Safe and efficient harvest communication

Chris: Welcome everybody to another episode of the Ag View Pitch. As we head toward harvest, one of the things I wanted to do for this conversation is just talk a little bit about bringing the team together from a communication standpoint, from safety, from understanding the equipment maintenance and that kind of stuff, and bringing everybody together. But before we get rolling, talking a little bit about pre-harvest and post-harvest meetings. Do want to remind everybody about the Ag View Executive Business Conference, January 24th, 25th, and 26th in St. Petersburg, Florida. We are super excited to have everybody there. We have quite a few people already registered, but if you're not registered, just go on to the Ag View Solutions website, agviewsolutions.com, and click on to the conference. And if you haven't looked at it yet, go through and look at that.

We're super excited, like I said, about seeing a lot of the presenters, a lot of, uh, excellent knowledge and great networking. So look forward to seeing you all there. Just wanted to mention that before we get going here on today's podcast. So we are sitting here, I'm recording this on the 20th of September, and we are several days away from harvest ourselves in our own operation, and One of the things we've always done is we've always had a pre-harvest meeting and we typically have a post-harvest meeting. We do it in the spring as well, pre-spring and post-spring, where basically you bring the whole team in, everybody in your operation, bring them in, including the part-timers, people maybe that only ever even there for maybe a number of hours, but bring everybody in that's involved. One of the first things we do is just kind of review core values.

You know, I know I've worked on core values with a lot of your operations, figuring out what those are. Those are your principles, how you make your decisions, has a lot to do with your HR and your PR, you know, how you're viewed in the community and just making sure that you're, you know, living those core values, you know, whatever they may be that you've determined that are what they are. And basically, you know, it's how you hire, fire, reward, and discipline your employees as well, and kind of how you manage yourself. So, you know, that sounds kind of cheesy, I guess, maybe on the front part of that conversation, but I think it's really important. The operations that we see have way better communication and just, you know, way, way better team health and that kind of stuff by having that and addressing that.

So The next thing that we work through in our pre-harvest meeting, and again, I know a lot of you, I mean, there's some of you guys listening to this are already done with harvest. Well, it's the post-harvest meeting then too. So be thinking about it from either pre or post. But the next thing we talk about is safety, and especially in the pre-harvest meetings, that's one of the first things that we address. And so just a couple of key points for you to think about if you're not already doing some of these things, just some things that we've observed that other operations do and we've integrated it into our operation. But number one, is just having a phone roster. And what I mean by that is just putting everybody's name on a spreadsheet, their phone number, probably their email, and also who, you know, who is their contact, you know, their emergency contact.

So if somebody gets hurt or somebody's injured and you've got an employee there, who do you call? Who do you contact if they're injured? You know, and maybe you already know, well, it's their spouse or it's their wife or it's their parents or whatever. But do you have their phone number and do you have it where you can get at it like instantaneously? So one of the things I see a lot of our guys do is we have that phone roster printed out at the meeting. A lot of people just take a picture of it, put it on their phone, and then they get phone numbers for everybody. And one of the reasons I did that originally was, you know, I was getting all these phone calls from people like, where do you want me? You know, and I have the guys in our combines are, you know, responsible for grain carts and I kind of managed the trucks, well, I was getting phone calls for everybody.

So if everybody kind of knows what their roles and responsibilities are on that sheet, so it should say right beside there, so your part-timers are calling you trying to figure out where to go, you may not be the one that wants to field all the phone calls. Maybe they can call somebody else and get the information they need without even bothering you. So anyway, they're just just a lot of reasons for that phone roster and a lot of benefits to it. The other thing I would say is, you know, we always go through the semis. I know we got some grief a few years ago just talking through kind of what our speed limits are on the gravel roads. You know, we put a speed limit of 35 on the gravel roads for our semis and had some people feedback and like, oh yeah, right, if I go 35, we'll never get done with harvest.

Well, If that's the speed limit on a gravel road, probably what's going to happen is they're going to be going 45, you know, and maybe, maybe if you say it's 45, then they're going 55. You know, it's just, just trying to be safe. And again, the courteousness. I mean, how dusty is it? It just, it's just a safety thing. The same thing in the yards, you know, what's your, what's your speed limit in the yard? I mean, have you even laid out those expectations for people? And our yard, it's 10 miles an hour, um, you know, what's, what's, what's a reasonable speed limit as you're pulling into driveways, or if you're in other people's yards, or, you know, driveways, or those kind of things to get to fields, you know, what's a courteous, you know, and safe level to be.

The other one from a safety standpoint, cell phone usage, you know, using hands-free, that kind of thing, making sure that you're not on the cell phone when you're driving on the road, with the semis and equipment and stuff, unless it's hands-free. And then, you know, just looking at the vehicles, you know, seat belts. I mean, a lot of times people get in tractors and don't put seat belts on, and that's one of the things, you know, you get hit on the highway or something and you do get rolled into a ditch or something, seat belt could easily save your life. So it's just, you know, thinking through that kind of stuff and And just making sure that you've got maps and you've talked about where field locations are well in advance. A lot of times people are tired, it's dark, somebody that's not totally familiar with where the location is, where the fields are, that kind of stuff.

