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SOP stands for Standard Operating Procedure. Those are fancy words for what it takes to care for your animals on a daily basis. After living through the pandemic, I think we all learned how to expect the unexpected. I have 5 other people in my life who know how to care for my farm so I was never worried about a situation where they wouldn’t be cared for. Once the pandemic hit everything changed. Between so my people getting sick and quarantining, we had a few close calls. That is when I decided to implement an SOP for my farm. I highly suggest, if you have any animals, that you make one as well.

An SOP is a detailed, step-by-step list of everything that someone needs to do to take care of your animals. It is written with as much detail as possible so that ANY person could walk in off of the street and could take care of your animals even if they had never been to your farm before. This is excellent to have in the event of an emergency.

My SOP consists of two pages and hangs on the barn wall right above my feed. The first page is a basic map of where all of my animals are in relation to the barn. Its not to scale, but it shows someone how many animal areas there are and how to find them.

The next page is a step-by-step for each animal.

Here is an example:

Back Chickens
Feed 1 scoop turkey mixed with 1 scoop layer pellet. (pour both in a single blue bucket together) feeder is just inside gate on ground.
Dump dirty water and refill with hose at Rabbits if needed. *Collect eggs you can keep them

In that description, I included:

• what kind of feed
• how much feed
• what color bucket
• where the feeder was
• where the water was

I give each animal its own color of bucket to help stop any confusion. If the person were to fill all of the different food buckets at the same time, it would be easy to forget which bucket had what food in it. I own sheep that can’t eat copper. My cow feed has copper in it. If someone confused the buckets my sheep could get really sick.

Having all of that information included on a laminated sheet that can be taken around the farm gives very little chance that mistakes can be made.

With my SOP in place I can rest assured that, no matter what happens in the future, someone will know how to care for all of my animals.