Standardizing Your SOPs

How to create standard operating procedures for your farm

There comes a time in every farmer’s life when they come to a hard realization: there aren’t enough hours or energy in a day for one person to do everything that needs doing on a farm. This is usually soon followed by the realization that training people to help is extremely challenging. No one cares as much as you do, has your depth of knowledge, or wants to put in the hard work it takes to become skilled … especially these days!

Or — and hear me out — maybe your SOPs could use some improvement. Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) are documentation that serve as a guide for breaking down repeatable processes on a farm, making it easier for others to do the work.

Having an SOP for a task doesn’t excuse you from training a new hire, but it does provide you with a framework for training and gives your people something to refer back to when they have questions. Good SOPs should guide worker decision making — both in handling the routine and recognizing when something is out of their skill set.

When creating SOPs, the biggest challenge is recognizing your own skills — the things you do so often that they have become second nature to you. These are the tasks that need to find their way into your SOP. For example, you know that used rags go in the bucket by the door to the kidding stalls. But if you don’t put that in your SOP, your employee has to see you put a dirty rag there during training and remember that when they’re on their own, they have to take the time to look for other dirty rags, they have to ask questions, or they have to guess and probably be wrong.

Part of our work with Love Is Love Cooperative Farm this year is building out SOPs as they prepare to welcome H2A workers to their farm. As a reminder, LIL Cooperative Farm is a diversified vegetable, seedling and flower operation growing on 64 acres in Mansfield, Georgia. Grower/Co-owner Russell is in charge of the wash/pack processes and took a first stab at documenting his work processes. Then we sat down to work through all the details.

The Process of Creating SOPs

If you’re starting your SOPs from scratch, start by breaking your farm into categories. If you’re farming timber, perhaps your categories could be land preparation, planting, maintenance and harvest. If you have a cow-calf operation, maybe you’re looking at feed runs/storage, pasture maintenance, grazing rotations, calving, branding/vaccines/pregnancy checks, dealing with injuries and loading for sales. At LIL, we settled on greenhouse, field operations, harvesting and wash/pack. We decided to focus on wash/pack first, as Russell had already sketched out some of his processes on paper.

Once you identify your categories, you’ll do a brain dump of everything you do within each category. Russell broke the wash/pack into the different equipment types and a morning routine to get the space set up. At this point, he sent them over to me and we sat down to go through them together.

Having someone outside your farm to work through your SOPs is essential. You need to get outside your own head, and doing that without another person who is unfamiliar with your operation is really, really hard.

Russell and I sat down for a couple of hours and talked through what life in the wash/pack station looks like day to day. As we talked, the SOPs expanded.

First, we dove into all the crops that pass through the LIL wash station. Each has slightly different requirements for washing and packing, and we talked through them all. Then we looked at the different equipment, the warm and cold coolers, and where supplies are kept for cleaning and packing. We ended up with 12 pages of notes.

I took those 12 pages and looked for patterns. What steps were repeated across multiple crops? What were the exceptions to those steps? I dumped the similarities into a mind map and a table, trying to figure out how best to convey the information. Then I thought through each step we had described for each process in wash/pack. If I had never been in a wash station on a farm before, what would I find confusing about these directions?

This led to two pages of questions, which I sent over to Russell. Things like, Where are brushes and buckets located? Do brushes and buckets get cleaned themselves? What happens if someone is injured — how is the injury treated, and what happens to the produce that was being washed at the time? What is the wash/rinse/sanitize procedure for the bubblers and spinners? Are there multiple harvest vehicles?

Our next step will be for me to go down to LIL and shadow for a day to watch and develop additional questions. We’ll also be thinking through formatting — SOPs are intended to guide others through the steps you take every day, but everyone learns differently, so what are the most effective ways we can transmit this information? In our next article, we’ll dig into the different formats we come up with for the wash/pack SOPs at LIL.

Creating Your Own SOPs

If you’ve never documented the processes on your farm, I challenge you to start thinking about the repeatable tasks you do regularly. Pick a category of tasks and start jotting down what you do and how you do it. This can happen in bits and pieces throughout the day, or you can set aside time to sit down and do a brain dump on everything in your chosen category.

Then find someone outside of your farm to talk through everything with you. This can be a family member who lives elsewhere, a new employee, or a consultant like we have at Good Agriculture. Let that person ask questions and capture your answers. Don’t worry if it’s a jumbled mess — the important thing is to get it out of your head.

Take the time to do this over several sessions. Give your brain a break, and you’ll see details you’ve missed and patterns you couldn’t see from down in the weeds. Next month we’ll talk about how you can go from your jumbled mess to something that lets you easily pass off work to someone else.

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 ).