Hi --
Was going through some old emails and came upon this one. I tried going to the web site linked to but can't find anything on this -- was the collected data ever posted? if so, could you give the page to find it on, and/or the correct search terms to find it on the site?
Thanks --
-- Rivka; Finger Lakes NY, Zone 6A now I think Fresh-market organic produce, small scale
On Jan 13, 2014, at 1:33 PM, stonecirclefarm tds.net wrote: Pardon the long reply but please bear with me...
Great to see this topic being discussed. Given that labor is a vegetable grower's largest input/expense, we all need to do a far better job tracking and understanding labor...and developing more efficient systems (whether that involves better organization, improved techniques, better training of employees, new tools, or whatever).
In addition to running my own farm, I work at the University of Wisconsin and am involved in research and training programs to serve the market farming community. We have a project called Veggie Compass that has been trying to do pretty much exactly what Kathryn is asking about. Veggie Compass is a spreadsheet tool developed to help vegetable growers track profitability BY CROP and BY MARKET. As such, it demands that a grower input labor data by crop in order to allocate labor costs appropriately across all the crops they grow. The Veggie Compass tool has been in development over quite a few years and initial feedback and testing proved what I and my colleagues knew: while most growers could adequately apportion most costs (seeds, fuel, etc.) across all their crops and markets, it was labor that was the big road block. So, we wondered if we could develop "proxy" or "average" labor numbers by crop so that people could at least start using Veggie Compass using those labor figures in lieu of their own. As a result, we have been working with a group of growers in Wisconsin and neighboring states to gather labor data for the past 4+ years.
We developed some record keeping systems to aid the process and provided labor data collection forms to our collaborating farms. These were pads of pre-printed, farm-specific forms and there were two types offered for growers to choose from. The first was a "short form" which were 4.25" by 5.5". These allowed a grower (or their employees) to quickly report labor hours after a task was finished by circling the crop, circling the activity (field growing or harvest and pack for the purposes of Veggie Compass) and reporting the total person hours. On a given day, many of these "short forms" would be completed, ripped off the pad, and tossed into a box for later tabulation (in this case by a student hired under the grant we received to develop Veggie Compass). "The "long form" was a full sized sheet of paper with a farm's crops listed in one column and two columns to record either field growing hours or harvest and pack hours.
Our experience using these forms is that, as the season progresses, success using these forms usually declines or they are abandoned. As a result, the quantity and quality of data we collected was reduced. We have persevered, however, and we now have several years worth of data and it is currently being analyzed. Initial observations suggest that labor hours vary considerably from farm to farm and from year to year. This means that we are unlikely to be able to produce sufficiently accurate "proxy" or "average" labor hours that would be meaningful for other growers to us in terms of budgeting or pricing. However, I remain confident that we will be able to produce some figures that will aid growers in placing themselves somewhere on a continuum to better understand their labor inputs and compare and contrast their operations with other farms.
By the way, we feel the best way to tabulate and report labor hours per crop is by:
Hour per Row Foot
The real bottom line is that given the variability we are seeing in labor hours, growers are well-advised to track labor on their own farms to be assured that they are pricing things appropriately and to work to become more profitable.
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