FARM MATH! Crunching Data to Crush Your Season with CURTIS STONE

if anybody is interested in my online course there's a discount code there if anybody wants is interested in taking that later on you are more than welcome to today we are going to look at it's this isn't specific farm related stuff this is actually stuff that could be useful to many different operations we're just going to look at how we use information to leverage our our experience basically to expedite your learning curve I think information is something that's often overlooked it's most often overlooked by farmers it's maybe a little bit more talked about in the in the in the traditional business world but I often find that the managing of information and systems are the things that farmers are always failing on I could consult for many different farmers throughout the US and it's often their biggest weak weak point so I'm all about tackling the weakest link and I think this is one of the the weakest links in the space of Agriculture and so we're really gonna dive in today and and and go ahead first into some of the systems that I use and how I manage information the way I see it information is like a seed it's like seeds you have to harvest those seeds you've got to Thresh them clean them and sort them in order for them to be useful so information is the exact same thing and that's what this is going to be all about today is we're going to look at how I manage information on a day to day basis on a weekly basis on a monthly basis how it review it at the end of the year and then how I use that information to improve things on the farm so I just want to point to some free resources that I have available so my youtube channel has a ton of stuff on there I've I'm posting videos every single week and I'm answering questions on it every single day you know if you're not in my online course that's a way to access me I don't really have time to answer emails any longer from people but on the YouTube channel if that information can help others then I prefer it to help people there because then it's it's it's useful more useful for for as long as YouTube is on is online this is a show that I did with Diego fooder the organizer of our wonderful conference this week and we did we had about forty three or forty four episodes basically tracked my season every single week for the entire season there's a ton of good information in there that you'll probably get addicted to it Diego and I have a really good rapport and we've had a lot of good conversations on the show as a total blast to do we're gonna do it again next year so check it out if you haven't heard of it already a lot of the stuff that well actually all the stuff we're gonna talk today you can get on my web site for free a lot of its in the book but when I wrote the book I wrote way too many words and had way too many charts and they had space for so all those extra things are on my website they're free just go to urban farmer Co slash book and then select that free extras thing and it's a download of all the spreadsheets the fresh sheet we're gonna talk about there's even land contracts and stuff in there that we won't talk about today but I do talk about in my in my one-day workshop that we're gonna be doing in this room tomorrow all day so all the spreadsheets and everything that I'm gonna show you today is there you can get it for free even if you don't have my book so these are my 10 keys to success that I think were things that really helped me when I was starting and I attribute a lot of the success of my farm in such a short period of time to these things we're gonna look at the main these two the ones that I've circled market research and how to track and measure everything those that's what we're gonna spend the next three hours on and we'll have lots of time for questions and stuff too but I just want to go through this list because I think it's important to keep to keep these things in mind so market research is crucial because if you don't know what you're getting into when you start selling or you start farming or whatever Enterprise you're gonna get into if you don't know where you're at you don't you have no idea if what you're gonna do is going to work so the one thing I always can tell people is number one never walk into a saturated market never go to the place where everybody's already doing what you're doing because then you won't be the story you won't you won't be the first mover and there's a there's a that's a common phrase in the technology industry is the first the first mover the first to market that's really key because often when I teach people about urban agriculture or market gardening they think they want to go to the Bay Area or they want to go to Northern California or they want to go to the place that there's already a big scene of people doing it and there's some value to that in some ways you've got camaraderie you've got a support group you've even got people to you might be able to share resources with at the same time you've got a lot of competition right out of the gate and that's something that I think is can make or break you I've seen many farmers come and go in my town in Kelowna BC who say oh I want to go and do this where Curtis is doing it because he's already you know laid out the groundwork which is true but do you really want to compete with me you don't I've actually seen three market gardeners come and go in my town and I encourage them actually when they came when they came to Kelowna I said yeah come on in I'll come over to my farm I'll show you everything I know but they just couldn't capture market share they set up at the farmers market they couldn't sell anything tried to get at the restaurants they just couldn't get