The Lean Farm Quotes

“Every tool on your farm should have a place. It should be in its place or in the hands of a worker. There is no third option. Use the tool, then put it back home.”
― Ben Hartman, The Lean Farm: How to Minimize Waste, Increase Efficiency, and Maximize Value and Profits with Less Work

“The dominant business model in the United States assumes a successful business will grow in size every year. But can one also find one’s right size and be satisfied with it? Lean principles—which focus on creating more value over simply more quantity—opened up the possibility for us of not growing bigger, of thriving even within the constraint of size.”
― Ben Hartman, The Lean Farm: How to Minimize Waste, Increase Efficiency, and Maximize Value and Profits with Less Work

“A farmer's work in many ways is like setting a stage. In theater, stage managers lay out furniture and props, set up lights, and clean to get a set ready for actors to take over and create a show. Farmers plow, fertilize, set up irrigation systems and fences, and otherwise prep the stage of their farms for the real actors -- the sun and the life within the seeds and animals -- to create the show.”
― Ben Hartman, The Lean Farm: How to Minimize Waste, Increase Efficiency, and Maximize Value and Profits with Less Work

“A farmer's work is more like that of a horse trainer than a mechanic, more like that of a healer than a computer repairperson. It is not really accurate to say that farmers grow food or raise animals. Farmers alter environmental conditions in such a way as to maximize a plant's or an animal's innate ability to do its own growing -- in the same way that the best horse trainers seek to draw out abilities already within their horses or in the way the best healers know when to stand back and let their patients' bodies do the work. There is mystery in farming.”
― Ben Hartman, The Lean Farm: How to Minimize Waste, Increase Efficiency, and Maximize Value and Profits with Less Work