Everybody knows Toyota. Many of us will drive one most days. Few of us pay much attention to the business behind the badge. But that business – and what it spent seventy years working out about how work actually gets done – is worth a closer look, particularly now.

Seeding 2026 is underway, and the ideas Toyota developed on a factory floor in Japan have more to say about how we run a broadacre operation than you might first think, and maybe now is a good time to see if this can work for you.

Ultimately, this is about reducing waste and how you might do more of that in your own business. Something to think about. The aim is simply to spend twenty minutes looking at your operation through a slightly different window.

What Toyota actually worked out

Strip away the jargon – kaizen (continuous improvement), kanban (visual cues), jidoka (systems built to detect abnormalities) (These are the core components of the Toyota production system – Lean methodology – all worth investigating further if you are interested) – and the Toyota approach rests on a single stubborn idea. Waste is everywhere, and most of it is invisible until you deliberately go looking for it.

Waste, in this context, is not scrap metal or spilled fuel. It is anything that does not add value for your customer. On a broadacre farm, your customer is your yield and your margin. Every hour of the optimum seeding window not seeding, when you want to be, is a waste (both in lost yield and in higher costs). A chemical that doesn’t work is a waste (for obvious reasons).

This won’t be news to you. What Toyota contributed was not the observation that waste exists. It was a consistent method for seeing it and removing it, rather than working around it year after year.

Across our client base, the parallel is not “farms with a waste problem” but rather farms where good operators have worked around small inefficiencies for so long that they have become invisible. The cost still shows up – in fatigue, in the mistakes made.

What inefficiency on your farm have you stopped noticing?

Three wastes worth looking for

The Japanese formalised a long list of wastes. Three that show up on most farms are:

Waiting. E.g. slow fills of seed and super on a bar, resulting in less ha per day, lost fuel, labour hours and depreciation.

Motion and transport. Runs to the shed because something was forgotten, or to town for parts. Sequencing of operations to reduce time shifting paddocks, or the risk of nighttime shifts on roads.

Defects and rework. A seed box filled but never switched on, or a block not picked up for a few runs. Seed placed too deep for the soil type, and a paddock that never quite catches up to the one next to it.

The question is whether your system is set up to catch these things, or whether it relies on the operator’s awareness or memory at the end of a long day.

Two ideas worth borrowing

Two principles from the Toyota playbook worth pulling out for broadacre.

Standard work. The best-known current way to do a job is written down, until someone finds a better way. Not a policy manual. It is a short, practical document that frees the operator’s brain from remembering every step, so it is available for the judgement calls that actually matter. Many farms run on the accumulated memory of one or two long-serving people, and that is a considerable amount of risk to carry into any given season.

Kaizen from the floor. The person doing the work sees things that the person managing the work cannot. An operator on a machine often knows the thirty-second fix that saves hours (maybe not so much now with backpackers!).

The job of the business is to build a mechanism that captures these things.

Together, these two ideas suggest making a change to the usual improvement model. “Standard work” is not written by management and handed down. It is written by the people doing the work, refined over time, and owned by the team.

A practical starter: two checklists to build this season

Here is where this gets specific. Do not try to apply this thinking to your whole farm. Pick two places where the stakes are highest and the pressure is greatest, say seeding and spraying.

For each, aim to produce three short checklists over the course of the season.

• A pre-start checklist (before the bar moves or the boom drops)
• A changeover checklist (shift changes, servicing of equipment)
• A shutdown checklist (end-of-day wash-down, fuel, fault log)

The important point is that you do not write the checklist yourself.

Give each of your operators a notebook or set up a shared note on their phone. Ask them to log every moment over the next two weeks where they thought “that’s annoying”, or “I had to redo that”, or “only one person here knows how to do this”. Review the output regularly. By the end of seeding you will have a checklist that genuinely works, because it was written by the people who use it.

The caveat

More businesses fail at this than succeed at it. Three practical ways to give it the best chance:

• Start small. Two checklists, not twenty.
• Commit to the weekly review for the full season. Non-negotiable, even when things are calm.
• Let the operators lead. Your job is to ask questions, not to edit. The moment it becomes the boss’s document, it quietly dies.

The goal here is not transformation. The goal is that, twelve months from now, your farm runs marginally more on written standards and marginally less on one person’s memory. Do that for a number of years, and the compounding should be considerable.

Why this matters

Ultimately, this is not really operational – it is strategic.

A farm that runs on “standard work” where it can, is easier to teach, easier to scale, and considerably more valuable to a future buyer or an incoming family member or employee. The mechanics of capturing how the work actually gets done turn out to be the same mechanics that make a business less fragile. And the people in it – owner, family, team – carry less in their heads, and can step away when they need to.

As you drive around the farm tomorrow morning. Look at what keeps the wheels turning. How much of it lives only in one person’s head?

That is your starting point.

Graeme McConnell (with a little help from AI)