Just, just map that stuff out in the daylight when everybody's rested well in advance. And it just makes things a lot smoother and a lot easier. One of the other things we do too is we invite our insurance agent to that safety meeting portion of the pre-harvest or pre-spring meeting just to make sure that they are aware of what we're trying to do to make sure that we have good communication, good safety procedures, good maintenance procedures, and all of those things just equate to a better managed operation. So I think, I think that's important. One other thing I'll mention this year that we're doing, kind of had the idea of contacting the DOT. Some of you are going to be like, oh yeah, that's really what I want is the DOT in my yard. Looking at our trucks. Well, that's what we're going to be doing this weekend.

I invited the DOT in to come in and give us a 1-hour training on what they look for when they pull a truck over, why they pull trucks over, what are they looking for, what should we be doing, what shouldn't we be doing, and that kind of stuff, and just get it directly from the DOT. It's amazing how many questions I get from DOT, or questions I'd get from clients on, you know, well, what's this rule? What's that rule? You know, and I'm really usually not that concerned with the DOT. I'm typically usually more concerned if we have a loss, you know, if somebody's injured or killed, you know, hopefully not. But, you know, you have a really bad incident, you know, you need to be more concerned about, well, what happens if there's a lawsuit or a liability? Issue, how do you manage that?

And so those are some things that I think we all have to think about, you know, and when you can have the insurance agents there along with the DOT, you can just kind of make sure you've, you've dotted all the i's, crossed all the t's, and you're, you're doing the things that you should be doing with the trucks. And so I decided to throw that out. Last thing on, on safety that we kind of COVID is I just go on YouTube and usually I'll show 1 or 2 safety videos. Like last spring, I. I had one on forklift safety. I know Hefty Brothers and there's some others on there that do a great job of just putting some videos together on safety and that kind of stuff. So that's the safety portion of the meeting. That's usually, you know, takes place the first part of the meeting.

And usually these meetings you can do them in about an hour, you know, but again, I think it's just so critical to get everybody there. So then the next thing we do is, is we just have some expectations for equipment operation. You know, what are, what are those expectations? I mean, one simple one we have, we had one of our drivers that was, you know, when he was pulling out of the field, he was putting the truck in second gear, popping the clutch just because he didn't have to go from the granny gear to the next gear or whatever. And we caught him kind of doing some of those things. You know, it's just having these conversations around stuff that you would think is just basic and you shouldn't have to tell anybody. But if you don't tell people and you don't have those conversations and they don't, you know, they may just be doing that stuff and you don't even know it.

And so, you know, it's having some SOPs. One of the things too that, you know, with harvest in particular, with semis and trucks that most of you have is is like, okay, what's the procedure for tickets? You know, some of you have iPads in the truck, some of you try to manage tickets, some of you keep track of it really good, maybe some of them not so much. You know, it's having a procedure, okay, who's responsible for the tickets? What one person at the end of the night should be getting all the tickets and making sure that they all match up with whatever's on the computer and you actually have physical copies and just something that that we pay attention to real close and a lot of operations we work with that do a great job that as well. Also, you know, just kind of grain cart safety, combine safety, maintenance safety that we talked about on the safety part.

But it's also, you know, what are those maintenance expectations? You know, what are some of the things you need to be thinking about? You know, if you've got a young person or a new person running the grain cart and they're crossing a waterway, You know, just some of the most basic stuff that we take for granted, you know, okay, square up with the waterway so you're not throwing all the pressure to one side of the cart or whatever, if it's loaded, you know, some of those basic things. Again, we, it's just like a no-brainer for us. But I think when we have hired people, sometimes, you know, I have people tell me like, well, you know, you gotta tell 'em everything. Well, yeah, no kidding. You need to tell 'em everything and no better place to do it than to have the document. Ready for them on the front end.

A quick story, I mean, I had a kid working for me and I've told a bunch of you this, but I sent him into a grain bin to sweep it out. There wasn't very much corn left in it. The sweep had gone around a few times and we had had it pretty well cleaned out. Well, I said, "Go in there and clean it out." I go in there to check on him and see how he's doing and he's pushing all the grain to the outside of the bin. I'm like, "What are you doing? Sweep it in, not out." You know, I told him out, he took it literally. You know, that's an extreme case, obviously, but, you know, just thinking about, you know, what things do we need to map out, you know.

The other one that's kind of a stickler with me is, you know, you got multiple people running machinery, you know, and one person gets in and they leave all their frickin' trash in the cab and there's water bottles floating around and, wrappers and all kinds of crap. You know, just pick your junk up when you leave. And, you know, so those are just some of the things we talk about, you know, greasing the machinery, fueling stuff. You know, if you've got multi-unit machines, you know, we've got operations with 3, 4, 5 combines, you know, what's the procedure to get everything fueled up? I mean, is there multiple fuel trailers or is there, you know, is there a process? And just kind of work that stuff out ahead of time. Makes a huge difference.