in there so it's better to not walk into a saturated market another one in British Columbia is Vancouver people yeah I'm gonna be an urban farmer I'm gonna go to Vancouver well then you got to compete with Krista row you got to compete with all these other urban farmers that are there it's like don't do that go to the place where you can be the frontiers person where you can be on the front lines you'll always be remembered as the first person to do it and it'll always be a news story because that's the thing that this is still a very new thing urban agriculture market gardening is still very new so if you can be the first person in your town or wherever you are to do it that is a ton of value and n and longevity to it as well but we will get into a lot more detail about our market research shortly here second thing I actually think this is probably one of the most important reasons that I'm here today that I'm talking to you guys after six years is that I had mentors I sought out people in my local area and went to them and asked them specifically about things that were relevant to where I was and I did this with business people with farmers with conventional farmers organic farmers all kinds of people because if you go to the source you can get the high grade information and that's really important and essentially you guys are doing that today you're coming to events like this this is high grade information you're going talking straight to producers that's key and I think you should constantly strive to find mentors I still have mentors today I like to think that I like to surround myself with three types of people people that are 10 years ahead of me aware I'd like to be people that are at my level and they're my in my peer group they're my friends and they're there they're moving forward and they're striving for similar things whether it's an exact same sector or not but they have similar ambitions and then people that are maybe a couple years or a few years behind me that are people that I can help and if you have three people people like that in your life it's very fulfilling but it can keeps you moving forward because your surroundings are those kind of people that share your values and that are moving forward and I really attribute that to two of the reason I'm here after six years of farming start small grow incrementally don't take on too much I'll just kind of blast through these start small and grow to what your market is demanding you can kill an operation if you take on too much overhead at once you don't need to own land I think we all understand this concept very by now if you if you've come here you've been here hearing some of the other conversations or you're familiar with my stuff we don't need to go over that too much keeping your overhead low is very key and it's the backbone to what we do on our farm our operational expenses are very low and we can essentially run our farm as a two-person operation at about 60 hours a week total between two people generally we've we focus on higher value markets and crops so that doesn't mean we don't we discriminate against places that aren't those it just means that if we have the option we'll always go for the higher value and that's just business common business sense in a way but it makes your life easier and it makes you more money essentially tracking and measure everything this is so key and we are gonna spend most of this workshop talking about exactly that and it is another main reason that I'm here today is I learned all the things that were working and what didn't and I would continuously double down on the things that we're working and eliminating the things that wasn't but if you're tracking your stuff if you're not tracking this information you don't know where you're at so that's why we're gonna spend so much time on this today appropriate technology a lot of tools and software systems these are things that I use my smartphone being one of my most used tools on the farm actually is my most used tool on the farm all these things help you leverage your workload and your experience focusing on the tasks that pay that actually links very much to tracking and measuring everything is you want to know how to you want to know what are the things that pay and what do they pay and you can't figure that out unless you track the numbers stacking an option ality this is something that's very important on our farm is always finding multiple uses for things as far as products tools and systems but that will save for tomorrow so I actually and was not a spreadsheet person at all I it's not something that I had a history of doing it's something that I got into when I was tree planting this is actually the only picture I could find of me tree planting this is a very Canadian job this is something that a lot of younger people do to put themselves through college Jaume are 1040a and I were both tree planters for close to 10 years and it's a job that is very physically demanding and it's a piecework job so you go out and you plant trees and you get paid per tree so it often creates entrepreneurs because you really learn firsthand how to you know you take what you make what you put in is what you get and if you want to sit around and you're lazy and you're unmotivated you're not gonna make any money so this is actually where i lurk my work ethic was in the bush tree planting and I did this for nine years so I put myself through college with this I paid off most of my student debts with this tree planters in Canada can make pretty good money like I in my later years I was I was averaging five hundred fifty dollars a day doing this when I started I could make you know I barely made minimum wage in my first year but what happened in my believe it