While you cannot plan for everything that life may throw your way, planning for what you can is important as business owners. Being in Wisconsin we have everything from blizzards and barn collapse from snow to tornadoes and floods as weather disasters to keep in mind. Outside of weather we need to think about fire risk, accidents and so much more. Each possibility of disaster has different demands from us to be as proactive as possible. I thought I would share what we do here on the farm to plan for the big problems.
First of all we have our general emergency preparations. We have phone numbers for everyone who services our farm, from electricians to plumbers to veterinarians in our office. The phone number for our local Department of Natural Resources office is in the book as well. The list is located where any of our employees can find it and of course many of our employees have all of the numbers in their phones as well. We have safety meetings with everyone on the farm once a year and when we have new hires we do safety training with them. We have good insurance covering the farm including business interruption insurance that would help out if something happened and we couldn’t milk the cows or had to dump our milk for an extended time period.
We’ve done what we can to make sure we have the equipment we need. We have generators available if we lose power. Plows for our trucks and tractors to move lots of snow in winter. There are fire extinguishers in key spots around the farm and in our equipment and trucks. They are inspected yearly. There are also first aid kits around the farm for more minor injuries.
We built the farm with what protection we could built in. As we head into summer, bad weather is something we watch out for. We have tornado shelters in the basement below the milking parlor and robots. So if there is a tornado headed towards the farm, everyone has a place to shelter. Our barns were built with snow load in mind, and we have to cross our fingers that we don’t ever get enough snow to really put them to the test. There is space at both barns for people to sleep if the weather was bad enough that they couldn’t get home.
We have as much of a plan as we can. We know what we would do if we needed to dump our milk. Everyone knows to call 911 if there is an emergency. We’ve opened our farm to our local fire departments and first responders for training. Not only does this help them, but it helps us because they know our farm a little better because they’ve been here. Lastly we have our flag pole. Everyone is supposed to meet there so we can make sure that all are accounted for if something were to happen.
There are two bottom lines to how we look at a disaster. The first is that as much as we care for our cows, our number one priority is to take care of our people. The second is that we know that you simply cannot prepare for everything that could possibly happen, but we can do our best to be prepared for what we can.