Ben Hartman grew up on a 500-acre corn and soybean farm where success meant getting bigger every year – buy a bigger tractor, rent more land, build another grain bin. He started his own farm with the same get-bigger mentality until one day he got a wake-up “thud.” In a wind storm, his new greenhouse, built in a rush to expand, went airborne and crash landed on the barn roof.
Today, Ben, author of The Lean Farm, and his wife, Rachel, own and operate Clay Bottom Farm, which is less than one acre but more productive and profitable than their old five-acre spread. They rely on lean principles rather than computerized tractors, genetically modified crops, or GPS-guided herbicide sprayers that are the mainstays of U.S. farms.
Listen to Ben’s fascinating and insightful explanation of why farming just may be the next industry ripe for disruption. You’ll learn why lean management principles:
- Upend the mass production farming model of endlessly pushing corn, soybeans, and a few other products with almost no regard for what customers actually want.
- Make small-scale farming practical and profitable for young people and agro-entrepreneurs wanting to farm.
- Require half the tools and far less work to be more and more profitable.
- Let Clay Bottom farm move from the country to inside city limits, within a mile of the consumers and restaurants they serve.
- Give Clay Bottom the flexibility to change what it grows every few months to produce the crops customers want — in the amounts they want to buy them.
Click here for more information on Ben and on Clay Bottom Farm, including links to Lean Farm books and its own online Lean Farm School program.
