My favorite question from non-farmers comes as winter approaches: What do you do in the winter? Honestly, I didn’t really know the answer to this question until Kim and I began managing a farm in Maine. The answer? We plan. We plan. And plan some more.
Summer on the diversified vegetable farm is more than a little complicated. Each year, we manage over 1,000 planting events, each requiring different seeds, seeder or transplanter settings, and dates, starting in February and ending in September. Each of our 20 fields has a different pattern of drying and moisture that dictates different timing for preparing the soil and managing the weeds. For most of the summer, we harvest, wash and pack about 30 different crops each week, each with its own requirements. We deliver these crops to each of 10 different locations every week.
We also manage moving the sheep, mowing the burdock and thistles in the pasture, planting trees, building greenhouses, maintaining tractors, ordering supplies, writing paychecks, paying loans, hiring employees, and pretty much whatever else needs doing or thinking about. On the farm, the CEO and the chief widget mover are often one and the same.
Of course, all of these events are subject to the vagaries of drought, flood, frost, and excessive heat. Even the normal variations in weather—the necessary rains, the all-important week of good weather in the first week of May—can create major bumps in the farming road. You can’t plant when it’s wet, and most crops hate to be harvested in the heat.
So next week, Kim and I will sit down and start to do whatever we can to find a clear path from one end of the season to the next. First, we outline our financial plan for the year, answering questions like, how many CSA members do we want next year, how much money do we need to make at farmers market, and how many new toys can we buy? Next comes the planting plan. We begin by trying to figure out how much of each crop we want available to harvest when, and work backwards to when we need to plant it and how much seed we need to buy. I’ve developed a pretty nifty database solution such that when we plug in the date we want to harvest and how much, it fills in the rest of the information (provided we’ve got some good data to work with!) When that is done, we return to our work on the financial plan, revising and polishing and doing the harder work of figuring out just how we are going to make everything work.
Two years ago, Kim read about and developed a tool for our farm that we call “Life Planning”. We plot all of the major events of the year, from putting the ram in with the ewes to planting tomatoes in the greenhouse to each of the kids’ birthdays, on a grid so that we can look at the amount of work in a given week and decide ahead of time whether we need to adjust our plan. It also serves as a reminder each week of things we shouldn’t forget to do, and relieves a lot of stress because we know things won’t slip by us.
All of this work keeps us busy right up until February 15th, when we start planting onions in the greenhouse. We do try to slip in a few late mornings and maybe a little time off the farm, but for the most part, what we do in the winter is look forward to summer again.
