Planning

With nothing on paper, two unwritten triggers decide the big purchase: the money that arrived and the tax bill that followed. Neither one asks whether the item was needed.

The farms that review on time are not more disciplined. They wrote a name beside the date and told that person the same day.

The sequence standing in the field this year is a record of decisions already taken. Without a sheet written beforehand, nobody can tell a choice from an oversight.

The lender reads the figures. Nobody can correct them next year unless the price behind each one was written down beside it, with a date.

Nobody set out to choose it and nobody has opened it since. Four of the five rules read here make the method easy to keep, and none of the five asks the farm to write down which one it is under.

Training arrives when a supplier offers one or when somebody makes an expensive mistake. The plan turns that into lines you can close, each with a name and a date.

The sheet does not tell you what price to take. It tells you, before the first sale, what you will be comparing that price against.

Nobody argued with the goal, so it looked agreed. Asking each person separately, in writing, is the only way to find out whether it arrived.

The interval you check on sets the floor. Look every 30 days and the average problem is already two weeks old when you meet it.

Agreeing that the farm has values is close to universal, and close to useless. The document is the part that separates one farm from another.

A goal you can only settle at the end of the year is measurable and still gives nobody anything to steer by.

Seven in ten farms say they regularly assess their advantages and disadvantages. In the survey that measured it against a written plan, saying so predicted nothing.

The document is filed under old age and behaves like a management practice. The farms that have one are the same farms that write their leases down.