The Lean Dairy Farm

Eliminate Waste, Save Time, Cut Costs - Creating a More Productive, Profitable and Higher Quality Farm

Jana Hocken, Mat Hocken

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780730368427
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Agrobusiness

Make your farm better, smarter, and more productive

The Lean method is revolutionising farming globally with its proven approach for reducing waste, improving productivity and sustaining profits.In The Lean Dairy Farm, dairy farmer and Lean consultant Jana Hocken explains why this approach is essential to every dairy farm and how to apply these tools, practices and principles to your dairy operation.

The Lean Dairy Farm helps reduce the common problems and stressors faced by farmers every day: long work hours, high staff turnovers, repeat problems, breakdowns, wastage, safety and high costs. Using her own family's dairy farm as a case study, Jana provides insight into how the Lean approach applies to farming, introduces practical tools to help you improve efficiency and reduce waste, and shows you how to create a farm culture that supports Lean thinking.

Even if Lean is entirely new to you, this book offers a simple blueprint for applying its principles and practices to improve your farm.

• Quickly make use of basic Lean concepts on your farm
• Identify and eliminate waste in farm processes
• Organise your farm effectively to improve productivity
• Standardise your processes to do everything right the first time
• Develop an engaged, high performing team

If you want a more efficient, profitable and robust dairy farm, The Lean Dairy Farm is for you.

PART I
The concept of ‘Lean'

I have dedicated the first part of this book to giving farmers a little bit of a background and insight into Lean management so that you have a better understanding of what it is and where it's come from. For many of you this may be the first time you have heard of ‘Lean' and I want to make sure you don't think it's some kind of exercise program! Also, it's important for you to understand the methodology, how it was developed and where it has come from so that when you are talking to people or your team about Lean you can confidently explain what it actually means and give it some context. It also gives you some confidence that this is a real, proven methodology that's used by thousands of businesses globally (including farms across Europe and the United States) and isn't something I've invented. I have also used this section to give you a brief insight into why Lean applies to dairy farming and why it can have such a big impact on your farm.

Chapter 1
Before we get started …

The Lean Dairy Farm focuses on improvements that any farmer can make on their farm. However, to implement any type of improvement you will need to first be open to change, and to accept that your farm isn't perfect and there are opportunities to improve. Further, you must acknowledge that while there are some things that affect your farm that you can't control, there are many opportunities and improvements that are within your control and solely dependent on your decisions and management. In this chapter I will discuss two concepts to help you transition your thinking so that Lean can be applied successfully on your farm: ‘external vs internal locus of control' and ‘the “possible” mindset'.

External vs internal locus of control

Profit and success are based on a lot of factors. To truly make your farm a Lean Farm will mean thinking differently (see figure 1.1, overleaf), whether you are the farm owner, manager, assistant or anyone else working in the industry. First, it's important to note that Lean is not going to solve all your problems. It can't change many factors that are inherent in farming — what I call the ‘external factors'. These include:

• weather
• global dairy prices
• interest rates
• politics
• taxes
• policies/regulations.

Figure 1.1 the locus of control

Based on a model by Julian Rotter

What Lean can help with is the things you can control on your farm. These are the ‘internal factors' and include:

• your work environment
• what you do and how you do it
• your quality
• your waste
• your efficiency.

Therefore, to gain real value from this book and be able to implement Lean thinking effectively, we need to shift our mindset. We need to stop focusing and complaining about the external factors that we can't control. We need to stop believing that everything is outside of our control and blaming these external factors for our inefficiencies or telling ourselves things like ‘we can't do anything', ‘our hands are tied because milk prices are down' and so on. Instead we need to start accepting responsibility and taking control of the internal factors in our farm business.

This is what Lean and the concept of kaizen (we talk about this in chapter 2) are based on: continuously improving the things that are in our scope of control.

Toyota is a perfect example: they have many external factors that affect their business and are beyond their control, such as strong competition, fluctuating currencies, political situations, steel prices and so on. Yet they are still the world's most profitable car manufacturer because they use Lean principles and focus on the internal factors that they control and can continuously improve on.

The ‘possible' mindset

The second concept that farmers need to open up to is something I call the ‘possible' mindset (see figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 the possible mindset

Basically, we need to shift our thinking from ‘not possible' mode to ‘possible' mode. Instead of believing that it's not possible to do something, we need to start asking ourselves how we can make it possible: how can we do thi...