was my fifth year of tree planting so for my last four years of tree planting I actually started to use spreadsheets it was my first experience with spreadsheets and it was at that point that I really started to make good money at replanting it wasn't so much because my technique was any much was much better than it was before it was that I was able to consist I was able to set goals and benchmarks and consistently keep my eye on the prize and stay focused and that's really what this information is all about is setting a goal so it's just like you know if you're planning a farm how much money do I want to make on my farm this year let's say you want to make 80,000 on your farm that's your end goal how many weeks do you have to do that okay I've got 30 weeks divide 30 by 80,000 that'll give you an average so that means you need to achieve that average each week and so when I was tree planting that's essentially what I did as I said okay I want to make 20,000 this season I've got 60 days to work how much money do I need to make each day to get to that average and I consistently checked in on the spreadsheet I had a grand total on the bottom and then it was a it was it calculated a sum and I'd put my days in as I went and I would see that number I had it subtracted for my total of how much more money I needed to make and I constantly looked at my average to make sure that I was going to my average and so I have done the same thing on my farm over all these years and it was the thing that really allowed me to start managing better and and staying focused on the numbers because the numbers don't lie you need to have goals consistent goals you need to have long term medium and short term goals this is how you can make these things happen if you don't have a goal then you'll never get to a number if you don't have a plan on how to get to that goal then you won't know where you're at because you need to constantly check in and so what we're gonna look at today this is just a slideshow of my farm as I'm talking about this well what we're gonna look at today is how we do all that how we track this information how we create habits to do that how do we spend time in the office and how do we review that information on a weekly basis a monthly basis and then on a yearly basis at the end of the season this stuff is is very key it's it's sometimes a little dry right it's it's it's probably not the most exciting thing to talk about in farming you know if I had to choose one thing I'd want to talk more about my high rotation beds or my inter planting with tomatoes or my new passive solar greenhouse that that's the really exciting stuff but farming isn't all glamour right it's not all fun and games it's not all going to the farmers market and socializing there's a lot of things in farming that just have to get done and if they don't get done then you can lag behind so that's what we are gonna get into today and I'll take questions at a certain period and we'll we'll just kind of do questions and sessions instead of having you guys blurt them out as we go it I find it just creates a better atmosphere a better experience I will absolutely yeah so what do we track and how can this help us so there's a lot of information out there there's a lot of things you can track and some things are more important than others it's important to track most things like what's going into your farm what's coming off the farm what are you selling what are you not selling there's a lot of things that are really important with that but with what we're gonna talk about today I'm gonna show you what are the key things to track what things are less important what things are critical to be tracking consistently and then what are things that you can track later on that don't have as much importance so I'm talking about things like what you plant in the field what do you harvest off the field what do you have for restaurant orders this week what were your orders in previous weeks when a chef makes an order and they ask for 10 units of this and you deliver 8 units of this then that's something that you can track as well that's called short it's very important to track your shortages because then you can see trends you can say oh I was short consistently for these weeks for these products all the time and then that information will help you create a better scenario next year on how you can come back with more product so these are all things that we use to look at trends to speculate on the future so it's it's a lot like people in the stock market really they're looking at graphs and they're looking at trends and in people's behaviors and then adjusting their behavior according to that and in leveraging that so that they can be more successful with it but before we get into how we track and exactly what we're gonna track we need to know our market you need to know what is out there and you know where are you gonna sell your stuff so we're gonna look at two things we're gonna look at farmer's markets and restaurants right now and we're gonna look at how we do market research to even assess if we want to sell there if that's a place that we can actually work so let's take a look at farmers markets so there's some things about a farmers market that are key to know first being what is your market so what what is that farmers market all about is it is it is it a really busy market is it slow how long is the season for this market is there a waiting list to get on this market this is really important to understand before we even think about selling to a farmers market because I've seen some farmers where they say okay I'm gonna sell at this market I'm gonna show up and they say well you didn't apply and there's a six-month waiting period and there's