Jenny (00:29)
Welcome back to the show. If you are a flower farmer that isn't quite sure if farming full-time might be right for you, I think you're really gonna like today's episode. I'm chatting with my friend James, who is the co-owner of Honeyed Acres Farm along with his partner, Ariana, and they grow a third of an acre of vegetables on the side. So they're not actually flower farmers, but don't let that dissuade you from the conversation.
So James and Ariana both have full-time jobs but run their farm on the side. They sell at one farmer's market and they have a 20 member CSA. So by day, Ariana is an elementary school teacher and James is a technical assistance agent to New York farmers. So it's really interesting because James's story is that he's been working on small scale organic farms since 2011.
but the farm he has now was designed intentionally as a supplemental income source rather than their primary source of income. And I'm really excited to have this conversation because I think it's important to acknowledge that farming full-time as a career doesn't always have to be the goal. You can, like James and Ariana, have a farm as a side hustle. So even though their farm isn't their primary source of income, they still treat it like the real
legitimate business that it is and they have been getting astounding results and they have a wildly successful farm. So in this conversation we talk about some of the rewards that come from farming on the side, some of the tough parts that come with doing that, as well as some numbers and just a whole other bunch of factors that go into this. So without further ado let's get you to meet James and hear a conversation about it.
Jenny (02:16)
Welcome to the show, James.
James (02:18)
Thanks Jenny, thanks for having me, really excited about this.
Jenny (02:20)
Yeah, me too. So for everyone listening, James here, my guest today, is my farmer's market next door neighbor. He has the booth next to us at the farmer's market. And we were having a conversation recently about part-time farming versus full-time farming. And I just thought this would be such an awesome conversation for the podcast. And so I think you guys are going to like it too, because I know there are a lot of flower farmers out there who are not doing
farming as a full-time gig and maybe don't have any intentions to do that. So I think you're really going to love this episode. So James, can you just introduce yourself and give us a little bit of a background of what you do for work and how your farm works into that?
James (03:06)
Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ So I'm James Cagle. I co-own a vegetable farm in the Rochester, New York area. It's called Honeydakers Farm, and my partner is Ariana. ⁓
We both have full-time jobs. She's an elementary school teacher and I work for a nonprofit that works with farmers around New York State. I help them apply for grants and write business loans. Our farm very small scale, it's a third of an acre. quarter of that is under greenhouse cover. About a tenth of an acre is outside. then how it ties into my work.
pretty, pretty, pretty well. mean, it's, you you work around farmers all day, it's hard ⁓ to knock the edge, you know, you get the farming bug and you want to do whatever else is doing, you know. So, it's cool to have that life experience alongside my clients.
Jenny (03:59)
Yeah, I think you have a super unique situation where you not only are a farmer, but you also have a job where you help farmers with their businesses. So you're like an expert for sure, which is so cool. Yeah.
James (04:15)
Eating, living,
breathing, farming, yeah.
Jenny (04:19)
Do you get tired of it?
James (04:22)
No, I mean it's my career choice, you know I've been in it since like 2011 and I don't see myself going any other way
Jenny (04:31)
Love that. So you and Ariana both have full time farm jobs and then you also have your third of an acre veggie farm that you have on the side. So did you always plan for that to be a side hustle or did that evolve over time?
James (04:43)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, well, yeah, there's like two parts to that story. With this current farm venture, the way we planned for it to be is kind of the way we're doing it. We never intended to leave our full-time jobs to quit our day jobs to farm. We wanted to farm, but we wanted to also retain that security, that financial security, the benefits, the retirement, et cetera, that was provided by our full-time jobs while using
we saw an opportunity to use farming on the side a way to bringing additional income our lives it and having fun. So the second part of that is like there's a backstory that goes back to like 2011 when I started farming, worked on some farms, started my own farm in 2013, did that for four that being my sole source of income and then deciding to leave that.
to go to school. And after school I'm here at CAID. But ⁓ yeah, so I think just, you know, looking back on my experience as farming as a sole source of income, I had realized somewhere within there that I didn't want to pursue that again at this point in time.
Jenny (06:03)
So can you tell us a little bit more about your past farm that you had where you were farming full time but decided to leave that? What did your farm look like and what made you decide not to continue pursuing that full time?
James (06:19)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So it started off really small scale. You know, start off on like a two acre piece of land that a friend had allowed me to use. Start off, you know, one market, two markets actually that year and 20 or 25 member CSA. You know, and that first year was rocky bumpy. You know, I had just come off of working on some really great farms. So had some really great information in my head, but like implementing it was, you know, I've still...
I to, I guess, learn it for myself in a lot of ways. So that first year was kind of bumpy. But the next three years went really well. Built up pretty substantially. By year sales were like 150,000 total revenue for the year. 100 member CSA, still doing like two to three markets a year. I had scaled up.
