Jenny (00:29)
It's August and holy heck is it a crazy time of year for a lot of flower farmers. If you are feeling overwhelmed, crazy, out of your mind, there are ways to come back from it and feel more at ease, less stress and overall just better. And that happens by creating more efficiencies on your farm. And this is a whole farm effort and we could talk about efficiency.
for literally hours and hours and hours, but we don't have time to do that today. So we're just gonna be talking about being as efficient as possible on your farm so you can free up your time, get your time back, have some more space in your brain for other things like your family, your hobbies. Like I know a lot of those don't exist for us anymore as business owners, but there are lots of things that you can do. And...
Every farm is as unique as the person who runs it. You guys have heard me say that a million times and I will continue saying it forever. So you just really have to look at what you're doing on your farm where you're spending a lot of time and then trying to cut back on some of the things that you're doing that are just taking a ton of time. So let's talk about the lean approach to things here. First of all, what the heck is lean? What does that even mean?
It is the process of eliminating or minimizing waste or steps on your farm in order to create more value. So basically, lean is just taking out all the crap that you don't need, minimizing all the things that aren't directly producing profit or value on your farm, and trying to minimize them or eliminate them. We're following a system to get more out of the farm by being efficient.
times, that means we're doing and having less. It sounds counterproductive, but if you think about the way you do anything on your farm, let's just say growing ranunculus, for example. I have a really good example of that I want to talk about. Just list out every single step you do to grow a bed of ranunculus.
And then look at every single step and think, how can I skip steps? How can I shorten or simplify them? How can I speed up the processes? How can I reduce the distance you travel or the flowers travel? Because the more distance you travel, the more time it takes and the more of a time suck it is. How can you use less resources, supplies and materials and still get a good result? These are all questions you should be asking while you're looking at that giant list of steps.
I know a lot of us continue to complete tasks because it's just the way we've always done it or because it's the way other people have taught us to do it. But what if there's a better way that you haven't discovered yet? So let's talk about the ranunculus example. We used to plant ranunculus on our farm by soaking the corms and then we would fill 50 cell trays and we would place every single ranunculus corm in a cell in the tray.
with the little legs pointed down, we'd let them grow on for about four weeks in the greenhouse, and then we'd transplant them as large plucks. This took about 20 hours of labor per bed of ranunculus, which is like quite a lot, I think. I wrote down all the steps, everything that we're doing, because I was quite frankly getting frustrated with how long it was taking to basically just start all the corms in the greenhouse and put them in the 50 cell trays.
even though it was only like four minutes, like I think it was like three or four minutes per tray or something like that, it still added up a ton because we grow like 10 ,000 ranunculus every year. So it was a lot of time. So I looked at all the steps and I thought, how can I simplify? How can I shorten processes? How can I use less materials to save me money? And here's what I came up with. Now on the farm, when we plant our ranunculus, we soak the corums as usual, we just take
The whole bags of them, we don't count out different numbers or anything of the corms for different successions. We order them in the succession, so there's no counting out corms or whatever. That saves an hour or time. But then we take the bag after we soak them, we take them out of the water, we take a 10 -20 tray, which has no cells in it, it's just a plastic open tray. We put a little bit of ProMix or soil on the bottom. We just...
dump the entire bag of corns into the tray. Usually we fit about 200 per tray. And then we put a, we just smooth out the corns. We don't bother to put any of the little fingers down or anything. And then we cover with a little bit of soil and we grow in our greenhouse for about 10 days. So instead of four weeks, an entire month, we're only, they're only in there for about 10 days. And then we transplant them as pre -sprouted corn. So there's no plucks.
All right, and so they transplant way faster. So this takes less than four labor hours per bed of ranunculus, which is crazy. It's such a huge difference. So if our labor rate, let's say it's $30 an hour. If I did it that first way by putting all the corms into a 50 cell tray and transplanting them out as plugs, that's 20 labor hours per bed, which is six.
hundred dollars in labor. Okay? So six hundred dollars in labor. The second way, but just taking those corms and dumping them into a 10 -20 tray and covering them back up and transplanting them as pre -sprouted corms with no plug, that only takes four hours. That means that cost me a hundred and twenty dollars. So we went from a six hundred dollars in labor to a hundred and twenty dollars in labor. That means I saved over
$480 and 16 hours of time with this little growing technique tweak. The corms, they still grow so beautifully, but I'm saving a ton of time and money. Now, I grow about six beds of these, which means that I'm actually saving almost $3 ,000 in 100 hours of time saved.
