Adapting and Improving, one year at a time

The wintertime brings a host of shifting timescales and events. It’s the overlap of the New Year, and notably the less busy time for the majority of farmers and food producers (sorry livestock folks, I realize there’s still a hum of activity in your barns!). For many of us, there’s a January lull before the thaw kicks many activities into gear.

Along with my partner, I operate a small community farm in Canton called littleGrasse Foodworks that raises vegetables, herbs and flowers for “Free Choice Shares”. My partner is on the farm and I juggle farm tasks with another job. I reckon that rings true for many northern New York producers. We are entering our 13th season and I’ve gotten much better at not losing sleep worrying about every issue of our farm, but rather tackling a couple things at a time for incremental improvements that lead to a range of small and big impacts.

If you are looking for ideas, here are three easy ways to enact positive changes in your farm or food business in 2022.

Track time for one enterprise OR activity 

It’s true that we cannot understand our cost of production without accounting for how we spend our time. And it can be overwhelming to consider. For years, I felt the pressure to figure out how much time we were spending tending every one of our 50+ crops to see if any were too time consuming and adjust accordingly. It seemed daunting and I hesitated to take the plunge. And in reality, as a farm with shares, diversity is essential to the quality of our overall offering. We cannot decide to stop raising carrots on a CSA farm, but we can prioritize improving efficiencies in our processes. Anyhow, in your own business, I bet there are certain activities you’d like to get a better handle on and there are very simple ways to track activities, for example an online platform called Clockify.

I decided that instead of figuring out how long tending the carrots versus the cabbage took, it would be more useful to get a grasp on categories of activities. So in 2021, once per day I logged onto Clockify to enter my time spent on certain activities such as Accounting, Communications, Maintenance, Harvest, etc.

Logging my activities each day was easy and took around 5 minutes. Some days only included a couple hours of farm work and others included a long list of tasks.  Now we are planning for 2022 and with that investment of a couple minutes per day, I have a wealth of new information that I can choose to use in various ways. These options include but are not limited to:

• Developing a master calendar of farm activities to track the arc of the season, this makes macro planning and delegation easier.
• Accurately planning a given work week since I know roughly how long those activities took last year, ex. seed inventory and ordering
• Recognizing areas that are time consuming and focus on those specific systems to make them easier or quicker, ex. inputting share payments and reconciling the books.

You create whichever categories and tags would be useful for you and it’s possible to run report to see how long that activity took in any given day, week, month, etc.

Get feedback from customers 

Each year we have a feedback survey that we send to all our CSA shareholders. It’s a dozen or so questions, a mix of open-ended and multiple choice. We ask about everything from their go-to recipes using our farm ingredients to suggestions for improvement. One of the questions is their original motivation for joining the farm. Another is, if they could describe the farm in three words, what would they be? These are my favorite questions on the survey because we comb through these responses and look for patterns during the winter. When we find items that resonate with a lot of folks, we make sure our communications and online presence include these concepts. Survey options are limitless.

For example, when describing the share on our website, the reasons we’ve included to invest in littleGrasse has expanded over the years due to these survey results. Initially the benefits we listed in our share description included the most obvious concepts such as “access to fresh produce” and “supporting a local farm”. Now we have expanded the list considerably to include less obvious benefits such as “increase confidence and healthfulness in the kitchen”, “connect with the sights, sounds and seasons of our region” and “complete access to the gardens with flexibility to adjust week to week”.

Another example of useful survey results is shareholders reporting which methods of communication from the farm they prefer. We learned that our weekly emails to members during the season were the most highly valued communication, much more so than social media posts or videos. So this season I will aim to be efficient at sending fun, meaningful emails and let the Facebook posts happen as needed or when we have time rather than worrying that we are not “posting enough”.

These results will vary for every business, depending on your sales outlets or customers. Take the time to craft questions that work for you. While we do 1 survey at the end of each share season, others might find very short surveys throughout the year to be more useful.

Make Sure You Can be Found Online

Even if ALL your sales are direct, such as the farmers market or onsite, customers still search for businesses to see what they can learn from afar before making a purchase. The more websites that your information is featured, the better your own website will perform in search results, since these other sites “legitimize,” your presence. It’s a wide world on that web, but here’s some important places to make sure you are listed:

• Google Business Profile
  • Once you verify your address, you can add photos, contact information, product

    

    listing and more. This text automatically populates in a Google search and shows up at the very top of a page. You’ve likely read these listings when learning more about other businesses and it helps people find you when using Google Maps. When I just logged in, I was excited to see a new feature, that you could post messages that would appear on the main block of the listing, example below about when our share information will go live.

• All Local Food Guides and Listings
  • Step one is getting the listing and equally important is keeping it up to date. For example, the GardenShare Local Food Guide lists 100+ farm and food businesses by sales outlet in St. Lawrence County and has 10,000+ copies printed annually in addition to the online listing. When was the last time you reviewed your information on Adirondack Harvest?! There are other county specific local food guides across northern New York areas including Jefferson, Lewis and Franklin Counties.
  • National listings include Local Harvest and the Local Food Directories hosted by the USDA.

So there are a few ideas to get your juices flowing during these icy times. These concepts are not cookie cutter, and they’ll need to be adapted and refined for your own needs. The variety and nuance it encompasses is part of the beauty of our food system. As producers we have to customize any tool, strategy or method to our specific situation. Here’s to positive problem solving.

Note: This information is for educational purposes only, Cornell Cooperative Extension does not endorse Clockify or Google products or any specific software.

Flip Filippi is the Local Food Program Leader and Harvest Kitchen Manager at the Extension Learning Farm in Canton. She is dedicated to serving people all along the food chain: from businesses wanting to make food products for sale to consumers eager to access foods produced in the region and gain the confidence to use them in their kitchens. She is a certified Master Food Preserver and loves to connect with others around low waste, full flavored whole foods cooking.