Personalizedproduce's Blog

Obligations

personalizedproduce — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 20:40:51 +0000

The ethical issue of obligations for Personalized Produce is an interesting topic. Are we ethically obligated to continue to provide the Personalized Produce service if it goes over well this year? This issue comes up because both Michael and I want to go out and find internships that more closely fit our majors and are more closely related to what we want to do for a profession in the future. We might have a serious problem on our hand if this year goes well, and we decide not to return and do this business again. As we are finding out now and as we suspected Personalized Produce is a lot of work. Not only is it a lot of work, but a lot of risk. Our entire company can either prosper or fail on the basis of weather. Not every year is going to be a good year for us, and even though we might get lucky and have a good year this year. If we try it again next year, we might not be so lucky. We are using this money to pay for college right now, so if we don’t do well, it will be hard to return for college. So even though we might feel ethically obligated to continue the business of Personalized Produce, it might not be practical for us to do so.

Deadlines

personalizedproduce — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 20:30:29 +0000

Deadlines are a very important thing in business. They are goals that tell us when things have to be done by, but how permanent are these deadlines. Are we to look at these deadlines as immovable objects that once it has come and passed, we should not accept any more customers past that point? This is an ethical issue that Personalized Produce is dealing with right now. Personalized Produce set a deadline for customers who wanted plots in our gardens to order their garden space by March 31st 2010. The hard part is we are still getting the occasional call, and people still want garden space. Is it fair to the people who ordered their gardens on time that we still accept these new customers? We looked at this and decided to continue to keep selling gardens because it really does not affect the other customers. Sure the gardens were not done by the deadline, and it is added work for us. We can still plant them though, so we decided that until we can no longer plant the gardens, we would accept new customers.

Ethics and Practical Jokes?

personalizedproduce — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 02:41:45 +0000

What are the ethical issues involved in playing practical jokes? This Easter weekend we came to our garden plot to finish planting on the Monday morning after Easter, when we arrived we were greeted by an unexpected surprise. In the furrows that we dug late Saturday night we found a bunch of Easter eggs lying in them. We were surprised and did not know what to think. We thought someone had an Easter egg hunt in our garden which was a little bit concerning, since our garden is our investment and we need to protect it. A couple of days later we found out who the mysterious culprit was. It was the father of our mentee. He played a practical joke on us (however the worst part was that the plastic Easter eggs were empty he could have at least left us some sort of treat in the eggs.) So the ethical issue of any practical joke is how to play a great prank or joke which does not do any long term damage or cost the recipient any money to fix. A good practical joke often leaves the recipient slightly embarrassed, but the joke can’t do any physical or mental harm. So I am not sure how we can get him back, but I know we will. Maybe the joke will involve making him laugh by stuffing some vegetable in the plastic Easter eggs and returning them to him when he gets his weekly delivery this summer.

The Passion of A Business

personalizedproduce — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 22:04:16 +0000

The purpose of a business should not just be to make a lot of money; the business must have some sort of motive behind it. It must have some sort of a goal in mind, to solve a problem, and the side effect of solving a problem is sometimes profit. Don’t get me wrong; the bottom line of a business is important, without the bottom line, a company cannot survive for very long. It is very important to make money in business, but it cannot be your soul motivation to do so. The reason for this is an ethical one. If all you are trying to do in business is make money, you will essentially try to squeeze as much profit out of each customer that does business with you. These customers will make sure to tell at least 10 people that all your business is about profits, and you will not be in business long. This is why it is so important that you start a business that you are interested in, and that you want to do. Without that drive of an Entrepreneur, the startup business will never survive. I think this is also what happens with big corporations as well. The moment the Entrepreneur sells the business, the new owner has to make the decision on whether or not he is actually passionate about the business. If he is not passionate about the business, and all he looks at is money, even the most financially sound businesses can crumble. It does not matter how good the business looks from the banks prospective, it is how good the company looks from the public prospective. Once the public has accepted the business, the banks will soon see a better outlook on the business. For Personalized Produce, Tyler has been gardening for 14 years now, and he is extremely passionate about what he does. Michael is taking his major of landscape Architecture which he loves, and is applying it to the business. For both of them, the passion for this business is there, and that is why Personalized Produce will succeed. Both of them have a passion for the business, and will do anything to make it work.

Mandatory Ethics

personalizedproduce — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 21:07:50 +0000

Mandatory ethics is an issue that makes ethics in business a little easier. There are many different ways that companies can practice un-ethical practices to raise more money. These problems are usually solved with what we like to cal mandatory ethical practices, which is the ethics that puritan to the law. Personalized Produce has very few actual regulations on it, but the few that are in place are there in order to make sure neither the business nor the customer gets cheated in the business encounter. The particular regulations that we have to deal with are that of the Weights and Measurements. These laws make Personalized Produce calibrate and certify our scales with that off an acceptable weight measurement. This ensures the customer that whether they buy produce from Personalized Produce or the grocery store; they will receive the same amount of produce. This is the main regulation that we have to comply with in order to run Personalized Produce. There are other small laws that apply to us, but their effect on our company is so minute, that it is almost as if they didn’t exist. Mandatory ethics are required to keep people honest in business, and helps with maintaining customer relationships with the businesses.

