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...]
Lean tools for bulls
I have been running my LeanFarm training with farmers in Tasmania over the last few weeks and have come across some great examples of simple lean tools applied on farm to make life easier, more efficient, safer and prevent frustrating problems. Visualisation is a simple lean tool that can make your farm more productive. One great example I have seen is at Matthew Gunnigham's farm in northern Tasmania. His team painted their two bull teams in two bright colours (red and blue) to help quickly … [Read more...]
Safe Farm – lean tools will make a safer farm
Safe Farm using Lean: A Lean Farm is also a Safe Farm. Lean tools such a Visualisation and 5S can significantly help to improve safety on your farm. Our team has been working on improving our safety processes. We had a session about all hazards on farm and it really reinforced how dangerous our farms actually are. But with good safety awareness, visualisation and standard processes, we can make our farms a safer place to work and live. Our team are working on standard hazard and safety … [Read more...]