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Growing vegetables, the Toyota way

Several years back, Ben Hartman and his wife were getting by, but just barely. Their small vegetable farm in Northern Indiana was starting to gain some notice from chefs and local newspapers, but they were feeling overworked, especially for an income that did little more than pay the bills.

Upon hearing this from his farmers, a customer named Steve Brenneman, owner of The Aluminum Trailer Company, thought he could help. At his nearby factory, Brenneman employed a system of production called lean manufacturing and he had some ideas about how the same principles might help save the Hartmans’ time, money, and energy.

Lean manufacturing is a philosophy of production based on the unique system developed by the car company Toyota. Save for 2011 (the year a tsunami devastated Japan), Toyota has been the number one car manufacturer in the world for the last eight years. It’s also the most valuable vehicle brand by nearly $3 billion. And because it informs every aspect of Toyota’s business, many point to lean manufacturing, or what the company refers to simply as The Toyota Way, as the reason for such success.

Hartman had some reservations about implementing a system designed for car manufacturing on his diversified vegetable farm. He worried that the lean approach may lead directly to monoculture farming, and he was also concerned about the practicality of implementing a system based on innate objects in an industry where the parts and pieces move and grow, get disease, get eaten, and die—sometimes all overnight.

“Imagine running your factory without a roof over your head,” says Hartman, “That’s the kind of volatility we deal with on a regular basis.” The standardization factories could rely on, in other words, seemed flatly unrealistic on a farm.

What convinced Hartman was Brenneman’s assurance that the lean approach was not just a style of manufacturing. Instead, he explained, lean was a way to grow more profitable with almost no added investment. “It’s just improving your process,” Hartman recalls Brenneman telling him. “And that idea appealed to us.”

Read more at Civil Eats
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