Introduction to Lean Homesteading

This is a story about weaving looms, cars, shoes, and how it can change the way you run your homestead!

There are certain innovations that not only change an industry, but change the entire world. The invention of the computer is one example, another is when Apple released the first smartphone.

I want to introduce you to an innovation that you may not have heard of but has changed your life. This innovation changed the wold of manufacturing. More importantly, it has enabled smaller producers to compete with larger more resource abundant producers. The story starts with a farmer and carpenter in Japan named Sakichi Toyda. He lived in turbulent times of political change in Japan where poverty was common. He loved carpentry and as a young man began to think of ways he could use his skills to help others. He became interested in weaving looms and thought that if he could create a more efficient loom design, it would help his people. He immersed himself in study and developed weaving looms that eventually caught the attention of some larger manufacturing companies. With their help, he founded a successful loom company. Eventually his son took over the business and followed in his father’s footsteps. However, he had some additional passions as well. One of them was automobiles. This is the history of how Toyota was founded.

The automobile industry was changed forever by Henry Ford who developed the assembly line model of production. Consumers wanted more variety in their automobiles and this all came in a time of difficulty for Japan. It was in the aftermath of WWII, and Kichiro Toyoda found himself as a small producer with economic challenges, competing against the massive Ford Motor Company. Toyoda teamed up with a brilliant employee of the company named Taiichi Ohno. Ohno had an amazing gift of observation. Ohno pioneered a system for the company that allowed it to remain small but still compete with the massive Ford company. This system is called the Toyota Production System (TPS) or often called lean manufacturing. The changes they made turned Toyota from a sinking ship to a global leader in automobile manufacturing! Chances are, you either own, or have owned a Toyota vehicle at some point.

The Toyota Production System is made up of several smaller systems, principles, and processes that reduce waste, increase efficiency, and improve quality. The most common name for these processes here in the United States is “Lean Manufacturing”. I’ve read several books, attended a few in person training sessions, and read many articles about lean manufacturing. What I have found is that most of these focus on the systems themselves. These systems are fantastic, but the Toyota Production System is more about a mindset pr philosophy than it is about the systems. Kaizen, or continuous improvement, is the heart of the Toyota Production System. The principles behind the systems become more important than the systems themselves. Principles can more easily be applied to different situations where specific systems may, or may not apply. On that note, let me tell you more about how and why I learned about this stuff in the first place.

Years ago as I was looking for the perfect pair of lightweight sandals for myself, I kept hitting dead ends and I started to tinker with making my own. I’ll skip all the details, but in the end, I designed sandals and ended up starting a barefoot shoe business. It was a solo job at first. It was a side gig that didn’t bring in much money but it was fun. Eventually I got busier and busier and I decided that I needed to decide between making shoes and my graphic design career. I honestly felt a little lost with graphic design and wasn’t sure where I wanted to go with it. I felt like I needed to move to the big city in order to succeed at it and didn’t want to do that so I decided to take the road less traveled. It’s not every day that you get that kind of opportunity! I officially started a shoe company called Unshoes. It was difficult, but we saw success. If you have business experience, you know that there are ups and downs. For a time, we had more ups than downs. Demand was growing, and things were looking good. However, we were custom making each pair of sandals one at a time and our turnaround time was getting longer and longer. It got to the point where it would take over a month from the time a customer placed an order before we could finish and ship them! People were complaining and canceling orders. Many well meaning people would tell me that having too much business is a good problem to have. Actually, they were wrong. Even though we put warnings on the website, order confirmations, etc. People were still blindsided by how long it took us to make their shoes. To make matters worse, this was right about the time that Amazon Prime really started to gain momentum and there were more mainstream companies like Nike that were jumping on the barefoot running bandwagon and making barefoot shoes. We were not only competing with massive, global shoe companies with nearly endless resources, but standards for online ordering were shifting very quickly and I was in a battle of customer expectations. I was trying to walk a fine line between handmade craftsmanship, and faster turnaround time.

I began to look for solutions. I knew that we needed to standardize things but I also didn’t want to just give up the custom nature of our shoes. Originally, every single sole was hand cut out of rubber to match tracings of a customer’s foot profile. Every pair of sandal straps were cut to length based on those tracings. I went through many different ideas and implemented several solutions over the next few years. Some helped a lot, and others backfired and failed spectacularly. The valuable thing was that in that process, I began to figure out some of the principles behind lean manufacturing without realizing it. I was working on an idea to pre-make all our straps and develop an easy way to attach them. That way when we got an order, we would custom cut the sole, then have standard sized straps sewn and ready to attach more quickly.

During this time, I met a local manufacturing engineer who came to check out our small operation. He looked at what I was doing and said it reminded him of something called “Just In Time Production”. He asked if that’s what I was doing and I gave him a blank stare because I had never heard of it. As it happened, I picked up a book that someone had given me years earlier. It was very heavy on data and had terms I was totally unfamiliar with so I didn’t read more than a few pages. After having some more experience, I picked it up again and found that it was about “Just In Time Production”! I dug in eagerly. While reading, it mentioned the Toyota Production System multiple times. I kept researching and implementing concepts from it. The principles I learned from that research turned my business around! The short story is that the idea I had for attaching straps did, indeed backfire. The concept for pre-making straps was good but the technical aspects of how we were trying to attach them were not. However, we were able to find better ways, and move forward. Because of the principles and systems I was implementing, I was able to hire more help standardize more of the process. Eventually, it was a fairly smooth sailing ship and it allowed me to have free time. I enjoyed a very flexible schedule and I even started a second business during this time. The systems were only part of the equation for us. They really are designed for larger manufacturing plants. However, because Toyota developed these as a small producer trying to compete, I found that I could adapt the principles to my situation and that was where we found success!

At this point, you may be wondering what this has to do with homesteading. What does this have to do with producing freedom? These same principles can be applied to farming or homesteading to make your efforts go further. I want to make one thing clear. This is NOT about mass production. Yes, it applies well to mass production, but it allowed my business to stay small, and find the middle ground where we still hand made our products locally, but we also found ways to standardize the process, reduce waste, and make it more efficient so that we could compete with other companies that had marketing budgets way larger than our annual net revenue!

This isn’t about maximizing profit over quality. It isn’t about maximizing convenience over value. It isn’t about taking the path of least resistance at the expense of health. This is about taking the most productive route to get the most value for everyone involved. Sometimes as homesteaders we do things the “old fashioned” way and we have to make due with what we’ve got. There IS value in that. I believe that the principles in lean manufacturing can help you find ways make your work more enjoyable, consume less energy, and make your work more efficient.

I made this tote out of found scraps to carry my milking stuff out to the barn instead of fumbling with all of it and trying not to drop things. It came together very quickly, cost nearly nothing, and has saved me so much time and effort! Small changes like this is can make a big difference towards a more efficient lean homestead!

I have been applying these same principles to my own “lean homestead” and will be recording some of the results. Sometimes all it takes are a few small adjustments or a slight shift in thinking. I would love to be able to help other others make some simple adjustments that make a big difference in the success of their own homesteads! Stay tuned for some more specific tips and tricks on how to build your own lean homestead!