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Mike Roberts

Are You Your Farm's Bottleneck

By Mike Roberts

     

Do you feel like you can never take a day off? Are you frustrated that everything seems to fall apart unless you’re there? Do you save all your office work for the evenings? Are you neglecting basic self-care? If the answer to these questions is yes, you might be a bottleneck in your farming operation.


Another name for a bottleneck is a constraint or a limiting factor. The meaning is clear if we take the term literally: fill a bottle with water, turn it upside down to pour the water out, and the rate at which the water will flow will be restricted to the amount that can flow through the bottleneck.


A farm is not a bottle and produce is not water, but the same principle applies: each operation has 2-3 crucial components that limit the overall output of the farm. While each farm is unique and there are many possibilities for where crucial bottlenecks lie, the farmer's time is the most common, universal, stubborn, and intractable constraint on a farm.


No matter how much acreage you farm, how many crops you plant, and how many employees you hire, the farm will only be able to produce as much as you, the farmer, can manage.


One of the reasons that the farmer’s time is so valuable is that the farmer holds the expertise and judgment that makes the farm run. Deciding what needs to be done today and what can be put off, solving problems before they cause large crop losses, and setting quality and quantity targets for crops often require judgment that only years of experience can provide.


However, we often see our time as “free” while our employees’ time is “paid-for”; therefore, we tend to keep more workload on our own plates than we should.


But, if you properly value your time as a bottleneck during the busy season, it is easier to commit to delegating more work. To most people, the value of our time at work is [ (gross sales) – (expenses) ] / (hours worked). For example, if our operation grosses $200,000 per year, our expenses are $165,000 per year and we work 2000 hours per year, then our time is worth (200,000 – 165,000) / 2000 = $17.50 per hour. However, this is our average hourly wage, not our value to the farm operation.


Our true value to the farm operation, if indeed our time is a bottleneck, is the same calculation but ignoring the expenses. In other words, (gross sales) / (hours worked), or using the above numbers, $200,000 / 2,000 = $100 per hour. Quite a difference!


We value our time in the operation in this way because, in the short term, all expenses become ‘fixed expenses’: our employees will come to work their scheduled shifts, our seeds and soil amendments are bought and paid for, and other fees are prepaid. The expenses are already baked in, and our time, as the bottleneck of the entire farm, is required to unlock all of the sales that will make the enterprise pay off.


This dynamic can manifest itself in several ways. Still, the underlying effect is clear once we learn to observe it: our inability to pull away from the day-to-day concerns of the farm often leads to cascading failures.


The most obvious example is when our employees make mistakes due to a lack of training or insufficient supervision. Sometimes, we just need to go back to fix the mistake, but other times, mistakes can lead to lost sales, insufficient product at market, or crop losses.


Likewise, we can be too busy training and supervising employees and not have time to solve other problems on the farm as they arise. Examples in this category would be crop losses from pest and disease issues, which could have been prevented with adequate countermeasures had we had the time to scout and implement them promptly.


An even higher-order farmer function is contingency planning. What happens if the box truck gets a flat tire on market day? Who will fill in at the market if the regular stall workers are sick? What preparations are required when a hurricane is bearing down on the region? 


If we properly value our time as the key to unlocking the entirety of the farm’s sales, we are more likely to commit to decisions that respect that time. I can set up sprinklers in 15 minutes, while the same task might take an employee 30 minutes. If I don’t value my time, then I won’t delegate the task, but by valuing my time, I can see that handing off tasks will pay off by freeing up my time to make important decisions on the farm.


Besides valuing our time appropriately, the second key to delegating tasks is to commit to delegating them at the start of the season. Decide which tasks you will delegate and to whom, and start training as soon as those tasks start happening for the year.


If we wait until we are too overloaded to try to hand off tasks, we will fail because we will be caught in the catch-22 of “I don’t have time to keep up with this task myself” but “I don’t have time to train someone new on the task”. Training and supervising take (*your*) time, so it is best to get as much of it done before the season gets busy.


Valuing our time as farmers also allows us to commit to making process improvements, updating equipment, and installing infrastructure that, while not necessarily increasing production output, might make it possible for someone other than the farmer to complete a task.


These improvements need not be expensive; sometimes, they only require an up-front investment in time. For example, spending hours in the off-season to sort and tidy the tools used for fieldwork in the coming season would allow employees more independence in starting and stopping tasks instead of needing the farmer’s assistance digging through piles of stuff to find the needed equipment.


Replacing old, finicky equipment likewise allows less experienced operators to use it, as does switching to easier-to-use tools. For example, we now finish beds with a tilther (conceptualized by Eliot Coleman, a lightweight battery-powered tiller designed to work the top two inches of your soil) instead of a BCS power harrow.


Finally, automating tasks and installing sensors so the farmer can get alerts when something is off can be very useful. Motorized greenhouse roll-up sides, irrigation timers, and walk-in cooler alarms allow the farmer to rest easy when not at the farm.


The key is to methodically move towards having the day-to-day farming tasks happen with less direct input from the farmer. This allows the farmer time to step back and address the more complex and unexpected problems as they arise, making the operation more resilient in the face of the myriad challenges farms face due to pest and disease pressure, weather events, and market disruptions.


Note: the thinking behind managing bottlenecks is drawn from ‘The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement’ by Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox, 1984.


Mike and his wife Kelli started Roots Farm in Tiverton, RI in 2009 and have been farming full-time since 2014.



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