It's like 15 acres instead of, you know, from going from human hand scale tools and methods up to trying to farming, not with all 15 acres. But that was the attempt. You know, I was trying to scale things up and through that process, I didn't really see my net income scale I was kind of seeing a stagnant net income, stagnant profitability. And it just, I was having a hard time.
seeing how it could be a long-term career option for me, I wasn't saving substantial amounts of money. Not that wasn't in debt or anything by the end of it, which is good, it just didn't make sense 30 years out. So I just needed to take a break
Jenny (07:54)
I have always thought that there is an absolute sweet spot when it comes to profitability on farms in terms of scale. this is like, I'm not an expert on this or anything, but it just seems like these smaller like market gardener type operations, like what I have, similar to what you have, this small scale, and this is what I teach as well. Staying on that smaller scale of things, you can be pretty profitable and earn like a
James (08:01)
Thank
.
Jenny (08:24)
pretty significant income. But when you try to scale up, there's that like middle mid-size farm piece of it where things can get like really sticky. And I'm sure it depends on your situation and a lot of different factors go into this. But it's like you kind of have to get through like a lot of muddy, sticky stuff to get to a place where you're really big enough, where you're earning a ton of revenue to keep a lot of that profit and, you know, pay yourself really well. And so ⁓
James (08:24)
Okay.
Jenny (08:53)
I don't think it's ever like a bad decision if you find yourself in a place where it's like just not working to rework your plans or try something else. What would you say about that speculation of mine?
James (09:07)
Yeah, no, I think you're spot on and I think you know a lot of people talk about that, you know that that sweet spot and I'm also not like an X I don't know what that sweet spot is I kind of get hints of it, you know on one end or the other and then I see a lot of it in the middle where it's like
You know, someone that I've talked to that's farming even like 300 acres of cattle, they're maxed out and they're still not making money. I'm like, if you're selling all your product at maximum value and you're growing all the cattle you can on that piece of land, how are you not making the profit you need? There's something about profitability here that's not making sense. But no, think, what I can say, I think is the smaller in scale you are, the greater the profit margin needs to be.
⁓ because there's less revenue potential the smaller the scale you are. ⁓ So that's kind what I keep coming back to. It's just constantly focusing on profitability. And then in terms of like the scaling, how you're investing into your farm and how you're building it up really matters. It needs to be suited appropriately to your scale. ⁓
what our game plan is, with the investments that we know we need to make on the farm, they're planned out to be matched appropriately to our scale, if that makes sense.
Jenny (10:31)
Yeah, 100%.
It doesn't make sense to buy a $50,000 tractor if you're only going to use it once or twice a year. That's going to make that implement very expensive to use once or twice a year, whereas maybe investing in more hand tools and stuff would make more sense at a smaller scale. And I love what you just said, and I hope that everybody listening imprints what James just said into his
James (10:47)
Mm-hmm.
Jenny (10:59)
brain about being really intentional about the investments you're making into your farm. It's so important in terms of profitability. So I'm curious about when you were at that really big scale, or not really big, but 15 acres is pretty a good size.
And you decided that where things were going in terms of your profitability and what was going on was not worth it for you.
Was there a specific turning point or other realization that helped you solidify the decision that going on that trajectory was not the right decision for you?
James (11:36)
It just yeah, it just didn't feel it just didn't feel right. There's a lot of stress lot of
Not necessarily financial stress, not that I was making buckets of money, it ⁓ just didn't feel like where it should be. And I feel like I still had a lot of learning to do personally, honestly. had started to look into this property nearby, this farm market that was available. ⁓ And I saw that as an opportunity, because I didn't actually own any of my land either, which I think is such a...
I don't know, like land tenure is such an important topic. ⁓ And that's what's very different about this current farm versus my first farm, feel like as well. Like being able to make investments into it because we own it. But ⁓ I had looked into that one property and ⁓ I was doing some planning and figuring out like the numbers. I was like, well, if I'm going to scale up even more and try to make something work building up my equity through this property, this is the way to do it.
But those numbers just still didn't even really make sense. And I felt like if I'm stressed now, I'm gonna be even more stressed down the road, you know?
So I hope that answers your question.
Jenny (12:49)
Yeah, no, think your stress factor is like a huge factor. And a lot of people don't like, I don't know with like, like I started out as a veggie farmer. I don't know if you know this, James, but I worked on veggie farms and orchards and stuff. And then I had started a vegetable CSA farm here in the Rochester area, but I like couldn't, I could not find people to sell to. I was really struggling with growing at my CSA.
James (12:51)
Yeah.
Jenny (13:15)
And so I just, I like made the switch to flowers and then made that work somehow. But with flowers, it's, it's this like really glamorous thing that looks so appealing from the outside. And a lot of times people jump into it, not realizing like there is this whole entrepreneurial part of it when you own your own business, there are all these factors with running a business that you may not have considered before. And it can be really stressful at times to own your business, I guess.
James (13:25)
⁓
Jenny (13:44)
being a business owner, there's going to be stressful points no matter what. Right. And like, that's something that people have to realize. But maybe farming as a side gig instead of trying to do it full time to earn your full time income might be the right answer for people.
