I made the front cover of Growing For Market with my article about running a Team Season review. We do a team season review every September at Tourne-Sol Co-operative Farm. It is one of the most significant ways we’ve figured out how to improve farm operations. In the article I break down how we run … More Running a team season review
Yes, you can directly share your spreadsheet and all those pivot tables you created with your farm team. But if you just want them to have tomorrow’s planting list, you might be better off giving them a PDF. PDF files are ???? Easy to email/text/DM ???? Easy to read ???? Easy to print They are … More fsa tip #55 Spreadsheet PDF power
Nonviolent communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg Nonviolent communication (NVC) has been a communication tool we’ve used at Tourne-Sol since the beginning of our farm. There are 4 steps when you communicate with NVC. You start by stating an objective observation about what happened. You do your best to keep any interpretations or judgements out of … More Farmer Book Club: Nonviolent Communication
Sometimes something goes wrong in your Google sheets. A formula is erased, a week of harvest data is deleted, all the formatting gets reset, something strange in your neighbourhood. When you just notice that you made a mistake, you can use UNDO (Control+Z) to reverse the last actions you made. But once you close the … More FSA Tip #54 How to save a Farm Spreadsheet when things go wrong
When I get asked for references on how to run a co-op farm, I point folks to Cooperative Farming, Frameworks For Farming Together by Faith Gilbert. This is part of the Greenhorns guidebook series. (You can download this book for free from https://greenhorns.org/guidebook-series/ – They have other book there too!) If you want to know … More Farmer Book Club: Cooperative Farming
Here’s a younger Dan and Emily in the summer of 2005. Tourne-Sol’s first season We still have that harvest knife though the blade is a little narrower. We don’t really use stirrup hoes much. Collinear hoes have become the dominant hoe on our farm. That basket has long since been tossed on a burn pile. … More Food Garden Life – what else is there?
Once your farm team hits a certain size, it can be easy to forget someone when you’re emailing the team or sharing spreadsheets. Setting up a Google group for your farm team lets you easily make sure everyone is included in all your messages. If you have different crews on your farm, you could also … More FSA Tip #53 Emailing your Farm Team
This week the #farmerbookclub is going to be the #farmerpodcastclub A lot of farming is about people working together. And you can do it all kinds of ways. And that’s what this podcast is about. Jackson Rollett interviews farmers about how they work together, how they support farmers working together, and how farmers work with … More Farmer Podcast Club: The Collaborative Farming Podcast
Let’s say you have a spreadsheet – maybe it’s a crop plan, perhaps it’s a harvest log, or it could be some sales records – whatever it is, you want to share it with your farm team so they can use that information to get your job done. But you’re also afraid of what folks … More FSA Tip #52 Sharing/Protecting Farm Google Sheets
A nice stand of spinach = deep satisfaction Especially at Tourne-Sol where we struggled with spinach for years. What did we do to get this great stand of spinach? I think we pre-soaked it before seeding it with the Jang. But I actually don’t really know how we did it. This is partly because I’m … More The deep satisfaction of good spinach germination