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Here’s something I’ve learned over the last 10 years here at the farm; there are always improvements that can be made to how you operate. But, how do you decide which improvements to invest in? It’s easy to spend a LOT of money changing how you do things, so how do you know you will get that investment back? The answer should be based on your data; i.e. your records of your experience on your small farm.
Here’s a little of my personal background to help make sense of the rest of this post. When I lived in the city (before New Terra Farm) I worked as a consultant in the area of planning and performance measurement. And I was trained as a computer programmer in college.
So, when we moved to the country and started our little farm, I was already sold on the idea that I needed good data to work efficiently. And (since my last name is not ‘Gates’ or ‘Buffet’) I also needed to know that investments I made in my farm would actually pay me back pretty quick. I had spreadsheets going for everything to keep track of our time and costs.
Here’s an example of the kind of analysis I did when trying to improve farm operations: I used to till my garden with my walk-behind Troy-built tiller (a great machine by the way, it’s a shame they are no longer really Troy-built). I would use the hiller attachment to roughly form raised beds for planting. Then my garden help and me would finish and level the beds with rakes, to prepare a good seed bed.
Here’s the math on that method. Each 50-foot bed would take about 20 minutes of labour to rake into shape (2 helpers about 10 minutes each). So, since I paid them $10/hr, the cost to get the bed in shape was about $3.33 (not even counting my time on the tiller.) This was also pretty strenuous work; I only let them do a about dozen beds a day.
So I started looking for alternatives. One of my neighbours had a tractor and bed shaper. I asked him what he would charge to till and make beds for my whole garden. He estimated the cost at about $500 (it came to $490 when all was said and done).
Here’s how that method broke down: 200 beds at a cost of $490 = $2.45/bed. It was cheaper overall, I saved the wear and tear on my back, and I had much happier farm helpers!
But the benefits didn’t stop there. Because the whole garden was tilled up and laid out, bed making was no longer the ‘bottleneck’ in the process. In the past, sometimes the spring rains would leave the ground too wet to till, so we couldn’t get beds made to plant. Now, the raised beds drained pretty quickly, and we were good to go whenever the rain stopped.
The point of this is, I needed to know how much it cost me to operate the ‘old’ way before determining if the new way would be a benefit.
I went through the same kind of analysis when building my processing area, and my walk-in cooler. In each case the data indicated these investments would pay me back. The new processing area, situated between my two gardens, saved us many thousands of steps every day. It was also laid out for efficient processing and packing of our veggies.
The walk-in cooler (built by me in an existing outbuilding) was actually cheaper to operate than the fridges I had been using, while having many times the capacity. (To see what I used to power the cooler check out this link http://storeitcold.com/ )
We could now pick many crops the day before delivery and keep them fresh (it made an excellent beer cooler, too!)
To summarize, continuous improvement is driven by performance data; start tracking your time and costs. This is also an investment that will pay off.
Author Bio: Scott Kelland is the owner of award-winning New Terra Farm near Ottawa, Ontario and is the author of several books for small farmers, including Bootstrap Market Gardening: How to Start-up, Market and Manage a Successful Small Farm Business.
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