⁓ in terms of that stress level or pressure. So what would you say that farming gives you, farming part-time gives you that full-time doesn't or vice versa?
James (14:16)
know, I feel like it allows us to be a bit more relaxed overall. You know, it allows us to kind of scale up or down with the market demand.
Last year we went kind of ham and we overproduced and we had a lot of waste and we kind of switched up our goal for this year and we decided let's just try to match the market demand as much as possible in order to be more efficient with our time our growing space.
Yeah, it gives us lot of flexibility, definitely reduced stress. Like nothing is as serious. Like we definitely take it very seriously, but it's not like life or death, you know. We always have ⁓ our personal income as a safety net. it's kind of like we just feel like the farming income is, it's kind of like the cherry on top. You know, like we're not investing our personal money into the farm anymore. What we have invested has already paid itself off.
So the farm itself at this point is self-sustaining. what comes in as profit, we've been reinvesting into infrastructure for the last year and for the foreseeable rest of this season. next year, we see it as an opportunity to really bolster our savings, our retirement savings. And that's really the goal right there.
Jenny (15:35)
So the goal is to use whatever profit you earn from your farm right now to just go towards savings for you and Ariana.
James (15:42)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Jenny (15:44)
Yeah,
I mean, I think that's incredible that you get to do something that you love and you're really passionate about and have. I mean, just building equity in a business is really cool as well. But then you get to take that money and put it towards savings or something else if somebody wanted to save for their kid's retirement or who knows anything like that. ⁓ It's also something else that comes to mind. Like sometimes I fantasize about having no business on the tough days.
Do you guys have employees right now or is it just you and Ariane?
James (16:17)
No employees. Yeah. Which is, know, there are days and there's times where I kind of wish we had an employee, like a part-time, to help us with harvest days and markets. But, you know, we're trying to stay away from having employees as much as possible.
because we're trying to maximize profitability and you know there's with employees I feel like there's both like risk mitigation but there's also a liability with having employees. You know so it's both. It offers both but for us you know we're trying to stay maximum profitability we really want to pay ourselves substantially before we're paying someone else.
Jenny (16:59)
It's also just when you have employees, they're reliant on you and you have this whole other sense of responsibility, or at least that's how I feel. And it can be a lot of pressure sometimes, ⁓ which can also be incredibly rewarding too. So I'm not trying to say all these things are bad because they're not, but it's just looking at it from two different lenses of a full-time farming business where it's your career versus a side gig.
I love that you keep bringing up the profitability piece of it because I think a lot of people who farm on the side, they tend to have more of like a hobby mindset with it where they're just like, well, this is just what I do for fun and I earn a little bit of extra money or whatever. But I think that if you're serious about really earning money from anything, you still need to really keep profitability like top of mind, approaching it as a professional.
James (17:32)
All.
Jenny (17:54)
not just as a
hobby, and I think that you and Ariana do that really, really well.
James (17:59)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It totally requires an entrepreneurial mindset. just to make clear, we definitely manage our farm as a revenue earning business. And almost all of our decisions based on profitability and efficiency. We love what we do. We love growing food and working outside.
we wouldn't be doing this even at this scale it wasn't worth our time. be spending our time hiking or camping, you know?
Jenny (18:30)
Yeah, doing something way more fun than harvesting in the rain that we've been having nonstop. Yeah. my God, we need sunshine so bad here. Like it has just been like an onslaught of rain. And like in some ways, it's been like kind of nice because it's extended our season of some of our spring flowers. But in other ways, it's been like
James (18:36)
Yeah, yeah. my god, been such a wet season.
Jenny (18:57)
Not great. Not great for our sales, honestly, but anyways. ⁓ Typical farmers are going to talking about the weather, right? Okay.
James (18:59)
I was
gonna say our peas are loving it. ⁓ We did a whole greenhouse of early snap peas and they're in a tunnel. So the tunnel gets warm on the hot days and I'm trying to prolong the harvest season for those. ⁓ So I was actually kind of looking forward to a cooler week.
Jenny (19:09)
Hmm.
James (19:24)
just so, you cause they're at like peak flower starting to fruit right now.
Jenny (19:30)
so this will be really good for your peas. Yay for them. Good for your peas, bad for my soul.
So let's talk about some of the pros of farming as a side hustle. Like there's obviously benefits to farming as a side hustle. There's obviously benefits to farming full time. I think a lot of it just depends on like people's personalities and their goals. And so everybody is different. But what are some of the biggest benefits that you have of farming part time instead of as a full time gig?
James (20:05)
mean I kind of feel like you get all the benefits having like the same levels of risk and stress You know, I think it I think it means our profit margins are higher So we're making better use of our time like we're being more efficient with it I don't think that we'd be making twice as much revenue if we spent twice as much time
for an example. But also, I think we should probably define part-time too, because we do work 30 to 36 hours a week on the farm. And I do imagine that most farmers, probably most farmers who are listening to this, are working well above 40. But strictly speaking, 40 is full-time, right? So theoretically, we are working very close to second to full-time jobs.
