The importance of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) on farms

Padraig O’Connor, Dairy Technician at Teagasc Grange joins Stuart Childs on this week’s Dairy Edge to discuss the role of SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) on farms. Padraig explains that the SOP is a step by step guide to completing a task. They are suitable for many tasks on farms such as preparing for milking, milking itself, treating a cow with mastitis and how to wash the milking machine correctly amongst many others. SOPs are an extremely useful way of communication and can help avoid mistakes being made due to misunderstanding. While often associated with farms that employ people, they have an equally important role to play on owner operator farms to help during holiday periods, during busy periods where help is needed which may be family or externally sourced, but most especially in the event of any incident which renders the farmer unable to do tasks with little or no notice requiring people to jump in to help to keep the show on the road. Padraig says that it is as simple as taking a piece of paper and recording the steps to complete the task in question, then getting someone that is preferably not overly familiar with the task to follow the instructions and ‘road test’ them. They may need tweaking and once happy with it, it should be laminated to make it waterproof and robust and placed in a visible location near the point of use. Padraig, Martina Gormley and Francis Quigley have some great information on SOPs and developing them for your own farm available at: https://www.teagasc.ie/animals/standard-operating-procedures/ For more episodes from the Dairy Edge podcast go to the show page at:https://www.teagasc.ie/animals/dairy/the-dairy-edge-podcast/ The Dairy Edge is a co-production with LastCastMedia.com