an $800 fee to get in so you need to have all those things assessed you can usually find that out on their websites just go to that market that particular market and see and see what they're asking of vendors often there's paperwork that you need to fill out the other thing that you want to look at even before you start selling at a market is you're probably better to shop there for a good period of time and I did that before I started selling at my market I was a shopper there for about a year and I was constantly looking at what other vendors were selling what kind of people were coming there what were some of the the demographics there learning some basic information about that farmers market is really important it's gonna it's gonna it's going to help you when you want to show up to that market the next thing is who are your customers so when we're looking at a farmers market who are the people coming there what's the primary age group is the socio economics of it if you can guess sometimes you might not have access to that information what's the gender I find out farmers markets women consistently buy most of everything usually when it's when there's couples or families the the wife or the the woman is pulling her husband along to make the purchase and the guys kind of like okay how we done can we get out of here so that's important stuff to know and it might not be that way for all markets that's just how it doesn't mind market it's important to understand that because how you target your marketing how you display things at your stand are important and we're not going to talk about how I do displays and all that that's that's more stuff for tomorrow's workshop but you know what what is the group of people here is is there is there a particular predominant cultural group at that market some of the Vancouver farmers markets are like 80 percent Asians Chinese Southeast Asians you name it that's important to understand because that might help you customize what you're going to grow depending on what you think they're their purchasing habits are what are these people buying what do you see they're just assessing the marketplace this is really nothing new to business but I see a lot of farmers don't really look at that stuff they don't really think about it the other thing that's really important is just a lifestyle piece is do the people you see at that market do you think they align with your values is it the kind of market you want to be at because there's some there's some markets or polar opposites you've got the markets where there's a lot of buy and seller type vendors they're just buying produce and selling it so they're just flipping stuff they're not really farmers per se right so that kind of market might not share your values whereas then there's other types of markets that are strict about you got to make it bake it or grow it like that's my farmers market in Kelowna is exactly that if you don't make that stuff grow it or any of that then you can't sell at that market so that I'd I would align that one with more with my values and and and and assess that there's probably people at that farmers market that would value what I do more than somebody who's just looking for cheap produce so it's really important to assess that all the values and how they align with yours so your customers who are who are the best ones well it once you start selling at a market or even you can perceive this before you even sell at a market if you're going to some particular vendors at your market and you start to see that there are certain regulars around there who are they what's their story what are their demographics apply what we just looked at on the last one to those people once you're selling at the market that's when your market research will further in a way is that you will identify very quickly who is your 80/20 so if some of you were here at my lap my last talk on two days ago I was talking about the Pareto principle the rule of 80/20 20% of your customers will bring you 80% of your business who are those people what are their what are their demographics co-ceo economics average gender average age who are those people what are their names what do they like are there more things you can do to cater to those customers because I find a big part of success at a farmers market is continuously offering more value to the people that bring you the most value it's it's it's it's kind of it's maybe it seems like common sense sometimes I wonder if common sense isn't very common but it you know what can you do to bring more value to them we consistently strive to do that when I'm at my market the first the first thing I always have a notebook with me and I take down and I write down the names of all the people that I don't know and they if they if they appear to be a customer that is coming back and I don't know their name I ask them their name and when they're not looking I write it down and make a little note about them so that the next time they come I know their name and this is a very old idea but the sweetest sound to a person's ear is their own name and you can remember your core customers names they'll bring their friends back and that will grow a very solid support group for your business and the great thing about when you have a customer base like this is that you can continuously ask them on what you can improve on what are the things that you can offer them more of what are the things they'd like to see less of because when people develop a relationship with you they'll be more forthcoming with information than somebody you don't know so that is really important at a farmers market so what are they buying what are the things so you know even before you're selling to the market what are the