Jenny (00:28)
The way you do things on your farm can literally make or break your business. And what I mean by that is the techniques that you use to grow and harvest and sell things make a huge difference on your bottom line. Here's an example. We used to plant our ranunculus in 50 cell trays. So we would take a big bag of the corms, soak them, then take each corn out one by one, place it in a little 50-cell tray.
cover it with soil, grow it on in our greenhouse for about four weeks, then we would transplant as large plugs. Now this took us about a hundred and twenty labor hours per bed.
Not to mention all of the trays and the soil and the greenhouse heat, the propane, all of that stuff, right? And then years ago, we decided not to do that any longer. So now we just dump the corms after we've soaked them into a 1020 tray with a little bit of soil on the bottom.
We just dump them in there, kind of smooth them out, put soil on top, and we grow them on in our greenhouse for about 10 to 14 days and transplant them as pre-sprouted corms. This takes about 24 labor hours per bed. Okay, same result. Both of these methods result in big, beautiful, gorgeous rununculous flowers. I have literally not seen a difference at all. Same flowers.
Same revenue, same outcome. However, we have saved so much time and money just growing them a slightly different way. Now we grow about six beds of these things. So to be exact, this saves us 96 hours. 96 hours of labor time. Like, just think about that for a second. How insane that is.
What would you do with 96 hours of your time back? You could do so much, right? And if that labor rate is $30 an hour, which if you're the owner of the business, I would minimum do that, that's nearly $3,000 in labor that you would save. Now, of course, that's like if you're paying somebody. But the big idea here is that a lot of flower farmers think that they have a revenue problem. And sure, for some people, you do just need to get some more money in the door, but
A lot of people have a systems problem that is costing them all of their time. And it's resulting in them feeling super panicked, like they have no time to do it all, no time to get all these things done. And it's simply because they're being super inefficient with how they're spending their time. So efficiency in small-scale flower farming is everything. And this is an obsession that I have. We used to do an on-farm workshop about this every single summer. ⁓ it's 2026. We're not doing it this summer, but hopefully.
We'll bring it back another time, no promises, but it is so important that we hadn't this entire workshop all based around it. And the thing is that
Every inefficient task that gets repeated hundreds of times or thousands of times every season, every year, adds up to a lot. So this is what I call the multiplication effect.
Now just imagine that you change the way that you're making your mixed bouquets and you're saving 10 seconds per bouquet. Seems totally insignificant. What's 10 seconds, right? Until you make 5,000 bouquets over the course of a season. Now, with that 10 seconds per bouquet, you've saved nearly 14 hours. So if you take that super simple thing and you multiply it across harvesting, weeding, planting.
Transplanting, washing buckets, bouquet making. Now you're talking about hundreds, if not thousands, of hours. So efficiency isn't about saving 10 seconds at a time. It's about saving 10 seconds 10,000 times. And truly, people look at me like I'm crazy sometimes when I'm like, just think about if you walk from one side of your farm to the other side of the farm and you do that five times a day.
That's twenty minutes a day, like doesn't seem like that big of a deal. But over the course of a season.
That's like something like 80 to 85 hours of time that you're just wasting. And so all these little things add up. So today I want to just go through some major examples from our farm, some things that we've changed that have made a huge difference in getting our time back and helping us feel like we're not just panicky and we're not like running around in a million different directions all the time and like we have our time back.
So I just told you about probably the biggest one, and I use this example all the time. So apologies if you've heard it before, but I already told you about our Rununculus, where we went from 120 hours of labor time to 24 hours of labor time per bed. Same crop, same outcome, but tons of time and money savings. The next one is tulips. Now I dislike tulips, I dislike growing them, I dislike harvesting them. They're not my favorite flower to grow.
⁓ because I have felt like they have been super inefficient in the past. But now what we do is instead of digging up every single bulb to store it dry in our cooler, we literally just pull the stems like we are pulling a renunculus stem or sorry, like a narcissist stem, like a daffodil. We just grab down at the base and pull up, and then we bunch them and stick them in a bucket of water like we would anything else.
And now, if you're storing them for a very long amount of time, maybe you want to dry store them with the bulbs on in crates or something like that. But typically, like we store our flowers like that in water for up to two weeks. If the cooler is super, super, super cold and you use a bulb teabag, you can totally get away from that with this. And I'll probably have some haters coming at me for saying that, but like we've been doing it.
