framework or method. So I try to implement systems into nearly everything we do on the farm, but a system usually comes to life from a bottleneck or a pain point first. And so when you
go to put systems in place on your farm. This is probably where you're going to start by finding that bottleneck or that pain point. And this really became apparent for me when I first started hiring people, even if it was just my first time, you know, part-time helper that I hired, it became very clear very quickly that we did not have any systems in place and it was really bad. This was a huge pain point for me. I was.
The bottleneck. I was the information constraint. So anytime my employees needed to know how to do something, they had to come find me and take me away from important work that I was doing. And so this is a problem because even though I really tried hard to train them up, like they don't just hear information once and know it forever. The same with all of us, right? Like we have to practice things in order to get to know them. But when they were doing that practicing,
I was the one that always had to be there for them. And it was a huge problem over time because I had other things that I needed to get done. I couldn't just hold their hand all the time. And it was my fault because I didn't know how to manage people. And it's because I didn't have systems in place. So my first deep dive into systems was to write out procedures for all kinds of things on the farm for my employees. things from seed starting to transplanting to
You know, bunch sizes to bouquet making to weeding record keeping farmers market prep and everything in between. And so what this did was it had a simple set of procedures, a system in place where they could go find the information that they needed without always having to come to me for that information. And of course there's always times where, you know, there's clarification that's needed or whatever. I'm always happy to step in and help and to answer questions, but this took a lot of the.
bulk of that off of my shoulders.
But maybe you don't have employees yet. You know, that doesn't mean that systems don't apply to you. So I applied systems before I had employees. And then because of them, I learned that I really needed to have efficient systems in place, both for them and for me. But an example of this that doesn't really have to do with having employees on the farm is on my farm, we, we had an issue with weeding.
So as a rule, I try to never do hand pulling of weeds on the farm. Like it seems like there's always some small level of hand pulling weeds on a flower farm, but we try to minimize it as much as humanly possible. is wildly inefficient. takes so much time. And so we really try to target our weeds at thread stage. So when they're little itty bitty baby weeds, then we can murder before they get too big. Now hand weeding is for gardeners. It's not for farmers. Okay. This hand weeding.
is a big no-no if you can avoid it. So that being said, we try to just shallow cultivate. And mostly we do this just with a wire weeder in all of our hoop houses. And it's, that's just the way that we do it, but we were not staying on top of the weeds at that thread stage. as much as we wanted to, every week, it seems like we would forget or another important task would feel more pressing. And so we wouldn't get it done. And then the weeds would get too big.
And then we'd end up having to hand pull those weeds and it just ended up being a waste of time. Cause you really can't, once weeds get too big, you can't just like cultivate them with like a little wire weeder or cultivator. So what we did is we implemented a new system in our schedule. We made Thursday afternoons, just after lunch, a dedicated time for scouting for weeds and doing wire weeding. And sometimes.
When we would go out to do that task on Thursday afternoons, we would find that we didn't need to do any wire weeding. had all been done. We had been caught up and there was nothing left to do, which was fine. We would just move on to the next task for the day. And you know, there's always something to do. So it's not like we had empty space in our schedule, but ever since we started implementing that every single Thursday afternoon is weeding time. We basically eliminated hand weeding and all of our annuals.
And it's just a super simple system that we put into place. And I have tried to do this with my entire schedule. So every day of the week, I have a system for what type of task gets done on certain days of the week. And I did this before I was full-time on my flower farm, because I was juggling a full-time job working for the government and trying to get my flower farm off the ground. So I like, I really needed to hone in on some of those time management systems. And now.
I I'm always kind of tweaking it and honing in on that, but we have those systems in place in our schedule for every day of the week. And because of that, makes life just so much easier and more efficient on the farm. Like we have time blocks scheduled for everything that we have to do, you know, mostly like Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings are always for harvesting. Then Wednesday afternoons are for CSA prep and delivery Friday afternoons are for.
farmers market prep. Monday afternoons are basically for field work along with Thursday afternoons. Like I just told you Thursday afternoons are for weeding. And then Tuesdays are typically like just an office day, like a catch up day. And so having this super simple time system in place allows us to know what our week is going to look like pretty much every week. You know, it changes a little bit, but not much to be honest with you.
And we are super efficient at getting things done and we're really, really productive because of it. So putting these systems in place have allowed us to be really productive and be really efficient and get our time back on the farm.
Another example would be our harvest board system that we put into place. And this came from a pain point that we had around keeping track of our harvest yields and keeping track of our yields has been really important to me for future crop planning and for understanding what kinds of volumes we're getting from different, you know, successions of cut flowers and to see how profitable they are. So that's an important metric for us to track. But when we had multiple employees harvesting every day, we really
Way back in the beginning, we just didn't have a great system. had people writing down their harvest numbers on pieces of paper. And then we tried like one notebook and then, you know, I would get water spilled on it or those pieces of paper would get lost or someone would forget to share them with somebody else if they had to leave early. And it was just a kind of a mess. And it seemed like the data was never quite complete, or at least it was always really frustrating to put all that data together. So from that frustration.
