I've been thinking about the term 'self-sufficiency' this week - its a term that I sometimes use unthinkingly when talking about what we'd like to achieve here. When I start to analyse the term I can't help but think that its actually a pretty inadequate description. 'Sufficiency', in modern language at least has a connotation of 'just enough', or 'adequate', almost a synonym for 'subsistence'. What I'd like to achieve is vastly different - I really like Joel Salatin's (www.Polyfacefarm.com) vision of “making a white collar salary from a pleasant life in the country.”
A better term than 'self-sufficiency' for what I'd like to do here is 'self-abundance' - to have a modern, generous lifestyle, but one focussed on the land. It would be great to achieve this through a business which has principles, and whose purpose it is to sustain and nourish my family, and to persist long enough to transfer into their hands when they are old enough.
I sometimes buy The Farmer's Guardian (www.farmersguardian.com/) which I find interesting, admittedly mostly for the machinery classified ads (!), but it also gives a really interesting insight into the viewpoint of the professional farmer. The more I think about it the whole concept of the 'Farming Industry' (meaning the industry which produces the basic commodities of food - grain, pigs, milk, turnips and a thousand other things) is hopelessly out of date. When one considers the whole value-chain, taking the example of wheat, from seed to sandwich, with the 20 or so intermediaries, each earning their (probably desperately small) margin, growing bigger and bigger in order to cut their per-unit costs, whilst still producing something which can still legally be classified as 'food', its no wonder that it seems no-one makes any money without being subsidised by Europe!
With a little enterprise like ours, with small amounts of capital and land, the only way to go ahead is to differentiate ourselves from the supermarkets by selling quality, to add value by vertically integrating, to try to disintermediate by (ideally) selling direct to the consumer, and finally to cut our costs by operating in a resourceful, innovative way. I'd like to reflect on how the 5 'Lean Principles' ( see the classic book 'Lean Thinking' www.amazon.co.uk/Lean-Thinking-Banish-Create-Corporation/dp/0743231643/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1338925821&sr=8-1) might be of use to us here:
- Specify value from the standpoint of the end customer by product family.
- Identify all the steps in the value stream for each product family, eliminating whenever possible those steps that do not create value.
- Make the value-creating steps occur in tight sequence so the product will flow smoothly toward the customer.
- As flow is introduced, let customers pull value from the next upstream activity.
- As value is specified, value streams are identified, wasted steps are removed, and flow and pull are introduced, begin the process again and continue it until a state of perfection is reached in which perfect value is created with no waste.
Immediately steps 1, 2 and 4 start to resonate! What consumer really specifies value as 'the cheapest radish which can legally be classified as such, regardless of taste'?! (Actually I guess the classic example of this kind of behaviour is the supermarket tomato - it looks like a tomato, but tastes of nothing!). The truth is that we all prioritise TIME and convenience, at the expense of taste and animal welfare, and I think that is precisely the puzzle which Tymawr Farm will have to try to solve.
I've already listed some business / farming principles which summarise how I'd like to manage the smallholding in Vision #1, and I think they really complement the 'self-abundance' concept and the ideas above.