things that you see are popular what are the items that there's maybe some abundance or scarcity of there's one trick you can do at a farmers market before you even sell there on how to figure out what you should grow and what you shouldn't is you show up in the morning make some notes and take some pictures on your phone with what you see on the tables and then come back an hour or half-hour before closing and then do a split test see what's left on the tables the things that are left on the tables are the things that there's not clearly a demand for and the things that we're gone fast are the things that there is a demand for this is really telling even about a community not just the farmers market you can see where the demand for things are and you can compare that that we'll look at we'll talk about restaurants in a few moments but you can constantly learn information about this because there's going to be seasonality to this - what are people buying a lot of in the spring what are people buying a lot of in the summer what was available in the morning what was what was gone and by the afternoon and also looking at what what what are the top dogs you know who are the people at that farmers market that are moving the biggest volume at my market there's about four vendors that are huge they might do six thousand eight six thousand dollars a day in sales what are they selling what are their customers buying sometimes you don't want to compete with those kind of vendors especially if they're offering a similar product to you so looking at all these patterns that you see at a farmers market will tell you a lot about how you should design your farm and it will correlate to restaurants and so what are their purchasing habits if this is a Saturday market one of the most amount of people there at our market between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. is the busiest time because it's the time that all the locals come because the locals want to avoid the tourist rush the tourists usually show up later in the day because they're probably out partying on the beach late the night before they sleep in they all show up at once to the market and they're just kind of touring around as their cotton candy taking up space the locals don't like that the locals want to come in they want to chat with their farmer they want to get their stuff they still want to have a good experience but they want to get out of there before the tourists come so that that could be different in any kind of market but it's it's important to understand when do when do they come in when do they come out because I when I when I know that when I set up at my market I know that I want to be ready to rock and roll right at 8 o'clock because I even have some customers coming at 7:30 as I'm setting up my really core customers so you want to make sure that you're ready for those customers because again that's your 80/20 that those are the people that are going to continuously support you so you want to make sure that they have the least path of resistance to come through and buy stuff from you to give you their money come in and out and make it easy as you can for them by the by mid-afternoon at our farmers market we really slow down we'll see hundreds of people walking by but we're just sitting there kind of twiddling our thumbs by that point we've probably sold more 90 percent of our stuff but it's understood it's it's important to understand those patterns because it's not necessarily gonna be the same at every market it depends where your market is my market is on a parking lot it's hot so in the summertime the locals they're over at at that point the tourists come because it's nice and they're just walking around having a good time but those patterns will tell you a lot about how you can sell how you can display when you should be set up and all these kind of things what are the products you should have and what it what are what are the things about your customers that you can cater to alright so there's a lot to selling to chefs a lot of nuances here this is kind of a who what when where why and how of dealings restaurants tomorrow we'll get into restaurants more if you're coming to the workshop but these are the some of the things as far as market research goes so we're essentially talking about any restaurants that are under the field to fork category so restaurants that are buying local they're sourcing local they brag about out on their menu they use seasonal products there's basically your target demographic of what you want to sell to these are the kind of restaurants you're targeting and before you even approach restaurants you should have a really good skeleton of what are the restaurants you want to approach and know some information about them before you even show up before you even send an email or make a phone call you should know a lot about them easiest way to do it at first is this a simple Google search just search farm to table or field to fork restaurants in your town what pops up if you scroll through Yelp if you use the app Yelp if you put in farm to table field to fork what pops up in San Diego source out that's your starting list and then you'll filter down from there so you want to make a list and then we'll go through some other processes to see is this cut the kind of restaurant customer that we want to sell to so what's the price point of these restaurants and and who's eating there so just like we looked at at the farmers market what is the demographic of people eating there that can tell you a lot about what you're gonna sweat they might be interested in buying so if it's a Asian cuisine restaurant and they're using things like pack choice and bok Choy's and and daikon radish there's that's