Land Stewardship

personalizedproduce — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 02:36:07 +0000

Land Stewardship is a huge concern of Personalized Produce; it is not only an ethical issue, but also a very important issue that can have a detrimental effect on the long term sustainability of our company. Land Stewardship is defined as the act of managing the land and its resources in a sustainable or restorative manner. This is extremely important to Personalized Produce because we are on virgin soil, this soil use to be grass land, and was specially tilled for the purpose of Personalized Produce. We could easily look only at the bottom line, and decide that fertilizer is not worth the money to put down, or that we don’t need to worry about soil erosion. This is an extremely important issue because the soil has all that it needs to sustain our plants, but we will be putting down fertilizer for the plants to use so that the system is sustainable. If we did not put any nutrients down, we would mine the soil of its nutrients which would be detrimental to anything else that grows in the future. The ethical issue is not the fact that we immediately would degrade the soil; it is more the fact that we need to think about the future uses of that land, and plan for the long term in order to keep the land sustainable. Personalized Produce would like to leave the land in as close to the condition that it was in originally even if it means raising our bottom line economically.

Mentor Ethic

personalizedproduce — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 03:37:37 +0000

Going into Personalized Produce one of our customers has a son that wants to learn how to garden. We took him on as a mentee, and we are going to teach him all there is to know about gardening. I think one of the most important ethical issues with this is the fact that we don’t want to be treating him as free labor. He is essentially free labor provided to us; however we want to give him the best experience during this summer as possible. We want him to learn all there is to know about our business, and how plants are grown. Michael and I both have considerable knowledge in the field of growing plants, and we both want to pass this knowledge on to our mentee. We also want to pass on some important lessons in business that we have learned. After all in Personalized Produce we have our own mentor that helps us out with the business aspect. We also rely on many other people for growing advice. Our goal is to pass this knowledge on to our mentee, and allow him to feel like part of our team. We are very excited to have the extra help, and even more excited to have the chance to teach someone what we know about our business.

Public Image

personalizedproduce — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 00:25:46 +0000

A public image of a company is the most important thing to consider when starting up a company. Because word of mouth is extremely important to the success of a startup company, the public image of that company is an essential part of the marketing strategy of that company. A great way to develop a good public image is to set high moral standards for your company and your employees. You always want your customers walking away from doing business with you feeling good about the way that they were treated. Those people will go and tell more people, and more people will start coming into your store. Bad news seems to spread faster than good news though, that same person would tell three times more people if your service was bad. That is why it is so important for a startup company to provide excellent service. Another thing to watch for is not offending other cultures. This may not be as big of a problem here as it is in some of the larger cities, but it is still very important to know some of the different cultures you might be serving and know what is acceptable to say or do around them. These little things can be the difference between a good startup company and one that fails. The biggest thing that this affects is the company’s public image, and that image will decide whether the company makes it or fails.

Philanthropy

personalizedproduce — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 03:30:52 +0000

The ethical issue that we are going to look at for this week is called philanthropy. Philanthropy is when an individual or company gives back to the community that made it a success. This giving back can come in many shapes and forms, and everyone does it in their own way. Personalized Produce is a company that is designed to aid Michael and I in paying for college next year. Therefore we choose not to give back to the community in the form of monetary gifts, but instead by helping some of its youth understand how their food is grown. Personalized Produce has agreed to mentor a 12 year old boy this summer in turn for his help. We believe this will not only increase his knowledge of how food is grown, but also help him gain a good work ethic among many other things. Personalized Produce will also be giving tours of its gardens to 4-H groups in order to further their understanding of the growing of vegetables. These are just a few ways in which Personalized Produce is giving back to its community. The community of Spencer has made our company work, and therefore we intend to return the favor, this is the whole idea behind philanthropy.

Organic to Be or Not to Be?

personalizedproduce — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 23:12:37 +0000

When people comment about organics, and ask us if Personalized Produce will be grown organically, we first ask them what they consider organics to be. It is amazing how many people truly do not know what growing organically actually means. This raises some important ethical issues. Personalized Produce has chosen not to grow organically, but we always tell people that we are not going to go out and put down a bunch of chemicals on our produce. It is in our best interest as a company not to use much in the form of inputs such as chemicals. We use a system called Integrated Pest Management. This system allows us to only put down chemicals when there is an actual risk of crop failure. We always have to look and see whether or not the chemicals would provide a better economical situation for our company. It also brings back the whole issue of supplying our customers with the best produce possible. If insects, like an aphid, comes in and tries to destroy our bean crop, yes of course we are going to apply a chemical to get rid of the aphids, but we also will be looking at such things as the time that is needed before we harvest again and what that time could cost us. We also have to look at whether or not the problem is getting worse, or possibly, the problem could be resolved by things such as beneficial insects, or a good hard rain. It all depends on the conditions that we find out in the field. These chemicals that we apply to our crops are not bad; they do their job, and then wear off. Chemical companies are forced to go through stringent testing and approval processes before their product ever goes to market. They know how long the chemical is active for, and how long until the vegetables will be safe to eat. Therefore if we follow the directions given by the chemical company, there will be no issues with the produce that we supply to our customers. Personalized Produce wants to provide the best produce to our customers, and that is part of the reason why we chose not to grow organically.