I get to keep almost $3 ,000 in my pocket and I get almost 100 hours of time back. Okay, you guys, that is huge. It's crazy how this little tweak in production saved me so much time and money. And I'm just talking about the labor here. This isn't even taking into account all of the materials and supplies that I'm saving. So I use way less trays.
and far less soil with that second method because in a 50 cell tray you can only fit 50 corms and in a 10 -20 tray I can fit about 200 corms and so I'm taking up way less space in my greenhouse. I'm using less energy because I put mine on heat mats. I know a lot of people don't do that but I put mine on heat mats and it works great. And so I'm using less energy to heat them. I'm using less soil. I'm using less trays and so.
Altogether, the savings is just absolutely incredible. And when you think about it, you know, if you're just planting one bed of corums, you're saving 480 bucks plus all the materials. So I don't even know, I haven't done the math on that, but in my case, just for labor time, I'm saving almost $3 ,000. Like what could you do with that money? So much, so many things you could invest in.
So it would make you money in the future. You could save it for an emergency savings fund, which everybody should think about having at some point in your business. Like maybe at first that's too much of a stretch and I get that. But at some point, like I want to be prepared if COVID or another pandemic or something happens again and the whole world shuts down, I need money to keep my business going through that downturn. So my business survives. So, you know, having a savings.
Just hire some more freaking help around here because Lord knows we all need some more help on the farm. You could make some new and better farm signage. You could upgrade your logo or your branding package. You could put it in a sinking fund or a savings fund for a future cooler or studio or greenhouse, or you could pay yourself and just buy something that you want. You know, it's so hard when we're starting our flower farms because we're pouring.
everything into the business, all of ourselves, our energy, our time, our finances. And so if you could just save a little bit of that, and if you're not gonna funnel it back into the business, give yourself a little reward for, you know, working on it and getting your business off the ground. It can make a big difference to your morale and just the general feeling you have towards your business, right? And then...
Besides the actual financial savings of just tweaking the production of this crop, you're also saving like hours and hours of time, okay? 16 hours of time in this example for growing one bed of vernunculus.
You could use that 16 hours of time to market and sell your business. You could write 16 blog posts. So you could rank higher on Google. It would help your SEO rankings and help attract your ideal customers. You could create 64 social media posts. You could write 32 marketing emails. You could pitch to like eight or 10 different florists or retailers or wholesalers or customers or pursue new opportunities or sales outlets or something. You could redesign your entire website.
You could finally weed that one peony bed that's completely out of control and you've just given up on, like we all have those areas of our farm. Organize your tools and supplies. So when you're making bouquets or when your employees are looking for things, it's way more streamlined. Or you could plan a floral workshop to make even more money. Okay, I'm just like spouting off ideas here, but you could do whatever you wanted. Even if you weren't going to use that time in your business, like that 16 hours of time could give you.
Like six dates with your significant other. You could go on two day trips with your family. You could bake like a year's worth of sourdough bread. And I don't bake sourdough bread. I have no idea how long it takes, but it just sounded good as an idea that popped in my head. You could go for a two hour hike every single day for a week. You could start actually having a real hobby outside of the business. You could finally finish reading that book you've had for a year. You could take, you know,
road trip to go visit a friend or take a nap for God's sake. So all of this to say these seemingly small and insignificant tweaks add up really really fast they really do. Growing practices really matter and so just finding ways to be more efficient can save you so much time and money on your farm.
and it can really help alleviate that overwhelm that you're feeling all the time. It can clear out all that clutter from your brain that you feel all the time. I know what that's like, and I'm so happy that I'm at a place now in my business where I've kind of figured these things out and set my business up in a way where I really don't feel like that with my business all the time. Now, I definitely feel overwhelmed when it comes to juggling other things in my life, like...
you know, family stuff with the business or whatever. But when it comes to the actual day -to -day operations of my business, like it's really not that overwhelming. It's very, very attainable. So what I want you to do is think about certain crops that you grow on your farm or processes and systems, ways that you make bouquets or maybe you bunch things or whatever, and make a list of steps to grow that crop or whatever steps it is in that process. Make it from start to finish.
