The Good, the Bad, and the Dirty: Ben Harman’s Lean Market Growing Masterclass

If you’re here, I don’t doubt you know of Ben Hartman, the Lean Farmer, and his work. If that name is new to you—one, where the hell have you been? and two, you have two books to read before the winter is through. So, lean-style, let’s just get right to it: the good, the bad, and the dirty of Ben Harman’s Lean Market Growing Masterclass.

The Good

It’s not a manual, rather an OS for your farm

What I appreciate most about The Lean Market Growing Masterclass is that it’s less of a step-by-step manual and more of an operating system that applies no matter the scale, location, market, etc. All of the foundational concepts will be applicable to your farm, be it half an acre of high-rotation salad crops or twenty acres of mixed veg. Relative to most online farm courses (and we’ve experienced several), a greater degree of the material here is usable by a wider diversity of small produce farms. Where most courses tell you how to grow—which can be very helpful particularly for beginners—this one shows you how to think, which is arguably more valuable.

The best tool for your farm is…

With maybe one exception, which we’ll get to shortly, this course is interested in the development of the most important tool on your farm, you. Sharpening the tool between your ears will be far more effective than any tool you hold in your hands. The Lean Market Growing Masterclass gave me a new level of perspective on not only the overall design of my farm—which I expected—but also the countless series of oft repeated tasks and workflows that actually make up the majority of our work, including communicating with employees and monitoring farm performance. There are several simple, uncomplicated methods he describes to train your mind to notice and evaluate those problematic aspects of your farm that may have been hiding in plain site for years, in my case seven. Often times, we want to buy a tool or input—or another caterpillar tunnel, which is usually my solution to everything—to solve a problem, when simply reimagining the process is better… and usually a lot less expensive.

The cost

Almost as if we planned it, during the month of October The Lean Farm Course is 25% off, so it’s just $600, or three monthly payments of $210. Ok—yeah—we planned it. Relative to most courses, this one is a steal. Side note, I have a $600 flame weeder still sitting where I parked it in my greenhouse two years ago. Many online farm courses are great investments for beginners looking to get a jump start on production and tout the ROI from providing a tried-and-true approach to, say, growing a solid salad mix. They’re not wrong. But, where most give you a head start on production, The Lean Market Growing Masterclass gives you a head start on perception. Being able to spot waste, and root it out, is not as sexy, but will certainly pay better.

A few highlights

• Ben is quite open with his numbers as well as other measures of performance, including hours worked.

• There is a lot of material on efficient small farm design, from farm layout to right-sized infrastructure to simple considerations like what should be year-one investments and what can wait. His lesson on finding and assessing farmland may be worth the price of the course alone if you are, indeed, looking for a farm as I am.

• If you’re concerned about the quality of compost that’s available commercially or contamination from persistent herbicides, then you’re probably also wondering how to make it yourself. There’s a module for that. It’s no Soil Food Web, but it is place to start. And you’d better be damn sure I’m in the market for a skid steer.

The Bad

Paperpot “magic”

I’mma come out and say it, I hate the paperpot system. Change my mind. It may very well be lean, but it’s also a very unresilient tool in my book with a lot of hidden costs of its own. Not about to make this a post about me hating on the paperpot, though. If, like me, you’re not interested in the paperpot system, some of the content of the course is muda. Not only is there an entire module dedicated to its use, most of the crops grown at Clay Bottom Farm pass through the paperpot system. However, if you’re into the paperpot, you can move this beef up into the “good” column, because he goes into great detail on the specs and the nuances of making it work well.

Out of date modules

There’s a whole lot of unnecessary tillage going on in this course. While Ben’s IG posts over the past year or two and the seasonal video updates within the course touch on the evolution of his growing practices and how he’s removed primary tillage from most of his field preparations, many of the crop-by-crop lessons take place early in the development of his new farm, where he typically advises growers to break out the tiller for most—if not all—bed prep. That’s not to say there isn’t a time and place for it, especially when starting a new plot, but I would like to see these updated.

It’s still just one farm

While lean thinking can be applied to farms at all scales, you’re still only getting real-world examples from a very particular farm, albeit one that is lean AF. And keep in mind, Ben is pushing the limits of Lean for all of our sake to see what’s possible and what’s feasible, so some of his lean solutions are going to seem out there. One thing I would personally like to see is lean concepts applied on a few other farms operating at different “small” scales.

The Dirty

The direction of lean is from inefficient to efficient. But, I don’t often hear the conversation around efficient vs resilient, which may—in the business of producing something as necessary as food—be a worthwhile conversation to have on your own farm. There may simply be some inefficiencies you’re willing to accept for a measure of stability. For me, it’s soil blocks (you will have to pry my standing blocker out of my cold dead hands). We do see glimpses of Ben building in some redundancies so the farm can keep operating when experiencing points of failure (like losing power or water), but—given what we all experienced with seeds and demand last year—I’m not going to be getting rid of my years-worth-of-seeds order or walk-in cooler just yet.

Ironically, efficiency may indeed make our farms more resilient. The balance between the two is for you to decide. How resilient is your farm if you’re burning out? Answer, it’s not. That said, efficiency is not mutually exclusive with elegance, nor does it mean your farm will become more mechanized, less ecological, or worst of all boring. Paperpot aside, many of the processes he’s enacted on his farm are beautifully simple, low-tech, even human scaled (not to mention affordable or free).

To be honest, I’m not sure how this is much different than reading his two books, except that there is a wealth of visual examples and breakdowns that may motivate you to actually implement what you previously may have read and only had a vague recollection of, otherwise said books just sit on your shelf waiting to be read again—but let’s be honest you ain’t gettin’ back around to them—just like they do on mine? The course does add something, but does it add another $540 worth? Maybe paying $600 for something, as opposed to $60, makes you get off your heels and actually do the work? And hey, that’s me, too. It’s the same difference between hearing about a farm on a podcast and being able to see it at work with your own eyes. Whatever motivates you to make these lean improvements on your farm, you’ll reap compounding rewards.

Used in conjunction with, say, The No-Till Market Garden Podcast or The Living Soil Handbook by Jesse Frost or The No-Till Organic Vegetable Farm by Daniel Mays, you’ll be equipped with a powerful combination of ecology and economy. Not only does removing tillage literally remove steps from your process, a living soil contributes to lean with regards to pest/disease resilience, water retention/drainage, nutrient management, even in ways we don’t completely understand yet. But the act of growing only constitutes part of what makes a farm work. There are many other aspects that, if not working effectively, can hamstring your farm no matter how alive your soil is.

So keep in mind, this is not an everything course. I.e. There’s little mention and no explanation of soil biology. But, that’s not the objective of The Lean Market Growing Masterclass. I hate to be the one to say it, but some of us have gone to some insanely inefficient lengths for the sake of modest improvement on the biology front. Indeed, ecological growing typically requires much more labor and initial investment and time, you know, all the things—which is one of the reasons why we as an industry moved away from it to begin with—and if we’re not as smart about our time, energy, movement, etc. going forward, it may be our undoing. Better, if we can combine the two, the system begins to look like the obvious, and default, option.

I’m not going to leave this with one of those “maybe” non-answers. Here’s my take. If you’re on an acre of production or so, or less, and most—if not all—of your production may be done without the use of a tractor and you’re working too many hours and you’re not making a living wage, or if your about to start a small-scale produce farm, take the Lean Market Growing Masterclass.