Poor performance begets poor performance.
When things don’t go well on the farm, you have less money, so you try to get by with less.
You skimp on fertilizer, so you don’t get good yields. Labor efficiency goes down because less-than-vigorous crops take longer to pick per harvested unit than high yielders. Now you’ve got less money, so you have to find another place to cut.
You skimp on hired labor, so you have less time and energy to focus on managing your operation and creating a rich family life. Without adequate help, timeliness of operations suffers, so you don’t get crops seeded, transplanted, and weeded on time, which reduces saleable yields and increases labor inputs. Again, you’ve got less money, so you have to find another place to cut.
Your shop’s a mess, so you don’t put your tools away, so the next time you need them, you have to spend extra time hunting for them, so by the time you’ve finished cranking that nut you’re in a hurry to get back out to the field, and the wrench goes back in the pile instead of getting put away where you can find it again.
One farm I worked with even tried to cut seed expenses to the bare bones, until the managers had a vigorous debate over whether they could buy seeds for the fall storage crops since they had already spent their seed budget!
And so it goes all across the farm, round and round and round again. Until, like the fabled and quite endangered Malaysian Concentric Bird, which flies in ever-smaller circles, you finally disappear up your own backside.
Unlike manufacturing, on the farm, many of our expenses are actually investments. Buying more charging ports doesn’t result in more iPhones. But adding more fertilizer will result in more crops, improving yields and income at a rate great that the increased expense. Adding more water – pumping more water and spending the money to manage the irrigation system – can dramatically increase yields (and, sufficient water is key to maximizing the utilization of soil fertility). Properly managed labor increases the farm’s productivity by accomplishing tasks in a timely manner that frees you up to focus more of your energy on actually managing the operation.
(Of course, this is only up to a point – but most market farms I work with simply aren’t at that point.)
The only way out is to invest more time, energy, creativity, intellect, or money into the things that are holding you back.
[HT to Edward Abbey for the Malaysian Concentric Bird.]
When things don’t go well on the farm, you have less money, so you try to get by with less.
You skimp on fertilizer, so you don’t get good yields. Labor efficiency goes down because less-than-vigorous crops take longer to pick per harvested unit than high yielders. Now you’ve got less money, so you have to find another place to cut.
You skimp on hired labor, so you have less time and energy to focus on managing your operation and creating a rich family life. Without adequate help, timeliness of operations suffers, so you don’t get crops seeded, transplanted, and weeded on time, which reduces saleable yields and increases labor inputs. Again, you’ve got less money, so you have to find another place to cut.
Your shop’s a mess, so you don’t put your tools away, so the next time you need them, you have to spend extra time hunting for them, so by the time you’ve finished cranking that nut you’re in a hurry to get back out to the field, and the wrench goes back in the pile instead of getting put away where you can find it again.
One farm I worked with even tried to cut seed expenses to the bare bones, until the managers had a vigorous debate over whether they could buy seeds for the fall storage crops since they had already spent their seed budget!
And so it goes all across the farm, round and round and round again. Until, like the fabled and quite endangered Malaysian Concentric Bird, which flies in ever-smaller circles, you finally disappear up your own backside.
Unlike manufacturing, on the farm, many of our expenses are actually investments. Buying more charging ports doesn’t result in more iPhones. But adding more fertilizer will result in more crops, improving yields and income at a rate great that the increased expense. Adding more water – pumping more water and spending the money to manage the irrigation system – can dramatically increase yields (and, sufficient water is key to maximizing the utilization of soil fertility). Properly managed labor increases the farm’s productivity by accomplishing tasks in a timely manner that frees you up to focus more of your energy on actually managing the operation.
(Of course, this is only up to a point – but most market farms I work with simply aren’t at that point.)
The only way out is to invest more time, energy, creativity, intellect, or money into the things that are holding you back.
[HT to Edward Abbey for the Malaysian Concentric Bird.]