Jenny (00:28)
Ever wonder how many hours you spend weeding, transplanting, harvesting, washing buckets, or doing general tasks on the farm. And if it's even contributing to your flower farm success or your bottom line. Well, in this episode, I'm sitting down and going over all of my employees hours on the farm, discussing what we can get more efficient at, get better at, and what we're going to let go of in 2025. I'm doing this because
Harvesting, weeding, and transplanting are often the highest costs of production on the farm, but often these are only ever guessed at by farmers. Most flower farmers really have no idea how much time they're actually spending harvesting, weeding, and transplanting. And I'm not guessing because I have my employees track their hours by project on the farm.
And there are a bunch of different ways that you can do this. If you are the only person on your farm, there are apps out there like toggle, or you can just keep a note on your phone. But if you have employees or plan on hiring employees, you can have them track their time through their timekeeping app, through your payroll company or another app like toggle T O G G L or something like that. But our payroll company is called gusto. It's an online payroll company that we've really, really liked working with.
we switched payroll companies a couple of years ago and have really loved working with gusto and through gusto. We're able to have our employees track projects as they submit their time sheets. And so if that's something that you're interested in looking into, you can email me it's info at trademark farmer.com and I can get you a hundred dollars off your account with gusto. So I have to admit that when I used to work for the government.
I used to have to submit what I was doing every single hour of the day when I submitted my time sheets and I hated it. I thought it was so stupid. I was like, why do they need this information? And I kind of got angry like every time I felt that my time sheet, cause I felt like they don't trust me and they don't trust what I'm doing. and that they just wanted to know like what I was doing every minute of the day. But now.
As a business owner, fast forward many, many, many years, I understand why the government had me do that sort of that information to me as a business owner is so, so valuable because I can not only see where our time is being spent on the farm, but if we're spending it in the right ways and I can pick areas that we need to improve and get efficient at when I look at the data. So as I was looking at our employees data this year and.
what they were spending time on. I was really surprised by some things looking at these numbers and I'll go over the reasons why as we get into it. So we're going to be talking about all of that and we're going to be looking at mainly Rebecca's hour. So Rebecca is my go-to full-time employee and she is a godsend. She basically completes everything for day-to-day farm tasks.
Everything from harvesting to weeding to transplanting, some seed starting, like a little bit of that cleanup, maintenance, you random things we have to do on the farm. She does, she does it all. And so me as the business owner, my business is fairly mature at this point. And so I don't really do a lot of the day to day tasks on the farm anymore. I mostly spend my time on higher level tasks, like chasing my toddler around as he gets all of Rebecca's nice.
clean buckets, dirty. Um, this it's one thing that's been driving her nuts this year. I know that she'll like fill up all of our harvest buckets and Owen will go and like throw a big wad of mud into the bottom of one of them. So poor Rebecca has to deal with that. But anyways, she's doing the day to day tasks and I'm spending a lot more time chasing my toddler around and also on projects like marketing and sales and this podcast.
So my hours are not really included in the numbers we're going to be talking about today. It's really talking about my employees' numbers. But I'm probably going to add some comments about my time and how that's spent on different projects on the farm. But mainly, we're going to be looking at Rebecca and our other part-time employees' hours, going through what they've spent their time on over the course of the 2024 season.
and to see if we can make some decisions on whether we are spending our time on the right things, the wrong things, and if our work is really moving the needle forward for the business. And so before we dive into looking at the actual numbers from 2024, I want to explain what I look for when I look at these numbers and hours. And I'm looking forward to make sure we are spending the majority of our working hours on the farm on tasks that really move the needle for us
and directly contribute to our bottom line. And so this would be things like marketing and selling and harvesting. When these types of tasks are completed, the result is money in for the business. Then we try to minimize things like maintenance, cleanup, weeding, because when those tasks are completed, it doesn't directly contribute to money in for the business. So
Obviously these tasks are still essential for the product health and maintaining the farm, but they're not directly resulting in revenue or our business's goals. So the goal is to minimize those kinds of tasks as much as possible. So let's just dive into the numbers here. I'm going to go through the tasks, the major ones that we have tracked line by line. So first up, what we're going to look for or look at.
is the time spent on record keeping. Now I wanted to bring this one up because overall in 2024, Rebecca and our part-time employees, which I only had one or two of this year, and there's just kind of pop up when we need some extra hands, like in the spring for transplanting, during peony season when we have some pretty urgent harvests that need to happen every single day. And then for things like Dahlia tuber digging in the fall.