Look at what steps you could shorten, what steps you could simplify, any steps that you could eliminate or speed up. And there's going to be a lot of steps. I mean, write down every single little thing. Like for ranunculus, I have make a crop plan, order the corms, count out each corms for each succession, excuse me, when we have them in hand, soak them for two hours, then soak in fungicide for 15 minutes, count out the number of trays needed, open and mix the pro mix, fill the
Sell trays with soil, fill the trays with the corms, cover the corms with soil, water them in, cover them with a humidity dome, set them on the heat mat, monitor and cover daily for however many days, 10 days, 30 days, whatever it is. bed prep, remove the residue, add the amendments, tilter it, rake it, lay your drip tape, water it in. Then when the trays are ready, you're moving them from the greenhouse to the tunnel, putting up string line because we do.
very precise, precision planting on our farm. So we put up string line to make sure everything's a nice straight rows. So weeding it is really easy and fast. And the actual transplanting, watering in, recording the data. So actually keeping records, writing things down, cleanup, et cetera, et cetera. I could keep going with all the processes until we actually harvest, finish harvesting, you know, pull them up, all that stuff. So this is what that.
step -by -step process looks like. So there's a lot of steps. I'm thinking of everything that we do and then looking at every single step and analyzing how can I make this faster? How can I shorten this? How can I eliminate steps? And it's such a simple concept, but we just get so ingrained in doing things every day. And I'm totally guilty of this. Like you're just doing, doing, doing, trying to get things done.
that you end up doing things that are really not efficient over and over and over again, because it's just the way that you've always done them, or it's just the way that you were taught. But switching your brain from having like a hobby flower farm to a business means switching on that analytical part of your brain where you're really looking at the way you do things and studying the way you do things to make them more efficient. Your number one constraint on the farm
is not your finances, it's not the farm layout, it's not the space that you have, it is your time. Your time is your number one limiting factor. So anything that you can do on the farm to get your time back, do it. It's gonna save you time, it's gonna save you money, it's gonna make you feel better, and it's gonna make your farm work way more smoothly and run more efficiently. So here's another quick example. We used to plant our field tulips.
outside in a trench and we'd place every single little bulb with the pointy side up one by one, like eggs in an egg garden. I think pretty much everyone has done it like that at some point. It takes a lot of time to do that. We don't do it anymore. If we plant field tulips in a trench, we dig the trench, we take the crate and we just dump it in there, cover it with soil and they grow great. You guys, they grow great. Seriously. And then when we harvest them, we don't
dig up our bulbs anymore. And so that might not work for your farm. Like I always say, every farm is as unique as the person who runs it, but storing those bulbs or storing the tulips with the bulbs on, you know, digging the whole plant up and putting them in the cooler was really a terrible job. We hated it. Everyone on the farm hated that task. It was dirty. It was just not fun. And we ended up
having a lot of shrink because we ended up breaking a lot of our stems when we were digging them out and then putting them in crates and then putting them in the greenhouse and then processing them later and taking all the corms or all the bulbs off. And so it was a really long process that just wasn't really worth it for us. We never really needed to store our tulips for that long anyways. So now we harvest our tulips.
sort of like how you would harvest a Narcissus or Daffodil. Instead of digging them up, we just grab down at the base and we pull them up. And most of the time it pops off from the bulb. The bulb stays in the ground and we just snip off those bulbs and bunch them like you would any other bunch on the farm and put them in water and store them in the cooler and water. And then all we have to do is take the bunches out and sleeve them for the market and they're ready to go. There's no processing.
and taking all the bulbs off and making a giant mess. And it's so much faster. We have way less shrink and we make way more money on our tulips now just because we've made these little tweaks in our processes. So there's so, so, so many examples of this. Another example, real quick, I feel like I could go on forever and ever about this, but another example is we changed the way we grew our dahlias. We used to grow them in landscape fabric. You know, we'd have the holes in the landscape fabric.