And it has been fine. And our tulips have lasted just fine for our customers. I mean, we obviously try to sell them as soon as possible instead of holding on to them, but sometimes we do hold them for like Mother's Day and stuff like that. So harvesting that way instead of like digging and saving them has been huge. But also planting them as well. I was taught when you plant tulips at the very beginning that when you dig a trench, you plant all the bulbs little pointy side up, like eggs in an egg garden. And
Let me tell you, you do not have to do that. We literally take the bulb crate full of bulbs and we just dump it into our trench and like smooth them out with a rake so they're all in one layer, and they grow perfectly fine that way. And so that saves us tons of money and time as well. We really stopped treating our tulips and Renunculus and Dahlias, like all of our flowers, like gardening projects.
And started treating them like a production crop. You really need to think about this from a farming and efficiency point of view, not just like a gardening point of view. And if you're a backyard gardener listening to this, like get on with your bad self, keep doing what you do. But if you're trying to make money at this and save some time, these are the hacks that are going to help you. Now the next example I want to talk about is dahlias. Dahlias are such a time suck. We have people come through our business program. It's called Six Figure Flower Farming all the time.
And they go through our cost of production exercise we have them go through, and they always come in thinking that dahlias are their most profitable crop because they sell the stems for like three, four dollars a stem. They sell a lot of them. But then when they actually go through the whole process to figure out what it costs them to grow those dahlias, so many of our students find out that they're actually losing money on them or just breaking even. So I hope that's not the case for you.
But this is a real possibility with dahlias because there is so much labor that goes into them between the storing the tubers, dividing the tubers, the way you plant them, then you have to pinch them, stake them. They get a lot of pests and disease, you know, all that stuff and digging them, if I didn't already say that. So we have always been very careful about our dahlia production. And we plant them and dig them the same way. What I mean by that is we use a
Potato plow, also called a middle buster plow. It's just a simple plow attachment that goes on the back of our tractor. We bought it from Tractor Supply many years ago for like 200 bucks, like not expensive implement. Most implements you buy are thousands of dollars. It was like a couple hundred dollars. And it just makes a furrow when you pull it behind the tractor. So you just drive down in a line, it makes a furrow. We go down, drop all the tubers in.
And then we cover them up. We either use a hoe or we have a hiller attachment on our tractor too. It just kind of depends on the soil conditions and what's going to be faster. But that's how we plant them. There's no digging by hand, there's no getting on our hands and knees, sticking a trowel in the ground, making a hole, dropping the tuber in there, like none of that. It's I could never go back to doing that again. And if you do that right now and you don't have a tractor and implement, please don't think I'm telling you that this is how you have to do it. I'm just giving you an example.
Of how we have saved time on our farm, and this is the way that we've done it. So digging. Now let's pretend that we planted them that way and the whole season has gone by and we've harvested all the flowers and now it's the fall and it's time to dig our dahlias up. We dig dahlias at our farm because we live in a climate where they won't necessarily survive the winter without lots of help and stress. And we also sell our dahlia tubers as well. And so we use that same implement, that same middle buster plow or potato plow.
To dig our dahlias. So, same exact way we planted them, we just mow all the dahlias down and then we drive over top of them with this plow behind the tractor, and it basically undercuts all of the tubers, the tuber clumps in the ground, and they just sort of like pop up out of the ground. And then we pick the clumps up, shake the dirt off as much as we can. It sticks pretty badly, to be honest.
end up using an air hose to blow off all the extra soil. But, anyways, just throw them to crates, we blow them off, and then we're done with it. So digging the dahlias this way literally takes us less than five minutes per 100-foot bed. It's so easy. And we used to dig these things when I first started flower farming by hand with a shovel or a fork. And I know for some people that's just
kind of the way it has to be for a while. And if you're at a small enough scale, that's probably the way it will be done. But again, this is just an example of how we have saved literally thousands of hours of time. Like I talk to other flower farmers who grow about the same amount of dahlias as us, and they will tell me it takes them weeks to dig up their dahlias. And I'm like, we do it in like an afternoon. Like literally thousands of them and just a few hours in the afternoon. And then it probably takes another, you know, day or so to like
Blow all the soil off of them, get them kind of cleaned up to store in the cooler. But I mean, when people are saying that they're taking weeks doing this, I just start to add up all the hours. And if you were to pay somebody to do that, or if you're paying yourself, like how much money and time that is, and to me, it's just insane. So dahlias are another one that we have really focused on dialing in our efficiency so we can save time and money and make these flowers more profitable for our business.
