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...]

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...]

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 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...]

A lean dairy farm also needs a lean dairy shed or milking parlour. Is your dairy shed or facilities a lean dairy shed? Are you thinking about building a new dairy shed and want to incorporate lean thinking into your shed design? I have been talking to a farmer in NZ that is in this process. I didn't incorporate a detailed section on this topic in my book (and if there is another edition I will do) but I had a quick think about some of the frustrations I have seen in our own shed and things to … [Read more...]

One of the key improvements we are making on our farm is the introduction of a lean tool called visualisation. This is about making things easy to understand using visual signs, symbols, colours, labels and so on. Visualisation is all around us in our everyday life. It helps us to grasp a situation quickly and make the right decision or action based on the visual information. Good visualisation helps someone to immediately understand what is required with out the need to have to go looking for a … [Read more...]

It was very exciting to see my new book in bookstores yesterday!!. The book is now available in all Paperplus and Whitcoulls stores in New Zealand and all Dymocks stores in Australia. Also available online through all major booksellers. Visit your local bookstore to grab a copy. Visit www.theleandairyfarm.com for more info.   … [Read more...]

People are one of the most important assets that you will have on farm. The success and contribution your people will add to your business is determined on how well you empower them and build engagement and motivation. Good leaders and employee support mechanisms and systems can help a business bring out the best from each team member. Other industries have been focusing on building people talent and engagement for decades, and farming is slowly catching up. Team development, empowerment and … [Read more...]

After developing the successful LeanFarm program (www.leanfarm.nz) - a lean training program tailored specifically for dairy farmers in 2016, I am incredibly excited to release my book The Lean Dairy Farm to the world. The book is for every farmer globally who wants to use proven lean principles to improve their farming business, eliminating waste from their processes, saving time, cutting costs and importantly developing an empowered team. The book uses our own dairy farm's lean journey as a … [Read more...]

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...]