The Best Farming Tool You Don't Own: A Stopwatch

How do you know if you are getting better at your trade as a farmer? Well, if your tomatoes are tastier, your chickens are healthier, and your corn has fewer worms than it did last year—you are probably learning a thing or two. You can also assess your success monetarily. But, what I’m thinking about specifically is your performance on day-to-day farm tasks. Planting, harvesting, weeding, animal feeding chores, milking, etc. It is easy to get overwhelmed with big picture issues, and of course these are important, but I think positive change can also come in small doses. If you can get better daily, imagine how much improvement you can see over the course of a year!

As Molly wrote last week, it is near impossible to assess or create change (in her example: economic change, i.e., profit) without some form of measurement. How are you to measure your ability as a farmer? Well, I would argue that the ideal goal should be a combination of the quality of work you do and the speed. Quality is somewhat subjective (I’m sure you already have your own quality standard); speed you can measure. 

One of my co-workers who raises sheep, Dan Macon, has proudly described how he times himself when he puts up livestock netting. What a brilliant idea! This way, he has a ballpark idea of how long it will take him to fence a particular area (He can calculate his minutes per net, or MPN if you will). This makes for better planning, “okay, I can set up fence in about 1 hour and then move the sheep, and then pick up minerals before the feed store closes…” The other really key thing that this provides is a measurement point that he has used as evidence of his improved proficiency. Dan knows he has gotten faster at doing his job because when he started, it took him about 45 minutes to put up four rolls of netting and now it takes him about the same amount of time to put up eight rolls! He has gotten better: awesome; and he knows it: even more awesome. He has a very tangible idea that he is getting more efficient and his systems are working.

If you want to see change, you have to make changes. I think this simple idea is helpful in that it provides the motivation to act. This action might be as simple as tweaking one part of the system that you already have in place. This is often an easy concept to think about but a hard one to act upon; especially in the farming world. It has been my experience when working on farms, that the systems you end up with are often in place because, “that’s how it’s always been done.” If that system is working for you, then by all means, don’t change it. But, (and here’s the trick) you have to have a point of comparison to know whether that is actually the case.

Here are a couple of examples to get you thinking:

Is it faster to bunch while you harvest leafy greens (e.g., kale and chard)?

Or is it faster to harvest good leaves into a bin and then bunch?

I don’t know the right answer and it may be different for you depending on how quickly you can harvest each way. Time yourself and see. You might find that specialization works…or not.

Is it faster to have each person dig and pull/pack carrots themselves?

Or is it faster to have one person digging and one person pulling/packing carrots in bins?

Is it faster to have one person move broiler chicken tractors? Or is it faster to have two people move tractors? Is it twice as fast?

I’m serious when I say it is important to understand the time it takes for each task. But, I also want to say that maybe the more important idea is to be open to change. It is okay to experiment a little bit. Sometimes just a minor change in what you are doing can have huge benefits. Having the practice with these different methods will also contribute to a richer skill set as a farmer. What is the worst that can happen? You can find out how NOT to harvest and process carrots. That is useful information. Don’t be afraid to make some changes and definitely don’t be afraid to measure whether those changes were useful to you. Stopwatch anyone?

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