We decided we needed to put a system in place. And so we just kind of brainstormed and we did, it took some trial and error, but eventually we came up with this really great system that works really well for us. So we have this big harvest board. It's a giant whiteboard in our barn that we use both to track our yields and also to track our inventory. So as people are harvesting, we're just tracking yields on their phone. like, as they harvest, like 20 bunches of dahlias in the phone, 20 bunches of.
You know, Zinnia is in the phone and it all goes into one app. So all the harvests for one day are in one section of that app. And then immediately after harvesting, as things are getting put into the cooler, I guess, right after they get put into the cooler, one person transfers all that data onto our harvest board. So then we can see exactly what our inventory is for the week at a glance.
So we can just look at the whiteboard if, you know, a florist order is like 20 bunches of yellow runnoculus, we can just glance at that board to see if we have it or not. And then also all of those yields on that whiteboard that are also in the app, that all gets put into a spreadsheet at the end of the week. And so I'm still kind of trying to figure out how we can make this a little bit more efficient. It can't just live in a spreadsheet from the get-go because we need that like visual reminder of the whiteboard of
what we have in terms of inventory and the cooler. So we're still tweaking it all the time, but this system we put into place has saved us so much time and frustration. I mean, truly. So as you can see from these examples, systems do not have to be complicated. They don't have to be fancy. They're just little steps that you put into place to make sure you stay organized and you stay on track and you stay productive.
first step here is to look at your pain points on your flower farm. Like what are some frustrations that you have? What are some bottlenecks? What are some constraints? And then build your first systems around that. So you can do something really simple, just like an SOP or standard operating procedure. And all that means is that you just make a list of steps from start to finish for one particular task.
And just start writing your steps. Start with step one and go all the way to the end. So if you're starting seeds, for example, step one would be to count out the number of trays you need. Step two, fill them with soil by laying, you know, we get really detailed in ours. Like we lay five out on our bench at a time. We use a feed scoop to fill to the outer level, like an inch above the, the trays. And then we lift the tray six inches and we drop them. So we evenly fill the cells. Then we level off.
Then we stack kitty corner. Then we move off the bench and repeat until all the trays are filled. And then the next step would be to, you know, go get the seeds. And so we have that level of organization. but you don't have to get that detailed. can keep it really basic, depending on your needs. You know, for me at the farm, cause I have other people doing the work, it's pretty detailed. so if they have questions, they can go to that document to find the information. but you know, if it's just you putting a system into place, maybe you don't need to be that detailed.
But the first step for you is just to identify the pain points and frustrations on your farm that you need to put or develop a procedure for and write it down, like physically write it down and have a place where all of these procedures and systems are written down. Then once you have systems in place, like you just got to get something in place. So you have a set of procedures to follow, but then the second part is to improve those systems and processes.
And this is something that we do with our crop production a lot. So for example, we are always trying to improve our systems and processes, especially with growing techniques. So if you've heard me do presentations before, you might've heard this example, but I think it's a great one. So I'm to tell it again. With our ranunculus, we used to plant our ranunculus in cell trays. So we would take little corns and soak them and they would place the individual corns.
with the little pointy legs down and the individual cell trays and we'd grow them on in our greenhouse for about a month. And of course we would be paying for the heat in there and electricity for the heat mats. But after that, we would transplant them into our beds and our high tunnels as big, plugs. And that whole system, that procedure took us about 20 labor hours per bed of ranunculus. But
It took a long time. And so I sat down and I looked at every step in that process, every single step. And I thought, what can I do to shorten these steps? How can I do this faster? What is really necessary here? And then I just tried to eliminate anything that wasn't necessary and simplify the whole thing. So now,
We still soak the corns and we just dump them into a 10, 20 tray. It's just a flat tray that has a little bit of soil on the bottom, cover them with some soil and we grow them on in our greenhouse for about 10 days. And so we are then transplanting them out into our high tunnel beds as pre-sprouted corn. So not like big plugs. And we are saving a ton of labor time with this, not to mention all, all the.
materials, like we're using a fraction of the amount of trays, we're using a fraction amount of soil. We're saving a ton of money on greenhouse heat and electricity. But you know, that process only takes us about four labor hours per bed. So just in terms of labor, like that's a huge savings and across, you know, the six different beds that we grow, that means that we're saving upwards of almost a hundred labor hours. And if you're right, like I try to pay myself $30 an hour, like
That's part of our labor rate when we do our cost analysis. That is saving almost $3,000. So like, this is what I mean by improving your systems and everything that you do. And we've done this a ton of ways on our farm where there are delias and our zinnias and just everything we do on the farm. And so just imagine that $3,000 savings and a hundred hours of time savings multiplied over
every crop on the farm and not just every crop on the farm, but every task you do on the farm. It's huge. Like we have saved hundreds, maybe even thousands of labor hours and tens of thousands of dollars of time by tweaking the systems on our flower farm to get our time and our money back. So we try to implement a system and everything we do, every task on the farm and every year we sort of analyze that to make sure we're improving on that.