Jenny (20:30)
Mm, yeah.
James (20:50)
But I'd be curious, how do you define full-time farming, actually?
Jenny (20:55)
I mean, I don't work 40 hours a week on my farm.
James (21:01)
⁓ really? Good for you. Okay. Well, you're a business owner, right? You're not fulfilling the full operating cost. So.
Jenny (21:04)
Mm-mm. ⁓
Hahaha!
Right. ⁓ Yeah, think it's also different for flower farming than it is for veggie farming. Being in both worlds, I think that the profit margins with flowers are way above what you can make with veggies, which is part of my strategic decision to switch from veggies to flowers. And because of that, I don't work full time.
James (21:21)
Okay.
Jenny (21:39)
Well, guess you could say I work full time. I feel like I'm in a unique situation because I've had my business for a decade. I have a right-hand person. Rebecca, she's my girl. She does pretty much all the day-to-day tasks on the farm, and I manage it. ⁓ So I have
James (21:48)
All right.
Jenny (22:00)
another business now, so I definitely work.
James (22:00)
Okay. ⁓
Jenny (22:04)
40 hours a week, but it's not all the farm. I'm spending the majority of my working hours actually working on stuff like this podcast and classes and stuff that we teach, which is a really fun balance to my life. And I also spend a lot of time at home with my son. So I'm home with him a couple of days a week ⁓ as well. So I feel like I'm in a somewhat unique situation. But I would say that.
For most flower farmers, I would say 40 to 50 hours a week is probably average for a full-time flower farmer, depending on what they do. But if you're working 30 to 36 hours a week on your farm plus 40 hours a week for your day job, you're working a lot.
James (22:38)
Okay.
Yeah. ⁓ So first off, congrats, props to you. That's awesome as a business owner.
to have your business structured in that way. That's super cool. So I guess I'd say then that we're really just like, we're kind of like just hustling right now then. trying to like ourselves and get this thing going. Get the ball rolling, I guess. The goal really is to reduce our time worked down to like 20 to 25 hours a week. ⁓ And if we can do that and maintain the same level of revenue, then that would be awesome. But I'm also...
Jenny (22:57)
Thanks.
James (23:22)
I feel like I'm also okay with our sales going down a little bit if it meant that we had a little bit more work-life balance. I think we needed to take the first couple of years to really hustle to get the ship moving, to get things built up the way we wanted to, but I'm kind looking forward to just riding on the profits after that and not really investing into the business too much more.
Jenny (23:47)
So just to clarify, how many years in are you with this side hustle farm?
James (23:50)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we bought the property in June 2023. So we're coming up on two years on the property. So the first season, the first season we just spent cleaning, clearing, cleaning up. There's a lot of dead trees, hedgerows, et cetera, fence lines, all sorts of stuff. So we just had a lot of fun that first season. we totally, you know, we totally claimed all of those expenses related to that. So.
Just a shout out to make sure if you're even if you're not making I Went through this with a friend recently like even if you're not making revenue in your year zero about I'll borrow that term from a friend of mine like your year zero even if you're not making money that first year, you're putting money into the property Maybe it's a property that's attached your house or not either way You're you're buying tools. You're you're buying gas equipment, etc. You're you're cleaning up the property. You're getting it set up like that's That year you should definitely still file
you you're schedule F and claim those expenses is my point. You know, because I had a friend that went through that and didn't and I was like, oh, you should talk to your accountant and redo your taxes to claim those expenses. But anyway, that's aside. Oh, so year one, yeah, so last year.
Jenny (25:06)
No, that's a great point. I'm glad that you're bringing
that up because when we started our farm, we didn't do that. And I really wish that I did because we had invested so much into, like you said, clearing the land, all kinds of things. And then it wasn't until I was like, ⁓ like I think I'm actually going to like make a real business out of this. And I was like, OK, I actually need to start like claiming a bunch of these things. And so I'm really glad that you brought that up because it's really important to do.
James (25:20)
You see?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, totally. we, you know, so we've, even though this is our second growing season, we've already filed two taxes and we got a huge return last year because we had zero sales for a lot of expenses. Yeah, so this is our second season producing and ⁓ making money.
Jenny (25:53)
Awesome. So I'm just super impressed with you guys. I want to circle back just for a second that you and Arianna are working a bunch of hours for the farm and your day jobs. And even if you had an intention to go full time with your farm, this would be totally normal. I had a conversation. I think I may have already talked about this on the podcast. I don't remember. Sorry if I already have, but I'm going to bring it up again.
Somebody brought up in conversation with me in one of our courses or a workshop or something that they heard they would have to work like 60 hours a week to get their business off the ground. They didn't think that that was going to be like worth it. And I was like, there's really like no way around that unless you are like a super experienced farmer, like starting a brand new business where you already have like a decade of experience and you know exactly what you're doing. But even then, like
James (26:29)
Okay.
