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: Read more Adapting and Improving, one year at a time
