Purple Pitchfork
  • Home
  • Podcast
  • About Chris
  • Farming Resources from Chris
  • Donate

Three Investments to Save Labor

1/7/2016

0 Comments

 
I’d like to suggest three ways to think about investments to save labor on the market farm (and elsewhere):

  1. Invest to make a job faster. For example, buy a cultivating tractor instead of wheel hoeing. Or invest in a root washer instead of trying to get things clean just by spraying with water.
  2. Invest in a task to make a different task easier. The best example here is investing in weed control as a means to improve harvest efficiency – when you don’t have to cut around or pick through the weeds, harvest gets a lot easier and a lot faster. Other examples would include irrigation to improve yields, which makes harvesting faster because you don’t have to move as far to get the same amount of produce; or investing in more precision with seeding to increase crop uniformity, which reduces the time necessary to put together quality bunches.
  3. Invest in capacity. Because farming is all about timing, when you and your crew can complete a task more quickly, you can move onto other tasks in a timelier manner. While this is related to investing-to-make-a-job-faster, it’s about more than saving money on the task at hand. If it takes a crew a full day to hand-weed half an acre, it will take six days to hand-weed three acres. But if you start hand-weeding on day one when conditions are perfect and the weeds are easy to kill, by the time you get to the last half acre, the weeds are going to be at an entirely different stage of growth.

The first is the easiest to identify and the sexiest to invest in. The third is easy to overlook – what’s the cost of doing your own payroll in terms of your capacity to get value-enhancing work done?

The best investments will have an impact on all three.

0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Picture

    Sponsors

    img_purple pitchfork_sponsor_vermont compost

    Archives

    2016
    2015

    2014
    2013
    2012
    2011

    Announcement
    Business Philosophy
    Business Strategy
    CSA
    Entrepreneurism
    Farm Equipment
    Farm Finances
    Farming Techniques
    Farm Labor
    Farm Systems
    Farm Wisdom
    Food Safety
    Government
    Health
    Irrigation
    Management
    Marketing
    Organic Certification
    Organic Farming
    Organization
    Pricing
    Records Management
    Scaling Up
    Value

    Picture

    RSS Feed

Picture
Purple Pitchfork is a project of Renewing the Countryside, a non-profit dedicated to rural revitalization and collaborative farmer education that serves as the home for these resources Chris Blanchard created.
Copyright © 2018, Purple Pitchfork. All rights reserved.
Privacy Policy