Jenny (26:49)
there's always this hustle in the beginning where you have to like either put in man hours or dump money into it. It's like one or the other in order to get a business off the ground. And so I just wanted to come back to that point because I think that's something that some listeners might be kind of grappling with as they're getting started or trying to scale their flower or other veggie business as well.
But I want to talk about kind of the tough stuff with this, because you're essentially juggling, let's say, two full time jobs right now. And like I did that for a long time when I started my flower farm. I don't think that could have been sustainable for me. So do you ever feel like you are
getting burned out with working like a seven day a week schedule. ⁓ And if you haven't felt like that yet, do you think that is there a concern that maybe someday you will?
James (27:45)
Yeah, it's definitely top of mind. sure, like as I mentioned, our goal is to reduce our working hours down to like 20 or 25 hours each while trying to maintain the same level of revenue.
mean honestly what's because we have our full-time incomes like what's most important is that we're enjoying this for ourselves, you know and know any level of sales within there as long as it's worth the time going to the market and all that, you know Is is okay with us, you know So yeah, I mean we definitely get tired, you know, we have a consistent schedule but like Saturdays are long Sundays are long. We're harvesting Saturdays We're going to market on Sundays. We're talking to
a couple hundred people, you know, it gets really tiring. Day weekend, you know, we burnt ourselves out pretty hard, I think, we were trying to, we had a couple of other side opportunities, plus trying to get things done early and quick to have a little Mother's Day celebration. So that following week, we both got sick, and whether that ties into us overworking ourselves, I don't know, but we both got a cold.
And it just kind of made me reevaluate kind of our schedule and what we were doing. So I kind of started to back off a little bit from some of these like secondary sales outlets and just kind of shutting those out for the time being so we're more focused on our primary outlet and.
Jenny (29:11)
So something that comes to mind for you guys just listening to hearing you talk is that working seven days a week, for most farmers, that's like normal, everyday norm. I try not to do that. Before I had a family, before I had a kid, I would have been totally happy working seven days a week because I love working. And most farmers do. Most of us love what we do. We don't have a problem with it.
I think in different seasons of life, you prioritize different things and all that. But if at some point you and Ariana decide that you want to take on some more revenue, but you don't want to grow the business too much, would you consider hiring a very part-time employee to maybe own a smaller sales outlet where they earn back their
James (29:48)
Okay.
Jenny (30:06)
their pay and then some. So you're like earning a little
bit of money off of another employee. Or do you think that that is venturing into the territory where like that's not something that would interest you?
James (30:11)
it
It's crossed my mind, you know, for sure. Occasionally we'll bring up the idea of an employee. It's nothing serious right now, for sure. But mean, if the demand was really there, there's only a couple of other markets around the area that I would consider, but I've done both of those and I know for a fact those markets are nowhere close to the profitability of the one that we're in. So I have to think carefully about
Jenny (30:26)
Mm-hmm.
James (30:42)
the numbers involved in that. you said, veggies is probably very different. Like you already said, the profitability of veggies is very different than flowers. so that's ⁓ maybe where there might be a difference for your listeners here on this answer. For veggies, I think it'd be a harder decision to make than maybe for a flower farm on that one. But yeah, if there was an opportunity, there was demand, there was an opportunity scale. The options, I guess, would be to leave the day job or to hire an employee.
And then it would just be, it would just kind of come out to like looking at the cash flow, doing a budget and figuring out ⁓ what the best equation would be, you know.
Jenny (31:23)
I actually loved your answer, James. And I don't necessarily think it 100 % depends on like flowers versus veggies. But exactly what you said is just like taking a hard look at the numbers and making sure that it makes sense before you jump into something like that. And I think that everybody listening should have that frame of mind where it's like, before I make a big decision about something like let's run the numbers, even if it's like, even if it's just like back of the envelope type of thing, that's going to make sense.
James (31:31)
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know if your speakers often talk about numbers, but I love being transparent about numbers because I think the more we can talk about numbers with each other and not be shy about them, the more helpful we are to each other and new growers that are coming into this. So I just wanted to make a point that our sales, we had a sales goal of like $75K last year or just in general.
actually, we're like, if we reach 75, that sounds great. You know, and we hit that last year in our first year and we were like kind of blown away that we did. And so yeah, it's great. And this year, like we're like 7k ahead of last year, which like makes me like, like last year, there was a lot of wasted time and there's already still a lot of wasted time and space and you know, here. it makes me that's why I kind of think that we could scale down our hours and our production and still stay around the same level of revenue.
Jenny (32:25)
That's amazing.
