Granddad's Notebook

Ask Gray about his grandfather and one detail comes up before any of the achievements.

“He always wore a button-up shirt, always had a pocket. And in that pocket, he always had a small notebook and a pen. And it was one of those flip-style notebooks, and that's where he kept his data.”

Gray Shipley

What goes in a notebook like that

Which cow, which calf, which field, what the weather did, what something sold for. The details that are obvious on the day and gone by the following spring. A farm runs on exactly that kind of information and almost none of it is memorable.

The value is not the notebook. It is that the writing happened at the moment of the observation, in the field, rather than later at a desk when it had already blurred.

Why it beats most of what replaced it

“I mean, he was still learning at 102 years old. Uh, he was still curious. He was figuring out how to use the smartphone in his pocket.”

Gray Shipley

He was not a man avoiding technology. He was still learning at 102 and working out a smartphone in his hundreds. He kept the notebook because it was better for the job: no battery, no signal, usable with cold hands and one glove off.

The standard behind the habit

“Uh, it's the standard that my granddad set for us, which is, you know, keep your promises, do what you say you're going to do. Don't take shortcuts, uh, and, and do the right thing.”

Gray Shipley

Keep your promises and do what you say you are going to do. A notebook is how you keep a promise you made in a field in March by the time August arrives.

What it says about running anything

Eighty-six years as proprietor, forty-four of them teaching alongside it, and the system was a pocket, a pen and the discipline to use them the same way every day. Most of what gets sold as a management system is trying to reproduce that discipline rather than replace it.

“Good enough is something that granddad would have been satisfied with.”

Gray Shipley

What gets lost without one

A farm that does not write things down repeats itself. The same field gets the same mistake made in it every few years, because the person who learned the lesson either moved on or simply forgot which corner it was. Eighty-six years of notebooks is eighty-six years of not relearning the same ground.

Does anyone still do it

Yes. Not as the only record, because the herd is tracked properly now, but the habit survives: write it down where you saw it, not where you will file it.

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The man himself is in R.G. Shipley at 101, and the family timeline in Shipley Farms since 1872.