What is "Lean Farming"?

CropWalk suggests viewing ALL process development, execution, and improvement efforts through the lens of lean farming principles, which are summarized herein.

Check out the book Lean Farming by Ben Hartman. It’s also available on audiobook. Consider buying it for your operations and production managers. It's the source of the info in this article and more, which itself, of course, is grounded in the lean product manufacturing efficiency principles of Japan.

The Five Principles of Lean Thinking:

1. Identify value
2. Map the value stream and remove waste
3. Create flow
4. Establish pull
5. Seek perfection through continuous improvements

The Only Three Types of Activities That Can Ever Occur on Any Farm:

1. Actions that add value
2. Actions that do not add value but are necessary (type 1 muda)
3. Pure waste (type 2 muda)

Your goal is to move as many of your activities into the first category as possible and then to perform those activities as efficiently as possible. Type 1 muda should be kept to an absolute minimum, and type 2 muda should be banished altogether as soon as possible.

Examples of actions that add value might be potting out transplants or washing your food. The farmer is not alone in creating value. When beneficial insects do the work of pesticides, value is added. When plants turn the sun’s energy into sugars, value is added. In many ways, the function of farming is to set the stage for the sun and plants and animals to do the real creation of value. These direct actions on the end product make the product more desirable and more valuable.

Examples of type 1 muda—the necessary actions that don’t add value— might be keeping meat frozen as it awaits paying customers or storing grains in bins or cultivating a bed of spinach. Whenever you set up irrigation, vent greenhouses, or move portable fences, you might be performing an import- ant—even necessary—task. You might be setting the stage for nature to perform its value-adding magic. But you yourself are not adding a bit of direct value to your product. Lean says strive to minimize or eliminate these actions.

Examples of type 2 muda—pure waste—might be letting milk become contaminated, leaving crops in the field, or packaging more than necessary. When you grow a crop nobody wants, order too many seeds, or let cut hay mold in the field, you are adding waste to your operation. These actions are often easiest to see. Because they add no value and only add to your costs, they should be eliminated.

All of your activities fit into one of these categories. These are tight definitions. There is no fourth category. Since the focus of a lean enterprise is waste elimination, lean managers spend a lot of time analyzing their work and categorizing their activities into these three types.

Maximize value-adding activities. Minimize type 1 muda. Eliminate type 2 muda.

Use Single-Piece Flow (SPF)

This means adding as much value as possible to the item in your hand before setting it down. It is an excellent way to minimize moves. 

SPF is a simple concept but not always one’s first instinct. In their book, Lean Thinking, James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones use an illustration from the world of office management. Imagine you have 100 letters, 100 envelopes, 100 seals, and 100 stamps. Is it faster to fold, stuff, seal, and stamp them all in separate steps, in large batches, or to complete the entire process for one letter at a time? 

As it turns out, the latter approach, SPF, is in fact much faster than the former method, batch and queue, because you are saving moves. You avoid picking up and putting down each letter four times. This translates into the way your employees carry out their tasks in a lot of different ways. When plant-handling employees are trained around multiple SOPs, they can be tasked with carrying out more than one thing at a time as they move throughout the crop; for instance, scouting whilst de-leafing or watering.

The 5S Methodology

5S is defined as a methodology that results in a workplace that is clean, uncluttered, safe, and well organized to help reduce waste and optimize productivity. It's designed to help build a quality work environment, both physically and mentally. 

The 5S quality tool is derived from five Japanese terms beginning with the letter "S" used to create a workplace suited for visual control and lean production. The pillars of 5S are simple to learn and important to implement:

Seiri: (Sort) To separate needed tools, parts, and instructions from unneeded materials and to remove the unneeded ones.

Seiton: (Set) To neatly arrange and identify parts and tools for ease of use.

Seiso: (Shine) To conduct a cleanup campaign.

Seiketsu: (Standardize) To conduct seiri, seiton, and seiso daily to maintain a workplace in perfect condition.

Shitsuke: (Sustain) To form the habit of always following the first four S’s.

In simple terms, the 5S methodology helps a workplace remove items that are no longer needed (sort), organize the items to optimize efficiency and flow (straighten), clean the area in order to more easily identify problems (shine), implement color coding and labels to stay consistent with other areas (standardize) and develop behaviors that keep the workplace organized over the long term (sustain).

It is also referred to as 6S or 5S+S (adding Safety or Security) or even 7s (adding Spirit and Safety). Not to be confused with Six Sigma (often written as 6s).

Make 5S a way of life by forming the habit of always following the first four S’s.

Tips for each 5S step:

1. Sort (seiri) – Distinguishing between necessary and unnecessary things, and getting rid of what you do not need

• Remove items not used in area – outdated materials, broken equipment, redundant equipment, files on the computer, measurements which you no longer use
• Ask staff to tag all items which they don’t think are needed – this improves understanding about need and use
• Classify all equipment and materials by frequency of use to help decide if it should be removed – place ‘Red Tag’ on items to be removed
• Establish a ‘holding area’ for items that are difficult to classify – hold item for allotted period to enable others not on 5S team to review

2. Straighten (seiton) – The practice of orderly storage so the right item can be picked efficiently (without waste) at the right time, easy to access for everyone. A place for everything and everything in its place.