But here's a caveat. Here's a key idea. You want to be able to skip steps, speed up steps, you know, improve your systems, but you must do it without negatively affecting the end product. So if it's going to negatively affect the quality of your flowers or your product or your business, then you obviously don't want to do that. And so.
you have to be able to produce your flowers in a way where they're still super, super high quality, but in a way that takes less steps and less effort.
This is what it means to be strategic in your business so you get a leg up on your competition. Like I can charge the prices I charge because of my marketing and like anyone can do that, but I'm paying myself probably more than a lot of my competitors because of these systems I've put into place on my farm. And an impossible question that has helped me with this is this question here.
How can you get two times the results with half the effort? I'll ask it again. How can you get two times the results with half the effort? So this question and this idea came from a book that I read called the prophet first by Michael McCallow. It's great read by the way. And at first, when I heard this, it felt like really confusing to me. I was like, how can I get double the results with half the effort? Like that's, that seems like an impossible question.
But we've actually managed to do that in a lot of ways on our farm. And that ranunculus example is just one of them. It's really amazing what you can do when you're analyzing the efficiency of things. You can do more with less a lot of times. And it seems counterintuitive, but just putting a lot of thought into the way that you do things is important. And I like to ask people, why do you do things the way that you do?
price or snapdragons at $15 a bunch. Why do you dig your dahlias that way? Why do you direct seed your zinnias? And a lot of times people just answer like, well, that's just the way that you do it. Or that's just the way it's done. Or that's just the way I was taught. And I think that as flower farmers, we can be such better business owners by just deepening the level of thought we put into why we do things the way that we do them. And this is actually a lean farming principle. It's.
called ask why five times. So you ask like, why do we like with the ranunculus example, why do we grow our ranunculus this way? Well, that's because the way we were taught. Well, why do we have to do it that way? Well, maybe we don't, you know, and you just keep kind of asking yourself why and going through down that rabbit hole to figure out the core necessities of what needs to be achieved in a system or a process and then cutting out.
All the fat to make sure that end result still happens, but with fewer inputs, you know, less labor, less time, less materials. So you can come out being more profitable and getting a bunch of your time back on your farm. So first things first here, your homework here is to just get simple systems in place. Like if you don't have systems in place and you have a lot of pain points and frustrations on your farm, write them down and just write out the steps and then.
look at them later and work on improving the efficiencies within those systems and within those processes. The amazing thing about this is that it not only makes your flowers more profitable and your farm more profitable, it also alleviates the time pressure from your week. I just used to work so hard and work so much on the farm. And of course, when you're first getting started, that's just part of it. That's just part of getting the business off the ground. like,
Even after my farm was very established, I was working far too hard and working like way too much many, many years into my flower farm. But when I really started getting serious about these systems and getting super efficient, I really got my time back and it sounds silly, over the past summer, Rebecca, the girl who works for me full time, she was kind of like, I at moments, she was kind of like twiddling her thumbs and being like, all right, well, like kind of running out of things to do. You want me to go find, you know,
Some, some other things to weed and we were like, Oh, we weeded everything now. So now because we've gotten so focused and efficient at what we're doing, she's moving into a position where she's actually doing some sales stuff for the farm. So she's going to be earning the farm more money because we've gotten so efficient and so good at what we're doing. It's allowed us to open up more time for her to actually earn more money for the farm and for herself, which is super cool. And we would have never been able to.
do that without going through these processes. And it is a process. It takes time to look at what you're doing to find new ways of doing things. And it might involve some testing and trial and error. But doing those little experiments for the most part, you can pretty easily find ways to do things faster and more efficiently. And if you want more insight on how I do this and how I implement systems and efficiencies,
Every single step of the way on my farm, I am teaching my in-person workshop this year called lean flower farming. is an intensive multiple day workshop on my farm in Clifton Springs, New York, where I teach systems and efficiencies for a profit driven flower business. So we go through the systems I utilize on my own farm. Like literally you get step by step what our systems are and you see how you can implement them on your own farm as well.
And we go through almost every aspect of the farm from seed starting to transplanting to bed prep to weed management, task and time and employee management, crop planning and harvesting and bouquet making and sleeving and record keeping. Okay. You guys get the point. Like everything in between. So you'll end up saving tons of time and money on your flower farm in the future. So the lean flower farming workshop is taking place on July 28th and 29th in 2025. And there's also an optional.
third day that you can sign up for that's called high earning high tunnels, where we grow over growing profitable flowers during shoulder seasons. can register now at trademark farmer.com forward slash lean, but spots are filling super quickly. So be sure to head over there to snag a spot. If you want to hang out with me over the summer on my farm.
I'm going close this podcast episode with this quote one more time. And I really hope that it sticks with you. We don't rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the level of our systems. Thank you, James clear for coming up with that. And again, I would just love to have you out to my flower farm this summer so I can show you the ins and outs of everything that I do on my own farm.
You'll get a literal roadmap with step-by-step procedures and systems on how we do everything. It's such a fun class. I would love to have you out there. So again, you can register at trademark farmer.com forward slash lean that's L E A N. So thanks for being here for another episode of the six figure flower farming podcast. release new episodes every Monday. So I'll see you next week. Same time, same place.
