This isn't exactly a "lean" thing, but it is about adapting your processes to ensure that you are doing what's best for your animals and also getting better results for the farm. In this hot weather, we have identified and cordoned off our shady paddocks. We have shifted our milking times by an hour and adjusted our grazing plans so that our cows can rest from around 11am-3pm under the shady trees rather than standing in hot paddocks getting heat stressed. This is our first trial doing this … [Read more...]

A couple of weeks ago was our scheduled monthly farm walk for January. This time we trialled going digital for our audit rather than using the paper check sheet. We have recently started using FarmIQ on our farm and are slowly integrating more and more features onto the farm. One of them is the ability to develop checklists that can be viewed by multiple people via an app and ticked off as you do each item. You can even use voice recognition to record your notes (we will trial that next month!) … [Read more...]

On our farm we are also trying to embrace more and more technology and become more digitalised. We have installed a large tv screen in our main office on the wall. We now use it for all our team presentations, monthly big picture breakfasts, and weekly CI sessions. It has been brilliant as we can use wireless laptop screen sharing and screen information, videos, the team can present their own things (one of our team members presented some interesting info about Chile the other day). And of … [Read more...]

If you want to step out of the day to day to focus more on "working on the business" you need systems and tools in place to ensure that the farm continues to run well without you. One tool we use is a monthly Manager Farm Walk Audit.This is essential an audit of the whole farm. The management team get together on a monthly basis and audit the entire farm against a number of criteria on an audit sheet. They take their audit sheet (which has around 50 items under specific categories to check such … [Read more...]

Lean Farming: What does Lean have to do with farming? How can it apply lean principles to a farm? Farming is completely different to making cars isn’t it? Yes farming is different – we have a lot more variables that perhaps are not as easily controlled – weather, cows health, global stock markets, environmental changes. However, we also have farm inputs, outputs and processes which we can have control of. Just like in manufacturing, we have people, cows, materials, resources, equipment and … [Read more...]