Our genius planning tool

Here is what farming looks like to me: a zillion different, semi-related projects going on at any given time all over the place, and continual reaction and putting out fires as the weather, bugs, blights, sick sheep, muscle sprains etcetera play games with any plans. That’s on established farms. On a farm being built from scratch as ours is, with each year being different, with farmers like us who don’t have much experience it’s even more topsy turvy. It would be easy for us to just be running around randomly from one project to another like chickens without heads pretty much from March to November. Thankfully, when we started in 2018 - putting a food forest in our back yard - Mark shared this really cool planning tool with me and it’s been my farmbrain-organizer ever since. It’s called a scrum board. In this letter, I’m going to share the 2024 scrum board and how we use it.

First, let me elaborate a bit on what we’re talking about here. A scrum board is comprehensive, nuts and bolts planning tool that reaches from a top-level project overview, to intermediate parts or stages of the project, all the way down to concrete, executable tasks.

To create a scrum board, first start with a high-level list of project parts. Ours are topics like: chickens, sheep, new blueberry field, nut tree planting, three sisters garden. If you miss a broad topic even as you get quite far in planning, no problem. There is no hierarchy here, so you can just add it in. For example, this year, I forgot “mushrooms” until the scrum board was almost done. I just added it in and continued planning. These big topics are called the epics in scrum jargon.
 
Next comes a more focused level (but still not tasks) - these are called stories in scrumese. Within sheep we have: lambing, sheep registration, summer grazing, winter feed/hay. Within the nut tree planting we have: wood chip circles, planting trees, planting supportive herbs, summer care. Although the stories are hierarchically below epics, within a particular epic there is no hierarchy or time sequence for the stories, no first this, then that. So again - forgot something? Just add it in.
 
Thirdly, we come to the level of specific, executable tasks. These are things we can actually DO. For example, in winter feed/hay, we might have: call John for hay pickup date; reserve U-Haul van; pick up van and hay; stack hay in barn. All of this is in an excel workbook, which I share with you here: 2024 scrum board

This excel sheet is quite large and not handy to use. The next genius part of this tool is how tasks are presented to the team/workers and how you decide on which tasks to do when: with the use of post-it stickies and weekly/daily team-scrum meetings.
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When the scrum plan in the computer workbook is done, all the tasks are made concrete and visible by writing them down on post-it stickies and putting the stickies up on some highly visible surface - a wall, a door, or, in our case, the fridge downstairs in the farm kitchen. It’s quite exciting, at the beginning of the season, to see the whole fridge covered in colorful squares. I organize them loosely by epic (sheep-related stickies all together) and roughly in order of the season (spring tasks at the top, fall tasks at the bottom). If we have done our scrum planning perfectly (which we never do), then completing all the stickie tasks means we have done everything in our 2024 plan.


With the stickies up, we can start work. At the start of each week (after animal chores!) the team gathers round the fridge and we decide which of the stickie tasks we’re going to work on that week. We talk about where we are overall and what the broad goals of this period are (“last week we finished making all the wood chip piles; looks like this week is going to be hot; we want to make some progress on the chicken food forest”) and people get to give preferences (“I really want to do some planting”). From there, we select what we think is a doable number of tasks for the week and move those post-it notes up to a special place on the fridge for ONGOING tasks. It’s fun to move the notes, and gets the work started with a little micro-action. I will say we are almost invariably over-optimistic about what we can accomplish!

From there, you start work! As the week goes on, there are quick check-ins, to see what is done, and what we can do next. Finally, the best part, when a task is complete, the person(s) who finished it get to take that stickie note and paste it on the other side of the fridge in the DONE area! Big dopamine rush, seriously!

If you have parsed your tasks well, each stickie moves from the ONGOING to the DONE part of the scrum board reasonably quickly, say in a few days or at the most over the course of two weeks. And, if you’ve done a good job of overall planning, then, right at the end of the season, the very last of the stickies move into the DONE area and you are complete. On our farm, I’ll admit there have been stickies that have taken literally months to complete when I completely missed how much work was involved in that task. Or, we have had to remove a whole group of stickies if it turned out that we were not going to be able to get to a particular epic at all. Or we have had to add a whole new set of stickies when we totally overlooked some bigger project. Over the years, I’ve gotten slightly better (operative word being slightly), as measured by faster stickie movement from ONGONG to DONE and being able to stick with more of the initial stickies.

As you may have noted, scrum board planning does not include (necessarily) estimated time or date to complete each task, nor is there a fixed order. It mimics real life: things can take longer or move more quickly, and the order of tasks emerges from regular conversations and assessments of where you are. This feature is awesome because you don’t need to break your head over getting timing, dates, and order just right - a completely impossible job as anyone who has ever planned anything knows.
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Having said that, I will say that I do make estimates of the number of days each task will take and approximately when it will be done, and try to remember to write down the actual time needed and dates we worked on it. The idea here is to plan for a reasonable workload and spread of work-days over the months, given our anticipated crew size, and to improve my estimates over time by comparing my initial expectations with the actual outcomes.

So, what is planned for 2024? Like last year, we have our chickens, mushrooms, and our sheep, and we are continuing to put nut trees and berries in the fields.
The chickens are a flock of 100 heirlooms that lay rainbow eggs we sell at the Greenfield and Turners Fall markets and via a very small CSA. The mushrooms we will grow for the farmer’s markets like last year, but maybe we will get some shiitake from our mushroom logs (this would mark a 15-year success! See the mushroom saga letters), and we’ll start some new logs. The sheep will hopefully give us some pretty lambs to sell to homesteaders and will rotate around the fields cutting the grass and depositing their fertilizer.

This year, hopefully, will mark the last year that we ordered nut tree seedlings - another 100 mixed chestnuts from a new, local nursery, Yellowbud. There are approximately 100 walnut trees and 100 pecan family trees in the nursery that will remain there until we plant them out in the fall season. At that point, we will have about 400 nut trees planted out on 4-5 acres, all growing in fertility islands with plenty of organic material and family of supportive green perennials - comfrey, peppermint, geranium, chamomile, chives, garlics …. 

We will also hope to make a good dent towards completing the berry plantings, with 600 small blueberry bushes coming to add to our new blueberry field behind the house, and seeing if we can start goji berries from seeds and seaberries from cuttings - all in baby care nurseries.

Last year was the first year we planted a three-sister garden, the traditional native-American mix of corn, beans, and squash. It provided us with beauty all summer, and plenty of dried beans, but sadly the corn was eaten by rodents, and the squash never quite got off the ground. This year, I am going to see if I can find some good rodent deterrent (coyote urine?) and start the squash in the greenhouse before planting it to see if that helps. I mean really, squash is supposed to grow like a weed!

One of the most exciting new projects - to me - is the chicken food forest. When we had chickens in our back yard in Needham, we did not buy any grains for them.  We gave  them food scraps from us and a few neighbors, and they at those plus the bugs growing in the food scrap pile. I had hoped to continue this system on the farm, but instead, have been buying nearly all the chicken food in the form of grain. I hate this approach— growing chicken feed is a very inefficient use of resources to produce eggs (more on that in a next letter). So, we’re going to try to get 20-30 families on our food scrap pick up route, which should provide about a third of the chicken’s food needs. For the remaining food needs we’re going to plant a one-acre chicken food forest with berries, herbs, greens, and bugs that chickens love, all geared to maximum calorie and nutrient production. This year, we can put in all the plants, and over time, as they grow, we’ll see if we can eliminate the grain purchases for 100% local, sustainable, egg production! :)