Going from brain dump to something useful
This month we’re going to go from last month’s brain dump of processes into something you can actually give to someone else and have them do a passable job replicating what you do on a daily basis. If you haven’t read last month’s article, go back and do that now — otherwise you might be a bit confused going forward.
When we left off last month, we had eight pages of brain dump on wash/pack procedures from a two-hour session with Russell at Love is Love Cooperative Farm. About a week later, I drove down to the farm to shadow a typical wash/pack day. I left with notes scribbled everywhere and lots of ideas for how to make the process easier to follow. And I learned that the SOP work we’re doing will have a real test run in November because Russell and Monica are expecting a baby!
Being part of a cooperative farm, Russell and Monica will have more support to keep the farm running while they’re getting to know their new son than most farmers would. But their absence highlights how important it is to have clear documentation of what you do on a day-to-day basis so that someone else can step into your shoes — whether you’re planning to return or whether your business is growing and you’re passing part of your workload to someone else.
Before I dive into what happened when I followed Russell around the wash/pack station for a day, I’d like to emphasize that there is no special training needed for this role. I haven’t taken any classes in writing SOPs — I’m just someone who’s reasonably curious and not familiar with the existing routines. When you’re trying to find someone to help you with this process, you’re looking for someone who can put themselves into the shoes of the person learning.
In watching Russell, I was pretending that I’d need to be doing the work myself and asking what variations could exist that I’d need to know about. I was also taking note of actions Russell has developed to make the work more efficient or ergonomic that didn’t make it into his initial brain dump. For example, at Love is Love, greens go from harvest totes into a bubbler and from there into a greens spinner. There are two baskets for the greens spinner so that one basket can be spinning while the second is being filled. A simple detail, but one that makes the process twice as fast and wasn’t immediately obvious from the brain dump we’d done earlier.
After watching how Russell goes through the day, I had notes scribbled on every one of the eight pages I’d previously written up. Then I sat down and created an enormous flow chart that captured all the tasks and decision points throughout the day.
Now, this flow chart is large enough that it’s not particularly useful as a learning tool unless we print it out and hang it on the wall in the wash pack station — which may be what happens. But it serves as a foundation to translate the SOPs into different forms to make them accessible for different types of learners. The chart is great for visual learners, because it walks them through the day step by step. It also provides a space to put photos in context — the arrangement of the baffles in the root vegetable washer, for example, or the range of dirt on freshly harvested produce that would require you to change the washing procedure.
From the chart, we can create a document for those who learn primarily through reading. We can identify tasks that can be recorded for auditory learners — and for things that are just difficult to get across in text, such as the safest way to lift buckets of produce into the spinner. And we provide a reference for the folks who need to do something in order to learn — the chart can provide a reminder for the things they’ve done once and allow them to operate solo with less training than would be needed otherwise.
The final step for this particular SOP, which may or may not be useful for your farm, is to translate it into Spanish. Since the farm is going to be hosting their first H2A workers next year, having the SOPs in Spanish will help them make sure that their new employees get up to speed quickly.
When the final SOPs are done with all the photos and videos complete, we’ll put a note in this space and make them available for anyone who wants to look through them at members.acresusa.com.
Next month we’ll be talking grant funding and digging into how we worked with Love is Love on a Farm Labor Stabilization Program application.
Kirsten Simmons is the co-founder and Chief Farming Officer for Good Agriculture (goodagriculture.com), a company dedicated to helping farmers find funding, manage finances, reach new customers and get certified. She also farms at Ecosystem Farm in Atlanta (ecosystemfarm.com).