Next example of efficiency is harvesting. This is a big one. You're gonna spend the most amount of time on your flower farm harvesting by far. It is the thing that we do the most on our flower farm. And the more efficient you can get at harvesting, the more time you're gonna have for doing other things on the farm. So we always make sure we try to touch our flowers physically.
as few times as possible because every time you're touching that product, not only is the quality diminishing because it's getting handled more, you're also wasting time taking it, picking it up, setting it back down, putting it in the cooler, taking it back out again, putting in a bucket, putting it in another bucket. Like you want to minimize that as much as possible to increase the efficiency. So instead of cutting the flowers, carrying the stems or putting them in a bucket to strip later
Or to bunch or process later. Think about right in the field. You cut, strip, bunch with a rubber band, put in a bucket to be sold later. Obviously, this doesn't apply to mixed bouquets. ⁓ but if you're doing straight bunches at all, trying to do it all in one swoop really helps. I know other farms, bigger farms that tend to harvest more than we do, have different systems for making this work for them. For example, they might have somebody who is cutting and then they have a runner.
Who is actually coming behind them and grabbing the bunches of flowers and taking them to another person to strip them? I know that works for some farms, that doesn't work for our farm. And so I wanted to put that in here as an example, just so you could figure out what works best for you. So I recommend just doing time studies. Like harvest one way one day, then the next day, harvest another day, and literally just time it and see which one is faster.
Do it a few times to make sure it's not just like a fluke or something. And then that can determine your new systems of harvesting.
my final example today is bouquet making. I feel like this is such a pain point for so many flower farmers, and it's something that I feel like we have really dialed in. And first of all, it comes down to bouquet recipe design. Like if you're somebody who is still putting like seven to ten ingredients in your market bouquets that you're selling at the farmer's market or your farm stand.
I would really consider whether that's necessary or not. Because for us, it totally isn't necessary. We make mixed bouquets with just three to four ingredients, and they are beautiful and they sell amazing. And, you know, we just put more of the same stems together. And that makes the bouquet making so much faster. For example, a typical bouquet recipe in August would be a few stems of Lycanthus, a few stems of dahlias, a few stems of eucalyptus.
And maybe if we have them, a few stems of Snapdragons. So that's four ingredients. And we can make those in less than sixty seconds, like put together wrapped in everything.
So super quick. So a lot of that starts with, like I said, your recipe design, but it also is your setup. So we prefer to have all of our flowers set out in piles on a table, assembly line style. So what this looks like is you'll have a pile of Lysianthus, then a pile of dahlias, then a pile of eucalyptus, all on a table, like pretty large piles as well.
Sometimes if we're using flowers that are delicate, we'll put them in a bucket, but it for the most part, we just try not to grow flowers that need a lot of special care and touch because it just slows everything down. We like want the hardy stuff that can really handle being put horizontally on a table so we can just pick up and grab stems and move through the assembly line. So we teach all of our bouquet makers to hold all the flowers horizontally. So the stems are horizontal, not like
vertical, like if you're actually holding a bouquet if you were to like hand it to somebody, you want to keep all the stems horizontal. So as you pick up a stem from the table, you put it in your hand horizontally. Hopefully I'm explaining this well. I don't know if I am. But we pick up the number of stems that we need. So if the first pile is Lycanthus and the recipe has four stems of Lycanthus in it, we pick up four stems of Lycanthus. Then if the next pile is dahlias and there's three stems of dahlias in there,
We pick up three stems of dahlias. And what we'll do is we'll place the first stem on the top of our Lysianthus pile, roughly turn the bunch of flowers, add another stem of dahlias, turn it again, add another stem of dahlias. So there's definitely some technique to this for sure, but ⁓ you just continue that same kind of technique down that assembly line of the table until you have all your ingredients.
Then we cut it with a stem cutter, like one of those big like kachonker things that cut all the stems off at once, band it, throw it in a sleeve, and put it on the table. We also go through this process five times before we pick up the bouquets to put them in a bucket of water. So we basically make five bouquets and we have them in a pile and we make like a little pyramid with them. So typically it's three bouquets at the bottom, then two bouquets sitting on top of those.