• Identify and allocate a place for all the materials needed for your work
• Assign fixed places and fixed quantity
• Make it compact
• Place heavy objects at a height where they are easy to pick from
• Decide how things should be put away, document it, and obey those rules

3. Shine (seiso) – Create a clean worksite without garbage, dirt and dust, so problems can be more easily identified (leaks, spills, excess, damage, etc)

• Identify root causes of dirtiness, and correct process
• Only one work activity on a workspace at any given time
• Keep tools and equipment clean and in top condition, ready for use at any time
• Cleanliness should be a daily activity – at least 5 minutes per day
• Use chart with signatures/initials shows that the action or review has taken place
• Ensure proper lighting – it can be hard to see dirt and dust

4. Standardize (seiketsu) – Setting up standards for a neat, clean, workplace

• Standardization of best practices through ‘visual management’
• Make abnormalities visible to management
• Keep each area consistent with one another
• Standards make it easy to move workers into different areas
• Create process of how to maintain the standard with defined roles and responsibilities
• Make it easy for everyone to identify the state of normal or abnormal conditions – place photos on the walls, to provide visual reminder

5. Sustain (shitsuke) – Implementing behaviors and habits to maintain the established standards over the long term, and making the workplace organization the key to managing the process for success

• Toughest phase is to Sustain – many fall short of this goal
• Establish and maintain responsibilities – requires leader commitment to follow through
• Every one sticks to the rules and makes it a habit
• Participation of everyone in developing good habits and buy-in
• Regular audits and reviews
• Get to root cause of issues
• Aim for higher 5S levels – continuous improvement

5S is often referred to as visual management. Sometimes called visual control, this is a method of managing a business that uses visual signals to communicate important information. These visuals can include diagrams, pictograms, color-coding, floor markings, photographs, and more. This type of management allows people to quickly understand the information being conveyed. In many cases, visual management techniques make it possible for everyone in the workplace to understand the current state of work processes. For example, a green andon light shows a process is moving smoothly, while a red light calls attention to a problem with a process.

5S is a form of visual control that focuses on organization and can improve productivity. Visual markings in a storage area can help workers return materials to their proper locations, floor markings can create boundaries around work cells, and signs on the floor can point out the proper locations for trash and recycling bins. Using visual tools like these allows a business to communicate information to workers without needing to actually say anything.

Ten Types of Waste on Farms

Taiichi Ohno identified seven types of waste in Toyota factories. We’ve listed this original seven muda below because they are ubiquitous on farms as well as in factories. There are three more concepts of waste particularly common on farms added to the original seven.

1. Overproduction

In farming, overproduction in the form of unsold crops or animals is among the most odious kinds of waste, because unsold goods have a lot of investment wrapped up in them and often cost money to get rid of. Overproduction can happen because of poor planning (erroneous forecasting), a bumper harvest (unpredictable weather), or market volatility.

We include in the definition of overproduction waste the practice of selling items at lower prices to clear out excess inventory or oversupply. The energy you exert to sell and manage those crops is time and energy you could have spent producing items that customers place more value in. Displaced energy is wasted work.

2. Waiting

On the production line, waiting waste takes the form of workers standing idle until parts arrive or equipment is fixed. Waiting waste also occurs when a product sits, as when crops or animals that are ready for market await customers.

When people are underutilized, it is obvious how waste is generated: you are paying workers to stand around. When products sit around, the waste is less obvious but still present. Every time you store an item there is a cost—for the building, for conditioning (if needed), for moving the item again later to its next destination, and for the mental space required to remember what you have and where it is.

3. Transportation

Moving goods from one place to another happens every day on farms; so does transportation waste—the inefficient or unnecessary transport of products. Examples might be inefficient equipment use—using a tractor to carry a single bunch of carrots or making four hay-loading trips with a small wagon rather than one trip with a big wagon—or delivering products that customers would be willing to pick up at the farm. Many direct market farms get bogged down with poorly planned delivery routes, where farm products are delivered in small batches to far-flung accounts rather than consolidated to minimize road time.

4. Overprocessing

This type of waste encompasses any activity that creates or does more for your customers than they are willing to pay for. Examples include bagging items that could be sold without packaging, washing food more than is necessary, delivering to more locations than necessary, or spending too much money on websites.

5. Inventory

Inventory waste means keeping more materials or goods on hand than is absolutely necessary. On farms, inventory management can be challenging because production output is impossible to control completely since nature always finds a way to alter a farmer’s plans. Even the best production forecasting will never allow a farm to determine exact yield, compared to a factory that can make exactly the number of units it needs. Even so, farms can do much to keep inventories—of both supplies and finished goods—to a minimum.

6. Motion

Too much moving is a form of enormous waste on farms. Motion waste includes handling items too many times, inefficient harvest practices, and poor planning at planting or seeding time (running back to the greenhouse for more trays of seedlings). A common problem on many farms is spreading out too far—propagation greenhouses too far away from fields, fields too far away from processing areas, processing areas too far away from storage rooms, storage rooms too far away from loading docks, loading docks too far away from the road. Awkward farm layout also contributes incredible motion waste, for instance when you have to go around three buildings and cross a road to bring home a harvest rather than make a straight path.