James (32:44)
But the point I wanted to make was if we wanted to stay at that scale, you know, and I've been in situations like this on some farms I've worked on, it doesn't make sense to hire a full-time employee to manage the farm for you. Because what are you going to pay that employee like 40, maybe 50,000 or more if you're generous? Well, all of your profits are gone. So I don't know. It's just, I don't know. I've worked on a farm where the owners, their intent was to...
have the farm is very, I don't know. It just didn't work out because they weren't doing any of the farm work. They were relying on very novice farm hands like myself as my very first farm. I just saw that as like a learning opportunity. was like, okay, something's not working out here with the economics. I was super young then, but looking back on it, I can understand it a little bit better now.
I don't know, it's just like the margins are high, but like the overall gross revenue's not there to support a full-timer for sure. Part-timer maybe, but we'd have to bring in substantial amount of extra revenue. Like you said, like give them a revenue stream almost to like own. And I've thought about like some creative ways for that, you know, but just gotta crunch the numbers. But for now, we're totally happy the way it is.
Jenny (34:12)
Yeah, I mean, I think that earning $75,000, you're basically your first year as a side hustle. that's stuff that people, somebody would be really happy with, especially considering because it's just you and Ariana, your profit margin is probably really high. And for a lot of people, that's like, that's that's going to be like exactly what they need. And if you're, know, if you have this vision to like,
James (34:28)
Right.
Jenny (34:41)
have this big farm and this big business and support a bunch of employees and like, OK, then yeah, it might make sense for you to scale and do more. But for somebody who just wants to earn like maybe 30 to $40,000 a year or maybe just like a little bit more than that, doing most of the work themselves, like that might be the right answer for people. And so I think one of the points of this whole conversation is that I don't think that people need to like give into the pressure
James (34:55)
Okay.
Jenny (35:11)
to be like, well, to call myself a real farmer, I need to do it full time as a career. And I need to have employees. And I need to have this and that and everything. You can literally just have a side hustle like James and earn really good money and be really happy with what you're doing, enjoy your work, and then also have the security of an off-farm job, or maybe not at all. Maybe just work on your farm.
James (35:12)
you
Jenny (35:38)
I don't know if you can call 30
to 36 hours part time a week and just be happy with that. The only things that can be really difficult is juggling those two jobs. Do you have any challenges with your schedules or anything like that with juggling both of these things, your full-time job and the farm?
James (35:40)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I'd say time management is one of the biggest struggles. There's only so many hours in a day, you've to make hay when the sun shines. one of the best perks about my current job is a very flexible schedule. And I do work, I work remotely. So if I need to go open and close the greenhouses, I can do that in the middle of the day. If I need to run some irrigation, I can do that in middle of day, water the nursery for five minutes.
I usually start my work super early to give me that flexibility the day. So that's kind of, I think how we, that's how I, you know, because I'm kind of like the caregiver of the farm during the day, I guess. And then Arianna comes home and she busts her butt and she cranks stuff out when she gets home. But yeah, so guess that's how we kind of manage that. Yeah.
Sorry, what was the question? Sorry, I forgot the.
Jenny (36:57)
Are there any
the question was just like if you, the hardest part of managing two jobs, like what your struggles were with that.
James (36:58)
Yeah.
Oh, sure.
Yeah, yeah. The balance is the other thing. You know, like the work-life balance. You know, there's like, it's seven days a week. You know, we love hiking, we love camping and backpacking and spending time with family. So that's kind of the, that's the problem I'm trying to figure out a solution for. Yeah, I'd love like that's, we got to find a way to be able to enjoy those the summer, you know, enjoy the great weather in the summer with friends and family and do the things that we enjoy.
So that's very top of mind, trying to get down to that 20 hours a week while still being able to cut ourselves a check for if we could do it, like 30K each a year. Our operating expenses are very low, so I think it's very doable.
Jenny (37:51)
Yeah. Do you mind me asking how long it takes you to prep for market on Saturdays?
James (37:54)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yep, that's a good question. we try to keep it at or under eight hours. Our harvest is very quick. like hours to harvest, but the rest of the washing and the packing can take forever. that varies throughout the season, but we try to keep it at or under eight hours on Saturdays.
Jenny (38:19)
for two of you, so it would be like 16 hours total, like labor hours. Okay. Interesting. I feel confident that you could shave that down.
James (38:20)
Yeah, correct. Yep, yep.
I agree. I agree. ⁓ we're, one of our investment goals is to build a new ⁓ barn or to renovate the existing barn with a concrete floor. do all of our processing on a concrete floor. It's in our attached garage though. it's just not, it doesn't have good flow. not central to the farm. So we're transporting all the produce down to the house from the farm, which is not far away, but it's still a lot of extra steps. if we had it,
Jenny (38:32)
Yeah.
James (38:57)
All of that centralized up at the farm a better flow. I think there's time to be saved there, but I'm open to suggestions if you had anything in mind.