So it's a little pyramid, and then we pick up the whole bunch of five bouquets at once, drop it into a bucket, and then we put that on a rolling rack that will get put into our cooler. So I know I'm going into some more granular detail here, and this is why we typically have that on-farm workshop. I don't know if we'll offer it again. I would love to, but ⁓ we'll see how what happens. But it's because seeing these things in person and getting to physically watch somebody
do these things and handle the flowers and watch where the hands are, watch where the techniques are, can be super helpful and actually game changing for your flower farm. Because if you can take your bouquet making from five hours a week to just two hours a week and make the same amount of bouquets, it could literally change the trajectory of your farm and your mental state with like all of the stuff you have to do on your farm.
Even though it's not that cool to compare a flower farm to a factory or like an assembly line, The fact of the matter is that assembly lines were created for a reason.
They changed manufacturing and they can change bouquet production too.
Okay, those are the main big pillars of inefficiency that we've implemented on our farm that have had a huge help in reducing our working hours and increasing our profitability. But I want you to really think about how many hours do you spend doing all these little inefficiencies? Because there's this huge hidden cost. How many hours do you spend looking for tools, looking for labels, walking back and forth, fixing mistakes?
Re-explaining tasks, doing bare bones basic stuff. Because many inefficiencies aren't even in production. They're in your farm layout, in your organization, your systems, your communication. There's all these things. And this is why I love teaching this stuff because they're all very doable things where you just make these small tweaks that end up saving you tens of thousands of dollars a year. Like people in our business program, like
It's not a cheap program, but you will make your money back within like the first week or two that you're in the program if you just implement a couple of the things that we teach you in there. It's crazy. We've seen it so many times. But, anyways, here's an actionable framework I want you to take away with you today. I want you to think about all the things you do on your farm and pick one repetitive task. So this could be harvesting, bouquet making, seeding, weeding, washing buckets, whatever it is.
And I want you to time it. Don't just estimate, like, I think it takes me 15 minutes to wash 30 buckets. No, actually time it. Get a stopwatch, use your phone, hit start when you begin it, hit stop when you end. Then I want you to multiply it. Actually figure out how many times a year do you do this? Like, do you wash buckets once a week, twice a week, three times a week? Take that time.
times three times a week times your entire season, How many hours is that? And then what would the annual labor cost be? Like if you paid someone $20 an hour, $25 an hour, if you want to pay yourself 30 times an hour, think about that exercise for a second. How much would that cost? A lot of people have their like, ⁓ crap moment right here when they figure this out, when we actually quantify it.
So the last step to this little exercise is to ask, how could I make this 50% faster? This is what I call the 50% faster exercise. And I have a lot of my students do this and I walk them through it inside of my program. You don't have to make it perfect. It doesn't have to be revolutionary, but just ask yourself: if I could make this 50% faster, what would I have to do differently? Now, this matters so much because so many farmers think.
I need more customers. I just need to generate more revenue. But sometimes if you can have the same revenue, but with less labor, less time dedicated to the business, that can create more profit. So sometimes same revenue, but less stress means better profit and a better life.
One of the fastest ways to increase profits and to minimize your overwhelm with your business isn't earning more,
It's doing the work more efficiently. So please do this challenge, pick one task this week, time it, do the math, ask how you can make it 50% faster. Take some of the examples from my farm for inspiration on your farm. You don't have to do things the same exact way I did them. Just try to figure out what's gonna work for you and your unique farm and business. Because profit is not often hiding in some magical new sales channel.
It's hiding in the systems you already use every single day.
All right. The goal isn't necessarily to become faster either. It's to build better systems because fast workers can burn out, but great systems can scale. If you found this episode helpful, please share it with another overwhelmed flower farmer. This is the time in the season where we're all starting to feel overwhelmed and burnt out. And maybe this episode can help someone else feel a little bit more at peace, feel like they can get their time back and really gain some more control over their time in their business. And heck.
Make more money and be more profitable. So please, if you found some value out of this, send this to a friend or leave us a review on Apple or Spotify. This will help more flower farmers find this information that they need to grow their business. And there are thousands of you now that listen to this podcast every single week,
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