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  • From: Etienne Goyer <etienne AT lejardinduvillage.ca>
  • To: market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] time budget info for various field crops?
  • Date: Sun, 12 Jan 2014 09:58:57 -0500

My resolution for 2014 is to get better at note-taking. Sit down every night after dinner and write everything I did in the day, breaking down the time spent on each task (including paid and unpaid labor). IOW, maitain a real season logbook. Next winter, sit down and crunch the number. One of my colleague in the area as been doing that for a couple years, and he is now able to figure his cost fairly precisely.

We all know that new year's resolution tends get dumped in short order, especially when the main season madness kicks in. But wouldn't it be wonderful if I where able to stick to it? :)



On 14-01-12 09:22 AM, Richard Robinson wrote:
This is an excellent question, and one for which I've never seen an answer.
The closest I've seen to what you are looking for are estimates from expert
farmers on the dollars of crop per hour of harvest time (lettuce is huge,
raspberries are terrible). But the usefulness of this figure rests on the
assumption that the rest of the season's work is either proportionate or
fixed. That's not necessarily true for all.

I tracked my own time by crop for one year a couple years ago, and confirmed
what I mostly knew already. There were some time hogs (artichokes, potatoes)
and some cash cows (tomatoes, kale, lettuce). I dropped the artichokes (but
hope to reintroduce them eventually), rethought how I grew potatoes, and
thanked my tomatoes each time I entered the hoophouse. To be what you are
looking for, I would have needed income from each crop, so I could figure out
what my hourly rate was for each, but that was more precision than I could
wring from my honor stand and CSA. I figured that on average, I was doing
somewhat better than minimum wage. That's not enough.


Richard Robinson
www.nasw.org/users/rrobinson/
Hopestill Farm
www.hopestill.com


On 1/12/2014 at 9:04:36 AM, Kathryn Kerby wrote:
I am looking for something which maybe doesn’t
exist. A table of estimated or averaged manhours required for different
kinds of veggie crops. For instance, something which would list the
approximate manhours required to take tomatoes from seeding through harvest,
on a per-plant or per-row-foot or per-square-foot basis. I know there are a
lot of variables, such as whether stuff is direct-seeded vs transplanted,
whether each step is done manually or via machinery, and probably a lot of
stuff I haven’t even thought of. But maybe something like this exists? I’ve
been doing Google searches on phrases like “time budget for vegetable crops”
but keep coming up with hits for enterprise budgets, ie, how much money was
spent on seeds and fertilizer and so on. Not what I’m looking for.

I’m asking for several related reasons. First, we’re trying to decide
whether to add any additional crops to our existing work schedule for the
year. Also, we’re wondering if there is some kind of comparison between
crops, such that if we wanted to add a few more, we could choose based (in
part) on how much manpower they’d require, versus how much time we can give
that new crop. Maybe tomatoes would be too time-intensive, but perhaps
onions wouldn’t. I also would like to compare the limited manhours info I
have for crops we’ve done in the past, versus how much manhours those same
crops required other farms. See if we’re taking more time than is really
needed, on X crop. If we’re spending five times more man hours in the field
on squash, compared to some kind of national average, it would be nice to
learn that so we can figure out why.


Anyone have any resources they could point me towards?
Thanks all………….

Kathryn Kerby

Frogchorusfarm.com
Snohomish, WA


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--
Etienne Goyer - Le Jardin du Village
http://lejardinduvillage.wordpress.com

"Changer le monde, une betterave à la fois"





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