The Farm Operating System
Practical Asset Management for Small Farms and Homesteads
by Lou Cripps
Every farm already has an operating system. The question is whether it is written down and working for you.
Your farm is not a pile of equipment. It is a system of systems: water, power, access, buildings, machines, land, animals and people. When one fails, the others feel it.
Most farm advice tells you how to fix things. This book helps you decide what to fix first, what can wait, and what will hurt most if it fails. It is the same discipline that keeps a city's water running and a transit system moving, cut down to the size of a family operation.
Working draft
The Farm Operating System
Practical Asset Management for Small Farms and Homesteads
Lou Cripps
Forthcoming, early 2027
What you will be able to do
- Know what you own, where it is, and what condition it is in.
- Find the single points of failure that could stop your operation.
- Put the next dollar and the next weekend where they matter most.
- Plan across seasons and years, not just the next emergency.
- Keep records that prove your losses to an insurer and help you win a grant.
- Hand the farm, and what you know about it, to the next person.
Who it is for
The small acreage owner-operator with buildings, tools, equipment, utilities and ongoing improvement work, who needs a practical management system more than specialized farm production software. That includes new landowners building a place from scratch, and families who want the farm to survive a bad season or a handover to the next generation.
Start small. It is built for that.
You do not need software, a consultant or a degree. Pick one service your farm depends on, such as water, and run it through one complete cycle. The book calls this the minimum effective dose: the least that reliably works. Each chapter starts there, then shows the recommended practice and an expanded version for when the stakes justify it. Each chapter ends with "What to do on Tuesday", one practical step for your own place.
The rule is simple: shrink scope, not logic. Start small, but keep the real reasoning. Read more about application dose
Start with a baseline, then use the tools
You can ask an AI almost anything about a farm. The hard part is knowing which question matters, and whether the answer is good enough to act on. A fluent answer is not the same as a sound decision. The cost of getting a well, a tractor, or a roof wrong is not the cost of the prompt.
I am not against using other tools. I use them too. What I want you to have first is a baseline: a clear picture of what you own, what it does, what happens if it fails, and what good enough looks like on your place. Once you have that, the tools get sharper. Without it, they can sound certain while you are still guessing.
Built on recognized standards
The system follows the ISO 55000 series of asset management standards, the Institute of Asset Management's Asset Management: an Anatomy, and the Global Forum on Maintenance and Asset Management (GFMAM) Asset Management Landscape. You do not need to read any of them. The book does the translation.
Where it comes from
Lou Cripps spent three decades at Denver's Regional Transportation District and led its Asset Management Division. He is now an Expert Asset Management Consultant at Jacobs, a Fellow of the Institute of Asset Management and co-author of Building an Asset Management Team and Legacy. When he and his family started building a farm from raw land, he found the same questions applied to a well pump as to a light rail fleet. In his words: "Asset management is the same discipline whether the asset is a rail line worth nine figures or a well pump worth four hundred dollars." About the author
What I will not do
No free products. No affiliate commissions. No reviews of gear I have not used. What you read here is not paid for.
What I will ask instead
I will not sell your attention so I can keep writing. If this work helps you run your place, the honest exchange is to buy the book, the binder, or the templates when they are ready. That is value for value: you get a system you can use, and the work pays for the time it takes to do it well.
Enough is the goal, not more. If the book, the binder, and the templates cover the cost of this work, I can keep giving away as much as I can: the concepts, the reasoning, and the parts you can use without buying anything. The more this pays for itself, the more of it stays open.
Status
Coming early 2027 in paperback and Kindle. The current working structure, not final, is an eight-chapter core followed by 23 full chapters. See the working outline
A companion binder and workbook will follow. See the binder