Risk Assessment

   Just like in any other work, we get a lot of tools or processes (mechanisms?) that get vague names or acronyms assigned to them. Something I daydream about is what would a person come up with if you were to lock them in a room and tell them they can’t come out until they have produced a [fill in the blank]. Business plan and sales model are two terms that have always done that to me. I wonder, could I write a business plan right now? Is there a specific format, or can I just wing it? Do I need a business degree or MBA? These are all things I daydream about, seriously.

   One process that we are going through is a risk assessment of our Internal Control System. Having gone through this exercise, I actually feel kind of the opposite, at least regarding this form that our potential certifier gave to us. If you locked me in a room and told me to make you a risk assessment I’d probably put down just about the same information they asked for. General categories of risk (when things can go wrong), specific sources of risk (what would go wrong), the current situation on the ground, and what we’re doing to keep the bad things from happening. As an example, in the category of processing, we have the comingling of organic and inorganic products, which is about a medium to high risk factor since we have a facility that will be processing both organic and inorganic products. To mitigate the risk, my suggestion is that we have our mill operators fill out a checklist any time they are going to switch from milling inorganic to organic coffee so that we will have documentation that the machines and equipment were cleaned thoroughly.

Hard to protect from uphill contamination on 

a 45 degree incline.

   Looking over the risks has led me to reorder a few of my priorities. Some of the highest risk factors are real nuts and bolts kind of things, like that issue with the mill equipment: which to me is solved by a one page Word doc with some checkboxes. Not quite as sexy as green manure cover crops or compost piles (yup, just called compost sexy) but to get our certification it is the kind of thing our auditors are going to want to see. Some of the other points that have asserted themselves are the frequently very indistinct borders between many of our farmer-partner’s fields and their neighbors’. This presents a risk of spray drift, fertilizer run-off, or a variety of other flavors of contamination. How do we mitigate? We’re working on it, and hopefully we can get some ideas from our auditors. Buffer zones seem to be a likely answer, but I’m not a huge fan of telling farmers that they need to put berries from this line of trees in this bag with a green check and berries from the next in a different bag, marked with a red X. Monitoring and assuring compliance of such a thing would be momentous. Where’s the Word doc for this one?

   I have a tendency toward over-complicating things, so ‘keep it simple stupid’ has been a mantra during this piece of work.  I’m looking forward to getting feedback from my partners and co-workers on some of the brainstormy ideas I’ve thrown out for risk mitigation strategies. I’m hoping they can show me clearer paths in a few cases.