What Priority is Higher Than Priority One?

You know everyone, I've been thinking.

***together now***
A dangerous pastime...
I know.

A constant task on our farm is the act of prioritization.  In fact, I suspect everyone will agree that many choices we all make every day is simply the act of prioritizing.

You have five minutes before you must get to a meeting.  Do you a)take out the trash, b)fix your lunch for after the meeting  c)don't do anything else and leave now  d) read the next chapter in your book because there is a cat in your lap.

Once the choice is made, you've effectively set some priorities for this moment (and some of the moments thereafter) in your life.  If you choose option d), you likely have decided that the consequences of removing a cat has consequences greater than those of the other choices.  So, your priority is to maintain peace with the feline and you'll accept the consequences that might follow with respect to not having lunch, leaving the trash in the house a bit longer and dealing with potentially unhappy persons you were supposed to meet.

Would you dare offend this cat?

 Decision making and priority setting is a continuous process for us at the farm.  We have long term priority setting, mid-term priority setting, short-term priority setting and "oh crap - we have to do all of these right now or else" priority setting.

An example of the last type of priority setting follows.  We have, of course, simplified it somewhat, but we think it makes the point:

Scenario:  There are four workers on the farm, including Rob and Tammy.  It is a Thursday in late July (ed. note: ok, rain in July the past two years makes this a fictional construct - but it is based on a real-life situation.  The names have not been changed either, so there.).  We must leave to deliver produce in Cedar Falls by 3pm.  It is currently 9am.  Greens are picked and hydrocooling, green beans are picked, but not bagged and little else has been picked.  Forecast is for possible storms and we can see the dark clouds on the horizon.

The easy part - we have alot to pick for 65 Farm Share CSA members.  It usually takes everything four people can do to pick, clean, pack and prep for the trip.  So, anything else on the farm is already lower priority.  This can be harsh on days like this if there are things that really NEED to get done before the rain.  Planting the next batch of green beans, cultivating the onions before the soil gets gummed up, etc.  And, because these priority one items cannot exceed the priority one picking items, we may find ourselves a week or so behind on them.  But, that's just the way it goes.

It looks like we might have 90 minutes before some stormy weather.  The underlying priority one issue is the safety of all workers.  There is lightning in this storm, so we will be pulling everyone in until it passes.  Once it passes, we might have another 90 minute block before we have to pack and leave.  Remember, it is likely that things will be muddy at that time, so that will play into our choices.

What do you do?

Pick the cucumbers?
Pick the summer squash and zucchini?
Pick the tomatoes?
Pick the broccoli?
Pick carrots?
Clean and pack the greens that are hydrocooling?
Bag the green beans?

Does the summer squash make the cut?

Or do we cut some broccoli?

All of you who decided to bag the green beans lose.  Go to the end of the line.  We can do that when it is raining.

If you chose to pack the greens, you might actually be right.  But, why?  First, you do not want the greens to soak too long in the water.  Second, our packing area is outside.  Third, one of the workers isn't comfortable with harvesting, but likes cleaning and packing the veg.  Ok, we have one winner.  After all, we've harvested this already.  Failure to finish the preparation results in wasting a crop already in hand for the delivery.  Not a good idea.

What do we do with the other three people?

Cucumbers, summer squash and zucchini need to be picked 2 to 3 times a week.  If we keep them picked, they keep producing.  If we fail to keep them picked, we end up with giant fruit that no one wants.  And, the production levels go down for future harvest.  It's still early in the season, so we can't afford to let these go at this time.  If we pick these after the rain, they're going to be muddy, so we have to spend some time cleaning OR give people produce with some mud on it.

Broccoli sets heads that hold for a limited period of time.  The next scheduled pick will be for Tuesday's shares.  A quick look tells us that we'll have about 70 heads of broccoli that will bolt if we don't pick them in the next three days.  We haven't had much for tomatoes so far and members of the CSA desperately want some.  Harvesting from wet tomato plants can spread disease.  If it were later in the season, we might figure it is not a big problem.  But, the tomatoes are just thinking about getting going here. And, the carrots require the most time to clean.  If we pick them before the rain, they will be easier to clean because they won't have mud clinging to them.  And, we could clean them while it is raining. 

Time is running out.

We eliminate the broccoli from consideration before the rain.  It will pick the same before or after the storm (assuming the storm doesn't have lots of wind and it blows all the plants over).  We will zip out with our lettuce knives and pick the broccoli right after the storm passes through.  Yes, we'll be walking in some mud while we pick, but that's true for all our options.  It's a priority one that isn't priority one in the morning.

We eliminate the tomatoes entirely for the day.  It is sad, but there really aren't that many ready to go.  It would take too long to run the whole field in order to locate enough for everyone to get a couple of tomatoes.  If we must, we'll pick over the weekend and make tomato sauce.  There will be more tomatoes ripening the following week and beyond.  And, only one of the three workers who picks tomatoes is Rob.   In other words, it is an inefficient use of time.  We are hoping to provide farm share members the best return for the picking time available.

Carrots....hm.  Well, carrots will hold until next week.  Frankly, they should have been priority one yesterday (they were, but that's another story with another set of choices).  But, we could use the rain to do some of the cleaning.  And, if it rains alot for several days, it may be awhile before we want to work with them.  With the rain coming, we would have 3 people who could concentrate on cleaning and prepping them.  It sounds pretty appealing.  We have two broadforks, so we could have two people working on it to get about 75 pounds dug before the rain.

Then, there is summer squash, zucchini and cucumber.  We need increments of about 70 of each (to simplify matters).  Increments less than that leave us with ugly numbers that are hard to split with our farm share holders.

One worker cleaning and packing greens.  Tammy and another worker digging carrots.  Rob runs out and grabs as many increments of the zucchini, summer squash and cucumbers as he can, watching the progress of the storm and shifting so that each crop is visited and number needs for the CSA are met.

Uh oh.  We forgot the kohlrabi.

Ok, we got to them too.