But for record keeping over the whole season, we spent about five and a half hours total over the entire course of the season, which amounts to about just under a hundred dollars. Now I really want to talk about this because record keeping is such a small expense. Like this is just a drop in the bucket. It's such a small expense with a huge reward.
In the last episode of this podcast, I talked about the importance of knowing your numbers to understand the profitability of your flowers. And you do that by keeping records and looking at the data. So on average, it takes us about 10 ish minutes a week just to keep track of things like our harvests and our sales. So I try to avoid burdensome record keeping that doesn't really contribute to anything, but keeping track of our harvests and our yields.
transplant dates and then sales by crop are the major things that we keep track of because they really helped me for future planning and projections. And I would say that tracking harvest probably adds about 5 % ish on our harvest time. You know, stopping what you're doing after you harvest, you know, 10 bunches of dahlias or whatever and jotting it down. And then when we're keeping track of our sales, it's pretty much like nothing because.
For example, when we get ready for our farmer's market, as we're sleeving all of the bunches and the bouquets, we're just counting as we're sleeving them. And so we know at the end of our prep, we have like 150 bouquets or something like that. So we just jot it down. Then we go to the farmer's market, sell as much as we can, whatever's leftover at the end. We just count whatever's leftover, say five or 10 bouquets, jot that down. And now we know exactly how much we've sold.
And we know exactly how many vernacular, how many tulips, how many anemones, whatever. So it's really easy. And people all the time say, I don't have time to do record keeping. It's, it's too much of a burden, blah, blah, blah. it's like, it's really not as long as you make it a part of your system and a part of your routine. So this is built into our SOPs on the farm. It's an essential task and it really takes no time at all. So
I'm really excited to just point this out to everyone. This super minor task of spending, you know, 10 minutes every week, costs you a hundred dollars a year. And this data is going to give you the ability to make data driven decisions to increase your revenue, pay yourself more and move your business forward.
All right, so moving on to the next task I want to talk about is CSA preparation and delivery. So over the entire season, we have a CSA that lasts for 16 weeks. And my employees spent about 75 hours doing CSA preparation and delivery, which adds up to a cost of just under $1,400 for me to pay my employees to get all that stuff ready and to deliver the CSA. Now, this is great because we earn
a lot of money from our CSA and me looking at the labor that is involved in the preparation. So putting the bouquets together and then delivering them and dropping them off is pretty reasonable to me looking at these numbers. So I'm pretty happy with this. And this is something that we've worked on over the years. So we don't do a lot of mixed bouquets for our CSA program. And if we do mix bouquets, they're very simple.
three to four ingredient bouquets that we can make really, really quickly. So we've gotten super efficient at this, and that is why these numbers are so low. So if you are somebody who is making really complicated bouquets and it's taking you a long time to make them every week, your cost to produce those bouquets and that CSA program is going to be a lot higher than mine. And so you're just not going to be profiting as much. So that's why looking at these numbers to me is really important.
So that number was pretty good. I'm pretty happy with that. The next task I'm looking at for what we did over in 2024 is bucket washing. So over the course of the season, Rebecca specifically spent about 30 hours washing buckets, which adds up to a cost of about $540. Now I can't really eliminate bucket washing and I can't really figure out a way to do this faster.
We have our own little process that we do. We actually have purchased an automatic bucket brush. So you kind of just put this brush on the end of a engine that spins it and supposedly it'll help you wash buckets faster. That's something that we're going to try, but I'm skeptical that it's going to make it any faster at all, but we'll see. We'll see how it goes. but this is one of those things that it's an essential task on the farm to have high quality products. You have to have really clean buckets. And so this is something that.
I'm looking at, and I'm like, okay, our costs are not that much. We probably on average spend about an hour or less washing buckets every week. I think that's probably just an essential thing we have to do, but we'll always try to improve that process to make it a little bit more efficient. I was actually surprised when I looked at this, I was like, wow, we spend 30 hours washing buckets. Like that's a lot of your life washing buckets, but it is what it is and it is what it is. So next up is a really big one for the farm. And that is.
transplanting. Over the course of the season we also spent just under 30 hours transplanting. Now I have to say this is probably not completely accurate since my numbers are not included in here and I would say I spend like a pretty fair amount of time assisting Rebecca with transplanting especially in the fall. So this is more for like transplanting our ranunculus and anemones so I really help her with that over the fall and the winter time. So I would tack on
maybe another like 20 hours onto this. So let's just say 50 hours in total transplanting for the farm. But my cost to pay an employee to do transplanting is just under $550. Now I'm okay with this number as well because I don't think that that is a huge amount of money for the amount of revenue we earn from those flowers. Like the percentage is pretty low. However, there is definitely room for improvement here.
