Digging Up the Garden - Lean, Reliability and Machine Availability

Living on a prairie acreage, there's a lot of dirt to be dug. Whether it's cultivating the space between the shelterbelt rows, preparing the garden for planting, or digging weeds out of the too-big flowerbeds, there's always some kind of digging to do. Since a big goal of acreage living is relaxing and enjoying nature, you end up with a bunch of different tools in an attempt to get everything done with as little effort as possible. And since work on the acreage usually has to squeeze between the demands of life and your real job, the digging usually has to happen now, or you won't get a chance for another week or two. Otherwise, things (ie. weeds) get out of control.

Preparing the large garden this year, I planned to use our old 35hp Massey Ferguson tractor with its sixty-inch three-point-hitch cultivator. Unfortunately, I noticed a crack in the tractor frame that definitely needed some welding before taking it out in the field.

Since I only had one day between work commitments to get the garden done, I decided to use the 16hp John Deere riding tractor with the 36" rototiller instead. That worked pretty well for a good three-quarters of the garden, but then the drive belt broke and I didn't have a replacement. Since the parts store was on the other side of the city  (a full hour round trip), I switched to Plan C; I wanted to get the job done.

Plan C was the 8hp rear-tine TroyBilt tiller, 24" wide and usually reliable, although I'd remember having trouble with it the previous year. In checking it over, I found there was no lubricant in the worm gear and remembered the leak that I didn't fix last fall. Rather than take the time to fix it and go buy the right oil, I turned to the small 40-year old Craftsman 7hp front tiller, 22" wide that had been sitting in the shop for years. To my surprise, it started fine but the mechanism to engage the digging tines was bent and needed repair.

Since there was only a couple hundred square feet of garden left to do, I turned to plan E, an 8" wide potato fork and a rake. Working hard for about an hour, I dug up the remainder of the garden by hand and raked it to break up the chunks. The garden was ready, but hardly a smooth, lean, waste-free process.

As we strive to improve our processes, and get more done with less work and less waste between steps, we end up relying on things to happen properly the first time. We rely on consistency. When things go wrong, it can bring everything to a standstill. Two simple lessons here from digging in the dirt:

First, your equipment, tools and technology must be well-maintained, reliable, and available to do the job when needed. As your processes become Lean and the inventory and backlog buffers that previously hid downtime are eliminated, equipment failures can have immediate, rippling, far-reaching effects on production. Effort spent on reliability and root cause analysis of downtime is effort well spent.

Secondly, simple tools are pretty darned reliable. Instead of complex ERP systems, computer networks and electronic devices, consider hand-written visual status indicators on a white board in the work area. Which is more likely to break down, be unservicable, and be hard to improve?

Advanced technology, automated equipment and other complex tools can be great, but they dramatically increase your vulnerability to unplanned downtime, and to being stuck with a system that is hard to fix, hard to change. If you are unable to work on the system yourself, the risk of failure, and the effects of a failure, are both increased.

Keep it Simple. Keep it Maintained. Keep it Available.