And so, so just talking through all of those kind of things, and I'm probably missing a few things, but you know your operation, you know what stuff you need to, to kind of explain to everybody, you know. The other thing too is just communication, you know. What's the, what's the communication procedures for the radios, um, you know, the cell phones, um, you know. And then the other thing we go through is is we talk about the roles and responsibilities. Who's in charge of the trucks? Who's in charge of the combines? Who's in charge of the, you know, grain carts? And who's in charge of maintenance? Who's in charge of safety? You know, put somebody in charge of each of those categories, and then that way people can be held accountable for some of the things that are clearly defined expectations that you put together. So those are just some things to think about.

Machinery maintenance, you know, combines, Checking the oil. One of the things that we always see, and I hear this from a lot of operations, is if you have a service truck or a farm vehicle, you know, and those are the vehicles when you got 10 people driving something, nobody's taking care of it. So it's like, okay, what are the expectations if you're going to use the service truck? You know, all the tools get put back in it, or, you know, what's the procedure for using the service truck, you know, I mean, it's weird how sometimes tools, uh, they grow legs and then like disappear. I don't know where the hell they go, but sometimes just stuff disappears. That can be fixed somewhat, um, and, and by a lot, just by kind of telling everybody what the expectations are. One of the things we did in our service truck is, is all the wrenches or all the tools have a, have a blue, uh, mark on them.

So we know if there's a tool with a blue mark in the shop, we know, well, that was supposed to be in the fuel, in the Surf truck. So, you know, just talking through those things, you know, keeping the windows clean, yes, stupid stuff like that, the most basic stuff, you know, it's, you know, if you've got a younger guy running the grain cart and they go through mud and get used to the windows being dirty and then that evening or the next morning you have an older person get in there, you know, it's like I tell guys here, you know, clean the frickin' windows, you know, for the next person. You know, and especially with the grain cart, you know, it's the next morning if you're filling a truck or whatever and there's dew on the windows and they're already dirty, it's 10 times harder to see stuff. So just some of those basic stuff.

This seems like, you know, elementary stuff and a lot of it is, but it's just making sure that everybody's on the same page and taking care of each other. And so the last thing that we do is in our, you know, pre-harvest agenda is just make sure that we have kind of set out who's responsible for what stuff. Like I said, you know, like who's the primary combine operator? You know, that's probably the person that should be in charge of the combines. You know, who's the primary dryer operator? Who's the primary trucker? Who's the, you know, the logistics person? Like in our operation, I do a lot of the logistics, kind of manage the trucks. And so they know to check with me on where trucks need to go.

You know, who is that person in your operation, you know, that's in the combine, at the dryer, doing logistics, you know, running grain carts, managing the maintenance, making sure the maintenance stuff's getting done, you know, and then fall tillage comes into play too. You know, what's that look like? You know, are you strip tilling? Are you deep ripping, chisel plowing? Is there, You know, driveways that need to be deep ripped or whatever when the conditions are right, you know, where all the semis come in. And are there procedures for the semis to get into the fields, you know, in certain driveways that need to be notable? You know, be careful of this driveway and that driveway because of XYZ. So again, pretty basic stuff.

And, you know, and hopefully you listen to this point because what I want to do is just tell you, if you would like a copy of our pre-harvest agenda, Just email me, cbarron@agviewsolutions.com. I'd be happy to send you our pre-harvest meeting agenda for this year. But we also do post-harvest. You just basically take that same informational agenda and go right back through that and say, how do we do, you know? And basically grade yourself or score yourself 1 to 10 and create the notables. Okay, you know, what happened? What did, what did we not do that we said we were going to do. The other notable is on the maintenance. Okay, you know, well, we had the, um, you know, something on, let's say, on the Draper head that we had an issue with that it was— we kept running, you know, we wanted to finish and we didn't fix it all the way, you know.

Well, note those things down now and you can either fix them in advance or at least have the notes. So when, you know, when you're doing preparation the next year for the, for the next season, you don't all of a sudden get out in the field and be like, oh crap, I was gonna fix that and I forgot, you know. So those are just kind of the reasons for that communication. Again, you know, the number one thing that we see that are issues with farm operations always comes back to communication. And so that's one of the key reasons why I wanted to just kind of give everybody a little bit of something to think about, you know, as far as having this kind of discussion. And maybe you're already in the middle of harvest and things are rolling. It's like, I'm not gonna screw around with that now. Well, if you get a rainy day, just pull everybody in and do a mid-season, you know, huddle.

Bring everybody in and say, hey, how's things going? You know, this stuff's working pretty good, this isn't working so good, you know, let's fix this, let's fix that, let's make sure that we pay attention to XYZ, whatever. So anyway, I'm gonna, I'm gonna shut up now. That's kind of enough, but I just wanted to give everybody a kind of a pep talk here, you know, mainly safety, mainly communication. Everybody gets tired, get your rest, please be safe. And if anybody has any questions or wants to visit during harvest time, let us know. I'm going to try to do some harvest updates and stuff during the middle of harvest here if it works out. So hope everybody has a great productive harvest season, and we will catch you again next time on the Ag View Pitch.