Jenny (39:07)
was just thinking that it's like, I mean, I've seen the level of quality of produce that you bring to the market, and it's excellent. And so obviously, you don't want to do anything that's going to negatively affect the quality. But it just seems like I think you guys could definitely shave that down and maybe achieve your goal of getting down to that like 20, 25 hours a week each to make that happen through your systems and processes and maybe like
James (39:28)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. ⁓
Jenny (39:37)
crop selection, stuff like that. But it sounds like you guys are well on your way to figuring that out. Are there any other specific tools or routines or systems that you put into place to try to make that all happen, make it all possible?
James (39:37)
Yeah. ⁓
you know, we're very simple, very lean. We just have a lot of hand tools, you know, and the appropriately scaled innovations that have come out over the years are incredible. know, like the precision seeders, the greens harper. You know, like these are all awesome tools.
Jenny (40:17)
They are.
James (40:20)
that are simple and affordable, like yeah, they can be kind of expensive, but like they've got a lot of potential for making revenue. You know, like it took me a long time with my first farm to justify buying a greens harvester. But you know, it take us like four man hours to harvest a bed of lettuce mix versus doing it in 15 minutes, you know, with a greens harvester. It's like, like what else could you be doing with that three and a half hours, you know, a lot.
Jenny (40:47)
I
mean, just think if you're paying somebody like 15, I'll just say $20 an hour, it's like 60 or however many dollars like every time you have to harvest, it like pays for itself really fast.
James (41:00)
⁓ yeah, very quickly. yeah, just, ⁓ yeah, we're constantly looking for more efficient ways to do things with as little inputs as possible. So we used a lot of landscape fabric last year. We're not trying to use landscape fabric this year. It could save us time on weeds, but we're also doing a lot of mostly no-till. So we're not getting a lot of weeds. So just putting down landscape fabric and pulling it up.
that's labor expense, it's an expense of itself. And also we do a lot of double cropping. So like doing landscape fabric would make it more difficult to do our double cropping with our long season crops.
Jenny (41:39)
We've
moved away from using landscape fabric too.
James (41:42)
Yeah, I like it better than tarps for sure. And you know, plastic, it's very durable. It'll take but it just takes up space. We try to things really
Jenny (41:49)
Yeah.
James (41:56)
Other tools, systems, I, you know, so, so yeah, system, you know, we, I've got a crop planter I'm working on. It's not solidified, you know, working on like ⁓ a harvest log. ⁓ The crop planter, I don't know how you do things, but it's really, I find it really tough to plan out a whole season. I kind of just do a lot of it, like in my head as we go and it just works out. And so I've built this tool over the winter.
Jenny (41:57)
Love that.
James (42:23)
tried to plan things out and like, you know what, I'm just gonna use the tool but retroactively. Like I'm just gonna record what we're doing as we're doing it. And then next season, I'm gonna look at this tool and then adjust the plan accordingly. Does that make sense? Like we'll have the recorded what we did and then make adjustments for next season based on what we did this year. So it would be a little bit more realistic and achievable, I feel like that way. But otherwise, I mean, because we're so small scale and simple, I try not to like over,
systemize things, you know, because I don't know that it would justify the time and effort spent to develop, like to overdevelop systems, especially without employees, you know. So, yeah.
Jenny (43:01)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Yeah, 100%. And I also think that as far as your crop planning goes, I think that's a good approach if you don't want to plan it out for the whole season, as long as you take really good notes throughout the year. I know I try to take really good notes about if we planted too much of something or if we didn't have enough of something else and then use all that information to do our crop planning for the next year.
I think just keeping really good notes and really good records just goes a really long way. And you think you're going to remember, but for me, I never do. I'm always like, ⁓ did we actually use that whole bed of Lysianthus? Or I can't remember, even though it's only been three months. So think
James (43:51)
Yeah.
Jenny (43:51)
record keeping is just a really important thing.
James (43:54)
Yeah, notes are huge. A good friend of mine, he's got a Google Drive and a folder for each crop. And then within each crop, he's got a whole note sheet, and it's by month. So he'll take notes by month. So if he thought of something in June for cucumbers or something, make sure to cover them as you plant them or something as simple as that. yeah, notes are good.
Yeah, just make sure you're taking them in a way that you can easily digest when you're looking back at them, you know.
Yeah.
Jenny (44:25)
Yeah, 100%.
So what advice would you give to somebody who wants to farm like you, but is not ready to give up their day job like you? What would your first piece of advice be to somebody like that?
James (44:42)
keep it simple and lean. Don't overcomplicate things. Constantly keep thinking about efficiency and profitability. Be prepared to operate it as an official business,
even though it might be a small scale thing, you still want to operate it as a business. At minimum, hire an attorney to form an entity, a business bank account, and the big one is hiring a tax accountant that really knows farm taxes, farm tax law, unless you do. But I learned that lesson when we hired a tax accountant for this farm.
used to do all my taxes myself for my first farm and I realized that I was missing out on so much. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I made a lot of bad, I think I made a lot of bad decisions and that was one of them, know? ⁓ Hire a tax accountant. Like it just, pays for itself. The amount of tax credits ⁓ that they can get you a loan, like the deductions, TurboTax is not gonna find those for you.
