There comes a point in the growth of any business where working harder doesn't get you significantly more results.
When you start out as a farmer (or any entrepeneur) on a few acres or with a few hundred chickens, you can rely on hard work to get you by. The tractor breaks? I'll use the rototiller. The beans are weedy? I'll just take longer to pick them. Behind on the bookkeeping? I'll stay up late and get it done.
Unfortunately, this works. It works so well that a lot of farmers work themselves right into a successful operation based primarily on their ability - and sometimes the ability of a loyal crew - to just work harder. For a farm where a significant portion of the labor comes from the farmer, increasing the number of hours you work, or ramping up the intensity, makes a big difference. You plant more acres, pack more boxes, sell more at farmers market, piecing together equipment, working late, and figuring it all out until suddenly it stops working.
On a few acres, labor-saving implements just save labor: if you miss a timely weeding because the hydraulics go out on your cultivating tractor, you can put a couple of enthusiastic workers out on hoes for a day or two and clean up a lot of weeds. On twenty acres, not so much. And at some point, depending on your location, coming up with more people on short notice simply becomes impossible.
And on a farm with ten full-time employees, adding another day to the farmer's workload just doesn't make much of a difference in the overall output of the farm.
I've heard beginning farmers say, "We're so small that efficiency doesn't matter." But that's completely backwards. When you're small is the time to figure out how to make the most of your time, to set up the patterns of work that make certain the tractor has been maintained so it isn't going to break, to document procedures and communicate expectations so that you can attend to urgencies and emergencies while knowing that the work is proceeding and proceeding well, to put systems and processes in place that are transparent and linear.
If you don't do it when you're small, you'll have to do it when you're big (and if you aren't going to get bigger, this still applies - working harder is a lot easier at 30 than it is at 40!). And it's a lot easier to do it up front.
When you start out as a farmer (or any entrepeneur) on a few acres or with a few hundred chickens, you can rely on hard work to get you by. The tractor breaks? I'll use the rototiller. The beans are weedy? I'll just take longer to pick them. Behind on the bookkeeping? I'll stay up late and get it done.
Unfortunately, this works. It works so well that a lot of farmers work themselves right into a successful operation based primarily on their ability - and sometimes the ability of a loyal crew - to just work harder. For a farm where a significant portion of the labor comes from the farmer, increasing the number of hours you work, or ramping up the intensity, makes a big difference. You plant more acres, pack more boxes, sell more at farmers market, piecing together equipment, working late, and figuring it all out until suddenly it stops working.
On a few acres, labor-saving implements just save labor: if you miss a timely weeding because the hydraulics go out on your cultivating tractor, you can put a couple of enthusiastic workers out on hoes for a day or two and clean up a lot of weeds. On twenty acres, not so much. And at some point, depending on your location, coming up with more people on short notice simply becomes impossible.
And on a farm with ten full-time employees, adding another day to the farmer's workload just doesn't make much of a difference in the overall output of the farm.
I've heard beginning farmers say, "We're so small that efficiency doesn't matter." But that's completely backwards. When you're small is the time to figure out how to make the most of your time, to set up the patterns of work that make certain the tractor has been maintained so it isn't going to break, to document procedures and communicate expectations so that you can attend to urgencies and emergencies while knowing that the work is proceeding and proceeding well, to put systems and processes in place that are transparent and linear.
If you don't do it when you're small, you'll have to do it when you're big (and if you aren't going to get bigger, this still applies - working harder is a lot easier at 30 than it is at 40!). And it's a lot easier to do it up front.
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