Measure, Monitor Metrics While it’s an extremely busy period in the southern hemisphere with calving, its vital farmers don’t forget to stay focused on your metrics. Set stretch (challenging) weekly targets for your key metrics such as production, quality, costs and animal health and graph and monitor them against actuals weekly. This will help you to achieve max production in the peak lactation period of September and October (for southern hemisphere), setting you up for the rest of the … [Read more...]
Lean is about working smarter not harder
Listen to this great interview with Radio NZ for the Country Life show about how lean can help your farm. It talks about what we are doing on our farm, how we are introducing different lean principles and the big benefits we have seen so far. https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/countrylife/audio/2018703869/working-smarter-not-harder-the-lean-approach-to-dairying … [Read more...]
A Lean Farm is a People Farm
A Lean Farm focuses on and develops people. Last week we had our end of season Performance and Personal Development Reviews. We have trialled various versions of templates and formats for our reviews, continuously improving them to suit our needs and attempting to make them as simple yet effective as possible. We are not perfect yet and will continue to evolve these over time. Our format now is standard for everyone and contains 4 one page documents for each review – First Quarter, … [Read more...]
A Lean Farm is a strategic farm
Lean isn’t just about the tools like 5S, Visualisation and Standard Work. Importantly lean starts with the high level business strategy and how a farm’s goals are cascaded through the business into tangible actions for the whole team. This ensures that goals don’t just stay goals but can be practically achieved to take your farm forward. On our farm we hold an annual strategy day every year with the whole team. We ran this on Friday followed by our end of season team event. During our … [Read more...]
Lean Visual Management of calves
Lean Farming and Visualisation A key lean tool is visual management. This is about having real time, live information available and visual for the team to use to manage a process or area. This helps anyone immediately see what is happening and make real time decisions based on actual data. It also helps to immediately spot problems and therefore react quickly to any issues. Lean at Clovelly Farm Mark Miers and his team and Clovelly Farm in Tasmania have very impressive visual … [Read more...]