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