We'd have an auger that we dig holes with in the holes in the landscape fabric to drop the tubers into and cover them back up. And then we'd have to weed all the little holes and you know, we have to put down the landscape fabric every spring, pull it up every fall. And it was just a lot. So this year, this is something new that we're doing. We decided to not plant in landscape fabric anymore. So we dig a trench with our middle buster plow, drop the tubers in the ditch. We
use a hilling attachment on our tractor to drive back over it to cover all the tubers. We do shallow cultivation for weed control. And then we also don't do drip irrigation out in our field anymore. We only use overhead wobblers and sprinklers, which double as frost control. And so, so far using these little tweaks and not growing in landscape fabric has saved us on our farm a ton of time and money. Now this
would not have worked for me when I first started my farm because we had so much weed pressure, it was insane. So I feel like we had to grow them in landscape fabric. But now that we've been doing that for a lot of years, we've really gotten our seed bank in the soil down under control. We don't have as much weed pressure as we used to. And so now this is a more time and cost saving way to do it for us.
And so another point here is that you don't need to be afraid of making changes to your production. Just because you've done something one way forever, doesn't mean that you can change it in the future. Like we've grown our dahlias a bunch of different ways. We used to grow all of our flowers in the field. in plastic mulch, we had a mulch layer that we use with our tractor.
We did that for a few years and then we switched to landscape fabric and now we're not using landscape fabric at all anymore. And so it's just sort of the evolution that our farm made and you don't need to be afraid of changing things like that. So like I said, there's so many different examples like this that you can implement on your farm. And efficiencies don't have to just be in the way of the way you actually grow and produce things. It can also be
when you're making your bouquets. Keeping everything nice and close is really, really important. The more distance that you travel, the more time you're introducing into things. And it may not seem like a lot, but as you learned, it can add up really, really fast. Another thing is just walking around the farm. If you're planting things really far apart that are harvested at the same time, it adds up really fast.
every time you're walking from one side of the farm to the other, even if your farm isn't big, like my farm is not big. We grow just over an acre of flowers. So we have like zones on our farm where everything that blooms at the same time blooms right next to each other. So we have a block for May where all of our May flowers are planted. So ranunculus, anemone, butterfly, ranunculus, tulips, whatever, all planted in the rows next to each other. Then our August flowers, salicyanthus, dahlias, eucalyptus, zinnias,
we try to plant those as close together as possible. Because even though it sounds insignificant, if it takes you five minutes to walk from one side of the farm to harvest to the other, and you walk back and forth four times a day, that's 20 minutes a day, which doesn't sound like a lot, but over the course of the season, that's 80 hours of time. That's a lot of time over the season that you could save. And now I'm not saying that you should make every single aspect of your farm as
crazy efficient as possible. So you take all the joy out of things. Like I'm not saying that you should just be like a robotic factory, but the more you have the mindset that your farm is kind of like a factory and you should be making it as efficient as possible, the more time you're going to save. And so, you know, on that same note, keeping things in your studio really neat and clean and organized and everything as close together as possible and keeping things or supplies
close to where you're going to use them is really important. So like we store our buckets right near where we're going to fill our buckets. We store our flower sleeves right next to where we're going to be making bouquets and using the sleeves. We keep all of our tables really close together and we keep everything close to our cooler. So we're not traveling a lot of distances and just adding more time into the equation.
And even making mixed bouquets is for my farm, kind of like a time suck. I try to make as few mixed bouquets as possible. We still make them for our customers every week for our farmers market, but we do very few of them and charge quite a bit. And something that I found with my retail customers, and again, your farm might be different, but think about what your customers are looking for, what they want and how you can make it easier on yourself. But my customers love mixes.
So we used to plant our zinnias in straight colors. So we'd plant the white zinnias together, then the pink zinnias together, then the purple zinnias together, because that's how the seeds came and that's how we planted them. But then our customers always wanted a mix of colors in their zinnia bunches. They didn't want just purple. They wanted purple and pink and white and whatever. So I found that...