And almost all farms suffer at times from the waste of looking for misplaced tools or from walking too far to retrieve tools stored in faraway locations.

7. Making Defective Products

Defect waste includes unsellable food and food that must be discounted because of poor quality. Defects result for many reasons. For animal products, poor management increases animal sickness and mortality. For fruits and vegetables, poor handling, improper storage, and poor field management are among the many reasons crops don’t turn out the way farmers intend. Again, because farmers live and work in the messy world of nature, some causes of defects, such as harsh weather or insect migration, are outside of a farmer’s control.

Defects are a major source of waste because, as with overproduction waste, defective products often contain a lot of lost investment. It’s best to spot defects early. We would much rather a crop fail within a few days of planting time than after we’ve spent time and money growing and tending or even harvesting a crop. The lean principle of poka-yoke, or “mistake-proofing,” targets this waste through systems for early defect detection.

8. Overburdening (Muri)

In the Japanese language, muri is often used to mean “impossible,” “unsustainable,” or “unreasonable.” On the farm, muri waste occurs when workers and equipment are overstretched. With people, muri leads to burnout, injury, and poor work. With equipment, it leads to engine failure, broken handles, and worn-out parts.

Equipment and bodily overburden can be a problem on farms, especially around harvest time, when there is more to do than time allows. And there is often a lot of muri when farms grow too rapidly. Workers are overstretched trying to build new greenhouses in addition to getting regular production tasks accomplished.

9. Uneven Production and Sales (Mura)

Mura translated from Japanese means “unevenness,” “irregularity,” or “lack of uniformity.” In a production environment, it refers to sales and production spikes and dips. Standardized and predictable work is easy to perform efficiently. A worker can readily find a rhythm, which simplifies spotting waste and making improvements. But uneven work is often inefficient because it involves less rhythm, more mistakes, and higher costs.

On vegetable and fruit farms, some amount of mura is unavoidable, as fresh products on such farms will ripen according to their natural season. But expanding production seasons and spreading out sales of food products—whether from animal or produce farms—has a leveling effect on farmwork and increases efficiency.

10. Unused Talent

Many farms need lots of help during harvest or extra hands at butchering time and can get by with less labor for the rest of the year. It’s tempting to divide a farm workforce into two camps—one for workers who grind away, heads down, completing simple, mindless tasks, and another for workers who think, process data, design systems, and complete complex and more interesting assignments. But to do so disrespects workers, and the farm loses out on talent as well.

Lean places emphasis on the production process (or gemba, the shop floor) as the best place for new ideas to generate. Responsibilities are pushed down the organizational ladder so that problems are looked at from many angles. Farm laborers working with production details day in and day out will often have better insights than the farmer on more efficient ways to get a job done. But systems need to be set up to receive and incorporate their ideas. According to lean thinking, any good idea that goes unspoken is a form of waste.

While these ten types of waste are distinct categories, there is a lot of interaction among them, particularly among muda, muri, and mura. If you rush around to fill orders at the last minute, your operation is exhibiting symptoms of mura—uneven production. When your production is uneven, you and your workers are bound to experience some degree of overburden (muri), for example, when equipment fails from overuse. Mistakes are made during these times, causing defects, one of Ohno’s original seven muda.

Once you understand these ten forms of waste, you can look out for them at Castillo and root them out. This is the basic practice of lean— banishing waste to increase efficiency.

It’s easy to think that farming is a traditional business that doesn’t need to evolve. But any business that persists with this mindset will not survive the challenges of the modern world. Farmers must leverage technology and adopt a continuous improvement mindset to stay competitive and relevant in the agricultural space. This is what kaizen means. Kai-, change. -zen, good. Change is good. It’s about challenging the current state and aiming for progress. It’s about the realization that everything can and should be constantly improved.

While lean farming is a relatively new concept, it has started to make waves. Equipped with the right techniques, methods, and tools, you can improve profit margins and increase operational efficiency. 

Value stream mapping will help you assess how well your programs are performing and identify where waste occurs and where improvements can begin. Value stream mapping is a lean management tool that helps visualize the steps needed to take from product creation to delivering it to the end-customer. As with other business process mapping methods, it helps with introspection (understanding your business better), as well as analysis and process improvement, but through a lean lens.

By looking at your business as a whole ecosystem rather than each process in silos, it eliminates elements that are not adding value to the quality of your delivery. Lean thinking can introduce more predictability into your business and give you the confidence to make management and investment decisions.

Applying lean farming starts with the right mindset. Farm owners must get the right frame of mind to start looking at their business holistically and identify opportunities to minimize waste and improve efficiency. There are various Lean techniques and tools that can help you do this. Once wasteful activities have been identified and eliminated, the next step is to re-think your production flow and transform it from supply-based to demand-based, just-in-time production.

It’s important to involve your team throughout this process. Continuous improvement should be everyone’s responsibility. Therefore, everyone can and should contribute to how processes can be improved.