Over the course of a few years, our employees have really gotten faster with the technique of transplanting. Like I teach a very specific technique because we hand transplant all of our flowers or the majority of our flowers. So first comes the technique and your employees and you have to master that. And then once you master the technique, speed comes with it. So over the years, we've really gotten pretty fast at this. but we also are always looking for ways to improve. So.
One thing is looking at our sunflowers. So long story short, we used to direct seed our sunflowers. Crows always ate them up out of the ground. So we had really poor, you know, it was just really bad germination because there was animals eating all of them. So we started transplanting them. We would start them in our greenhouse, transplant them out, but it seems like a waste of time because the
You know, we're not really getting a huge jump on the season with our sunflowers. And so we want to go back to direct transplanting to span to save some time. We don't grow a lot of sunflowers, but the amount that we do, I think we can get better at. So actually my friend Heather from Brook and Blossom gave me this really cute tip to when you direct seed something, if you don't want bird seed it, you just throw a layer of frost cloth or remay over it until it's germinated and then you can take it off. So we're going to try that this year.
Thanks Heather for that tip. All right, so moving on to the next task that I wanna talk about is looking at studio maintenance and cleaning. And this is one of the numbers that kind of shocked me a little bit. So this is task that is involved with cleaning up our barn or our studio after we've been like making bouquets or doing farmers market prep. And it also is just like general.
barn and studio maintenance or cleaning up from tasks on the farm. Part of me thinks that these tasks like this should be included in whatever the task is. Like for example, if we are making bouquets, the cleanup of that task is that task. It's part of it. The task is not finished until the cleanup is finished. However, I wanted to see how much time we were actually spending on this this year. So we decided to make it a different category that we track.
So as far as cleanup goes, my employees spend just over 50 hours doing this on the farm over the year, which amounts to just under $1,000. And I was a little bit shocked by this, and I'm still trying to like kind of make sense of it, this information, and figure out what to do with it.
big part of how we run our farm is keeping things really organized and efficient. And the only way that we can run efficiently and be organized is to always have a neat and tidy farm, or at least as much as possible. When things on the farm have been unorganized and not neat and tidy, we end up spending a lot of time just looking for tools or looking for things that we needed. Like if you finish
wire weeding and you don't put the wire weeder back in the tool shed, the next time you go to use it, you're looking everywhere for it. And by the time you get to it, you know, 20 minutes has passed. And so part of keeping a very efficient farm that runs smoothly is keeping it neat and tidy and clean and making these part of our systems. And so we are always looking at that and trying to find ways to keep the farm neat and orderly.
and still be efficient without spending a ton of time, just like cleaning things up after we make a mess of things, which is inevitable when you have a farm and you have messy things to do. So this, maybe this, can contribute to Rebecca cleaning up after my son Owen, who always makes a mess around the farm and she always ends up cleaning up after us. Thank you, Rebecca. Cause regardless, we always have to rush up for nap time or diaper change or whatever. So.
This is something that I'm going to be looking at a lot more closely this season. All right. Now we're getting into some of the really big tasks like weeding. Weeding is something that I try to eliminate and get my costs down as much as possible on the farm. In 2024, Rebecca spent about 53 hours weeding on the farm, which adds up to a cost of just under a thousand dollars. This comes out to approximately two hours a week.
So she spends about two hours a week weeding things on the farm. I would love to get this number down more. I felt like this year we were really efficient at weeding and we did a really good job of doing it quickly and efficiently. But looking at these numbers, I think that we can do better. So we're gonna be looking at possibly putting fabric down in our tunnels, which we've never done before. We've always just wire weeded in our high tunnel beds. We've...
We really don't have a lot of weed pressure in there, so it's really easy to do that, but we might be experimenting with putting some landscape fabric down and try to get this number down a little bit more. I want to get this number down because when we weed on the farm, yes, it has a lot of positive benefits. It keeps our pests and disease down. It makes our products better because our flowers can grow better. We get better yields. There's all kinds of amazing benefits with having a weed-free farm.
However, having a weed free farm doesn't like directly contribute to money in the bank for the farm, like something like harvesting does. So as far as harvesting goes, this is our second biggest task that we spend time on the farm. So we spent, or Rebecca spent about 195 hours harvesting over 2024, which adds up to a cost about, well, it's about $3,600.