We really didn't want to take those single colors, harvest them, and then mix them all together afterwards. Even though that's what our customers wanted, it was a huge waste of time. So now we just make our own seed mixes and plant those zinnias in a mix. So we'll take our zinnias and we'll
do like a pink mix, because I like to do monochromatic things. So we'll put salmon rose. These are all giant binary zinnias, but we'll do salmon rose, the corals, the carmine rose, the bright pink, and maybe like a purple and a lilac seed all into one packet. Shake it up. Seed them as normal. Transplant them out in the field. And then when they grow, you have a mix that's already in your field. So when you're harvesting them, you harvest an entire bunch of mixed zinnias.
So just doing that instead of making the mix afterwards saves a ton of time. Let's say it takes you two hours to make 60 mix bouquets. If you do that three times a week throughout the season, you have about a 32 week season. Over the course of the season, that's 192 hours of time. And if your labor rate is $30 an hour, that's almost $6 ,000. Okay. What could you do with $6 ,000 at the end of the year? That was freed up. You put back into your profits.
So all this to say, all these seemingly small and insignificant tweaks add up really, really fast.
Now I could talk about efficiency forever for hours and hours, like I said, which I actually do in my online business course, six figure flower farming, which opens for registration every winter. But for the sake of our podcast today, I want to talk about one more major, major thing when it comes to efficiency on your farm. And this is going to make or break a farm, I swear. And it's weeding. Your weed management practices are so important. If you are a farm that
does a lot of hand weeding, please, for the love of flowers, try to stop or minimize that as much as humanly possible. Hand weeding is just so inefficient. And I think on most farms, there's gonna be some small degree of hand weeding, especially if you have like a lot of perennials, but it should be minimized as much as possible. Hand weeding is such a time suck. Instead of hand weeding, try to use efficient weed management techniques such as,
weekly shallow cultivation with a wire weeder or a tine weeder. And that's just a long handled tool you can buy anywhere online. Wire weeder is my favorite tool on the farm. Or you could do that in combination with stale seed bedding, flame weeding, using physical barriers like landscape fabric or plastic mulch or living mulches or no -till permanent bed systems. There's a bunch of different ways that you can do weed management. And usually on a farm, you're going to use a few different ways. But
Let's say you hand weed one bed of zinnias. It's probably going to take somewhere about an hour. Whereas if you wire weed a bed of zinnias, it's going to take you less than 15 minutes because when you wire weed, you're targeting weeds at thread stage. So you just basically zip up and down the aisle with that long handled tool. It's super fast and easy, especially if you do precision planting. Now over the course of the season, if you hand weeded a bed,
three times over the season, let's say that's three hours. Now let's say you wire weed the same amount of time, three times over the season, about an hour. Now realistically, you're probably gonna wire weed way less than you hand weed a bed, but just for the sake of even comparison here, If you have 50 beds on your farm,
over the course of the season, that's going to take 150 hours. Now, if you're wire weeding and you have 50 beds on your farm, that's going to take 50 hours. So let's just say on this imaginary farm we're talking about, hand weeding takes 150 hours a season versus wire weeding that takes 50 hours a season. You're saving 100 hours of labor time here. And if you're paying $30 an hour as your labor rate for yourself, that's $3 ,000. Okay?
You save 100 hours of time, plus you're saving your hands, you're protecting your back and your knees, and you're just getting your time back for other money -making tasks, which is absolutely huge. So I highly encourage you to look up what a wire weeder is and learn how to implement one on your farm, because it's going to save you so much time and energy and effort. So all this to say.
Efficiency is super, super important on your farm and there's so many different ways that you can implement it in a bunch of different facets. But I would love for you to just give this a shot and try to analyze some of the things you do on your farm, like growing specific crops, doing bouquet making or any other processes on your farm. Sit down with this exercise, write down all the steps.
and then look at the steps and try to find where you can be more efficient or you can cut things out or you can simplify things or speed them up. And I promise it will give you time and money back on your farm. If you found any value in this episode, I would appreciate it so much if you went and you left a review for us on Apple Podcasts. It means so much to me.
I put a lot of time and effort into trying to think about what you guys would like. I ask you what you want to know about putting these podcasts together and recording them. And so I would love it if you could just repay the favor and leave me a positive review on Apple podcasts. It would just mean so much to me. And if you've already left a review, thank you from the bottom of your heart. It truly means a lot to me. So thank you so much. And thanks for joining me for this episode of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast and we'll see you.
the next time.