Jenny (45:26)
Why?
James (45:48)
you know, pay the $700- $900 to a tax accountant. Record your expenses and your income in the way that they would like, whether it's a spreadsheet or in QuickBooks or whatever. QuickBooks is a whole other thing. That can be pretty expensive, but our accountant has what's called, I don't know, it's called QuickBooks Ledger or QuickBooks P &L or something. It's like $10 a month. a very cheap version that only they have access to and they can give you a seat.
So I don't know how that works, but there is a very cheap version to ask your accountant about. So that's what we do. We don't pay the 30 or 50 or 100 bucks a month for QuickBooks. ⁓ no, have an accountant for sure. An attorney would be helpful. Open a bank account. Be prepared to keep your finances very separate from your personal finances. your accounting and bookkeeping a lot easier. Identifying your market potential.
is really key and having a fair understanding of what your production system is going to look like. And a lot of that comes through having gained experience on other farms, I think is so crucial. If you haven't ever worked on a farm and you want to start a farm, I would reevaluate that decision and at least go spend at least one season on a farm. One of my best mentors that I worked for, they worked one season prior to starting their farm.
They worked at Stone Barns and Restoration Farm down Long Island, are two mega farms. And they just soaked up all that information in one season. And they kicked butt when they came on here in Rochester to farm. And ⁓ so that's all it can take. But you have to kind of see, have that perspective. You don't have to make all the mistakes by yourself. Learn from others' mistakes. It'll cost you less.
Jenny (47:39)
it's an amazing answer. And I think it's so common in the veggie world for people to do like internships or ⁓ work at other farms before they start their own. But for some reason with flower farming, it is so rare for people to do that. And I wish it was more of a thing because I would like to mentor somebody. And as much as I would want somebody to come and stay on my team for a long time, it would just mean like more to me to have somebody that
I know would like go on to do farming somewhere else, but like for whatever reason, it's not like a huge thing in the flower farming world. And it's so valuable if you work for somebody else first. And it doesn't have to be like if you want to start a veggie farm, you don't have to work on a veggie farm per se. If you want to start a flower farm, you could go work on a veggie farm and get like a lot of the same experience. But anyhow, I feel like I'm going off on a tangent about that. But it's just like an incredibly
James (48:13)
Okay.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Jenny (48:36)
valuable experience to have working for somebody else first in this industry before you work for yourself. Not always possible for everyone, but cool idea to have. So yeah, I love that answer. Are there any last thoughts that you want to leave us with, James, about farming as a side hustle instead of pursuing it as a full-time career?
James (49:00)
Have fun with it.
If you're someone that's already easily stressed with your current workload, at work, on additional work time might not be the right choice. However, if you've got the drive and the time and the motivation and you want to increase your income and supplement it, then it might be a good option for you.
Jenny (49:21)
love that. So if people have questions that they want to ask you, where would they be able to find you and contact you?
James (49:22)
All right.
Yeah, we don't have a lot of online presence. ⁓
Jenny (49:33)
Or I guess
I should ask if you're open to that.
James (49:36)
Oh, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. like my favorite part of my job is just talking to folks and helping share whatever information I might have if it could be helpful. we don't have a lot of online presence as a farm. We probably should, but I started off having a website, but just trying to keep things lean and simple. I didn't see a lot of value in having a website with how we're currently doing things. But anyways, we are on Instagram.
handle is like honeyed underscore acres and honeyed is spelled like honey H-O-N-E-Y with an E-D at the end. So honeyed underscore acres. That's how you can find us on Instagram. If you're in Rochester area, you can find us at the Brighton farmers market. Yeah. And if you want to email me, it's james at honeyedacres.com. If you want to email Ariana, it's ariana at honeyedacres.com.
Jenny (50:29)
and I will put links to your contact information in the show notes if anybody does want to contact you and reach out. sounds good. thank you so much for talking to me about this topic today. I feel like this is a ⁓ kind of like a hard topic to talk about, because there's like some awesome things and there's also some like kind of harder things to discuss. So I really appreciate you taking the time to be with me today.
James (50:53)
Yeah, thank you very much. This was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it.
Jenny (50:56)
Me too. So thank you guys for being here for another episode of the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast. Before you go, if you have gotten any valuable insights, information, or entertainment out of any episode of this podcast and have not left a review, please, please, please go ahead and leave a review for us. You can just go to Apple or iTunes or whatever you want to call it nowadays. Go to our podcast page, the Six Figure Flower Farming Podcast page, scroll all the way down to the bottom and you'll see a little area that has
James (51:23)
if
Jenny (51:25)
reviews in a button that says leave a review here, super simple to do. It really helps other flower farmers find the information that they need to find success. So please help me on my mission to make flower farming a successful and sustainable career for all of us.
Plus, I would so appreciate it. It only takes 30 seconds or less. And with that, we'll see you guys next time. I release new episodes every Monday. So I see you next week, same time, same place.
