Scale on the Market Farm

I’m writing this from Little Rock, Arkansas, where I am doing a presentation on farm financials for the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group. It’s another in a string of presentations I signed up to do this winter, many of them with a focus on issues of scale in agriculture.

For beginning farmers especially, scale can cause significant problems as the business matures. Most of us get into this business to save the earth, get a feel for the soil, or simply to feed people – we don’t get into it to spend time crunching numbers at a computer, manage employees, or track down overdue payments.

Unfortunately – and I have a feeling that this happens to almost all small business owners – those are the very tasks that make or break a business, especially at the point when it needs to take a turn from being run on the constant over-exertions of the farmer and his or her dedicated crew.

So, one of the core messages I try to carry to beginning and expanding farmers is that they need to understand, at the outset, just how much they will eventually need to produce to sustain the quality of life they want to achieve; and since money is one sure way to unlock the flexibility and resources that can sustain an operation and a family, I focus on that.

If a market farming couple hopes to retain a $50,000 profit to cover their living expenses, mortgage, retirement savings, and such (this is a ridiculously low number based on the number of hours and level of risk assumed by most farmers, but I use it as an example because we tend to be a bunch with relatively low financial expectations), and market farms of their scale seem to average about a 40% margin, that means they’ll need to raise about $135,000 of vegetables – and that’s a lot more rutabagas than most of us got into farming thinking that we would be producing.

In This Week's Box

Our best estimate…

Carrots

Celeriac – the ugly, somewhat knobby root that smells just like celery. In fact, genetically speaking, it is celery, just a variety that has been bred for its swollen root rather than its crunchy stalks.

Heart of Gold Squash – A great acorn-type squash with excellent flavor.

Cabbage – one each of regular red cabbage and a red savoy type.

Garlic

Rutabagas

Yellow Onions

Beets

Spinach – the spinach has taken a little bit of cold damage, but is still delicious and still stores well. The discoloration on the leaves is purely cosmetic. By friend Bill Warner refuses to grow spinach at any other time than the winter, because then it would “taste like spinach.” I love the sweet goodness of winter-grown greenhouse spinach.

Rosemary – just a couple of sprigs, from our greenhouse production.

Recipes You Can Use

Baked Beets in Rosemary Butter

1 lb beets
1 Tbsp butter
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 tsp chopped rosemary

Preheat oven to 400. Halve beets if they are large, otherwise use them whole. Place them in a covered baking dish with a little bit of water, and bake for one hour or until tender. Meanwhile, melt the butter and olive oil together with the rosemary, infusing the flavors over very low heat for about five minutes. When they are fork tender, hold the beets under cold running water to slip the skins off. Place in a serving dish and pour the butter-olive oil mixture over the beets. Serve warm.

Celeriac Gratin

1-1/2 lbs celeriac, cubed in one inch pieces
2tablespoons butter
2 tbsp flour
1 teaspoon chopped fresh rosemary, or thyme
1 cup grated parmesan
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup chicken stock or water
2 cloves minced garlic
Salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 375. Boil the celeriac cubes for about five minutes, until fork tender. Drain. Butter a 5 x 9 baking dish. Melt the butter and add the flour cook until flour browns, add the stock and stir until thickened, Combine the cream,and garlic with the stock and bring the mixture just to a boil. Pour over the celeriac. salt and pepper and top with cheese. Cover and bake for 20 minutes, then uncover and bake for an additional 20 minutes or so, until browned.

No News

With a lot more work than is seemly in early January, and some big picture issues to wrestle with right now, I’ve decided to take the week off from the normal newsletter.

The oddly-mild winter weather has left me feeling a little bit out of sorts. High winds made things interesting early last week, but no real damage was done. The lack of snow is downright depressing.

I’ve lined up a bit of a speaking tour this winter, with stops at the Great Plains Growers Conference in St. Joseph, Missouri; the Minnesota Organic Conference in St. Cloud, Minnesota; the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group Conference in Little Rock, Arkansas; the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture’s Conference in College Town, Pennsylvania; and even a workshop at the MOSES Organic Farming Conference in La Crosse, Wisconsin. I don’t usually speak at the MOSES conference because I co-direct that one, but this year I’m stepping in to cover food safety record-keeping.

It’s a privilege to share the lessons my crew and I have learned in twenty-two years of farming, twelve of them at Rock Spring Farm. Combined with the years of farm visits and conference organizing, it all adds up to stories that people seem interested in hearing, and I hear repeatedly from people who have learned something valuable at one of my talks. It feels like I am making a difference, and that makes the travel and the work worthwhile to me.

In the Box

Savoy Cabbage
Delicata (2)
Turnips
Rutabagas
Spinach
Garlic
Yellow onions
Red Beets

Staying with the too-much-work and too-few-hours theme, I’m going to refer folks to the blog site for recipes: www.eatbetternews.com has a five-year treasure trove of great recipes for everything we grow. The search box in the upper-left corner can help you find them.

Good Food, Good Systems

Over the last twelve years, I’ve worked hard to develop systems at Rock Spring Farm that consistently provide our customers with clean, ready-to-use vegetables and herbs. As the farm grew beyond the size that could be operated by just one or two individuals, I’ve had to learn how to communicate the how-and-why of what we do to an ever-growing and ever-changing crew if individuals who flow through this operation from year to year.

I’ve had ample opportunity over the last few years to learn that I can’t possibly do it all myself. This wasn’t an easy lesson for this farmer to learn. I didn’t get into this business to manage people – in fact, like most farmers, I didn’t get into this business to manage a business! I got into this business to drive tractors and dig carrots and listen to the birds sing. But having employees on the farm enables me to make a living at the same time that it allows me the flexibility to pursue other projects beyond the day to day work of growing rutabagas.

Having well-trained and empowered employees also has a tremendous impact on my and my family’s quality of life. Without a competent and invested crew, I wouldn’t have the ability to leave the farm for days at a time on vacation, or even to attend mid-day events in town on days when we need to pack CSA boxes. And it’s not just vacations, but my ability to have an impact on the world of organic farming by serving actively on non-profit boards and providing education, outreach, and consulting to farmers around the country (not to mention co-directing the MOSES Organic Farming Conference).

On a small, diversified operation like Rock Spring Farm (we are the largest organic vegetable farm in Northeast Iowa, but still a rather small operation in the overall scheme of organic produce), everybody plays a variety of different roles on the farm. We don’t have a food safety manager who dedicates all of their time to watching out for regulatory and common-sense compliance; even a packing shed manager ends up riding on a transplanter. The fact that everybody has complicated and multi-faceted roles to play on the farm means that everybody needs access to a diverse array of knowledge about how to accomplish just about every task on the farm.

Last fall, when we decided to pursue a food safety certification through the USDA-GAPs program, we had to begin to document our procedures and improve our record-keeping to demonstrate that we did indeed implement the procedures we had documented. This has led to an effort to document our practices throughout the farm, an ongoing process that we expect to finish this winter. While’s it’s not a substitute for elbow-to-elbow training, a good operations manual will help ensure the continued smooth operation of the farm, and the consistent production of good food, good soil, and a great quality of life for everybody involved in the farm.