And so this seems about right. And when I think about harvesting, we're harvesting the value on the farm. When we're harvesting every little flower stem I see as dollar bills, you know, if it's a Dahlia, every Dahlia stem is three or four bucks, three or four bucks, three or four bucks. So every bunch that we're harvesting is $20. And as we're harvesting,
All I have to do is get that out into the world and get it sold. So I see that as value creation on the farm. So I'm okay with us spending the majority of our time on harvesting because that means that we're creating value and money and revenue for our business. Now there's always room for improvement. We have a really good system down, but we're always going to keep working on it. But this is something that I'm glad.
The majority of our time is spent on harvesting and not things like bedflipping or weeding. Speaking of bedflipping, that was a number I was really shocked at when I looked at this year. Rebecca spent just over 85 hours on bedflipping the season, which was about 1500 bucks of a cost labor costs to the farm. And this is one of the numbers that I really want to focus on in the future.
And we're doing that by buying a flail mower because before Rebecca was doing a lot of hand work, like physically pulling plants when we were doing our bed flipping and I bought a flail mower, which will hopefully reduce a lot of not only the time it takes to do our bed flip, but also the backbreaking labor that Rebecca is doing. Cause she's spending a lot of time just physically pulling plants, which with our flail mower will hopefully eliminate that. So this is something that I don't feel like.
directly contributes to money in on the farm. And it also doesn't really have like a huge benefit like weeding does. You know, when we have a weed weed farm, there's a lot of benefits to our product and everything that comes with it. But bed flipping, we got to get this process a little bit cleaner and a little bit better because it doesn't really contribute to anything, the method that we use. So this is something we're really going to be working on in the future.
Now the final task that I'm going to be talking about is the one we spent the most amount of time on in 2024. Out of all the tasks and all these categories that we have, and there's more that we keep track of, but I don't want to go through every single one it would take quite a long time and I don't want to bore the pants off of you guys. So the
tasks that we spent the most amount of time on in 2024 is farmers market prep and sales. And over the course of the season, Rebecca spent just over 300 hours on this, which it adds up to a cost of about $5,500. And looking at these numbers, I think that this is actually probably not quite correct. Um, there must have been some sort of record keeping issue here because I think that this is actually.
a little bit more than this realistically. Because every week Rebecca probably spends about on average, I don't know, three hours, three to four hours doing actual preparation, like sleeving bouquets, making bouquets on Friday for our Sunday market. And then she spends seven hours every Sunday at the farmer's market selling the flowers. Now I'm really happy that this is our number one expense out of all of our tasks.
because that means that we're spending most of our time physically collecting money from people instead of just like weeding or watering flowers.
So looking at all of these tasks, the number one thing we spend the most amount of time on is farmers market prep and sales, which is great because that means we're spending the majority of our time physically collecting money for the farm. And the second thing is harvesting, which means we are creating the product. We are collecting the product that we get the money from for the farm. And so I'm really happy that we spend the majority of our time on those things.
Now I want to tighten up the amount of time that we're spending on some of these tasks. went over because I'm delegating more important tasks to Rebecca this season. She'll be managing our bulk bucket orders and our CSA communications, but I don't want Rebecca to work 50 hours a week, nor does she want to work 50 hours a week. So what I need to do as a business owner and a manager of Rebecca is I need to take time from the tasks that aren't directly producing revenue for the farm.
and make time for revenue producing activities like booking events and more subscriptions. So some lessons learned here, actions that I will be taking based on looking at this data and my employees hours is tightening up our bed prep process, reducing time spent weeding by implementing some other weeding techniques.
making harvesting more efficient, which we're already pretty efficient at, but just working on that, and then direct seeding our sunflowers to make some of our transplanting a little bit easier. So I hope that this episode was helpful in getting you to think about how you could spend your time on your farm a little bit better and try to be more efficient.
If you haven't been tracking your hours or your employees hours, I highly recommend it. Even if you don't do it for the whole season, but just do it for like a few weeks or a month of your season, just to kind of get an idea of where you're spending your time and looking at that data to figure out if you could be shifting some of that time to areas that will make a bigger difference and you hitting your goals. So this is an exercise that I like to do every year. I sit down and look at what we've spent our time on.
and try to make decisions moving forward to make the business more efficient and more profitable in the future. So if you found this episode helpful or got any value out of it at all, I'm asking you to please do me a solid and send this episode or this podcast to a farmer friend. I've been getting so many wonderful messages lately about how much people love the podcast. And so please just share the love because I want to help as many flower farmers as possible.
pay themselves what they deserve, and just have a profitable, thriving flower farm. And another reminder that there are new episodes coming out every single Monday, so I will catch you next week, same time, same place.