information for you what what can I go and market them so you're not going to go into a Thai restaurant and be really trying to talk to them about how great your romaine lettuce is or you know your Tomatoes you wanna you want to customize what you're going to bring to what they need based on previous information that you've sussed out because you don't want to go in you don't want to go in ignorant so you know what is what is the price point with with the food their lower price points generally means and not always there's always exceptions out there but generally if the price points are low they're probably not buying local stuff but often there isn't really that much of a price difference I'm often quite surprised just even traveling through California when I go to restaurants that are serving local I'm I'm often quite surprised on how affordable it actually is because a lot of it isn't just strictly to do with the price point that they're buying its how they manage their kitchen so there's a lot of other nuances there if they're efficient or not but I've you know I go to field to fork restaurants all the time and sometimes it might only be 20 percent more than what you'd see at it at an average restaurant obviously we're not talking about Denny's and McDonald's and chains we're talking about places that are that are gonna use local and quality stuff organic stuff so the price point is always going to be a little bit higher but a general rule of thumb is that if you're looking at restaurants maybe it's of this list because there's a lot of restaurants that that lie about this right there's a lot of restaurants that just say they buy local and they actually don't so the price point will tell you a lot and that might be your first sort of red flag how much does an entree cost at that restaurant is it is it a $15.00 entree or is a $35 entree more likely the $35 entree is going to be paying a better price to buy local food because if you want to buy local food you need to pay a farmer what they need to make a living on right so so that's that's where the price the price point comes from so the cheap stuff generally might be your first red flag but you never know and again you know what the value is just like with the with the farmers market does that restaurant share your values so this is more just the quality of life piece right it's not so much about economics I've sold to some restaurants that don't necessarily share my values they might as far as using local and quality produce but they're and they're really high maintenance and and I don't want to deal with prima donnas so I've had to fire chefs in in some years because I just I can't handle working with them so it's important for that to understand do they share your values because ultimately all we won't want to have fun doing this we want to enjoy our lifestyle so it's really important to assess the whole holistic approach to it do they share your values can they actually pay you a price that is reasonable for you to make a fair living at what you're doing so a lot of that comes from the price point so if they do source local where do they get their stuff from is there competition do you know any farmers that sell at those restaurants you can you can call a restaurant and pretend to be an overzealous customer if you want to figure it out quickly you guys ever seen that Portlandia skit where they're asking the name of the chicken and and they want the whole backstory of the chicken this in in the foodie scene the stuffs become pretty common actually I think that's why they made that skit because I've actually seen this stuff so if you want to figure out pretty quickly if you have competition at a restaurant just phone them and pretend to be an overzealous customer where do you get your stuff what's what's in okay your Caesar salad I see on the menu okay you're using romaine where do you get that romaine just just pretend to be an over self customer you know you don't want to annoy the hell out of them but if they are a foodie restaurant they're probably used to it so you can find out pretty quickly where they'll they're getting their stuff and they'll tell you because they'll want to brag about it if people are buying local they're usually going to put it on their menu or they're gonna say oh these are greens to the Akers greens this is wiser farm stuff or whatever it is they're gonna point to that especially in the more higher-end restaurants they're gonna say where every item comes from so it won't be hard to figure that out one thing that I've seen in my years of doing this is that there is fraud out there and it's not so much fraud where people are outright lying there's fraud in the sense that some restaurants and this would be more on the lower end one and you'll you'll see this if they if you notice that they don't align with your values like I said before but you'll see restaurants that will have a farm name on their menu and if you really ask them overzealously like I said if you phone and say what are the ingredients where do these ingredients come from if they don't have an answer for you they might be just biessing you because often what happens with restaurants because so many people want to get on this bandwagon in the culinary world is they'll buy from a couple suppliers locally basically they're just a garnish like they'll have two farms that they buy a hundred $200 worth of stuff a week but then they'll buy everything else from Cisco or GFS like whatever the big distributor hubs are in your area that is very common I've actually had to say to chefs at previous time take me off your menu because you're you're promoting a solid that looks like crap and it's not my salad but it's an awk it's an awkward it's an awkward conversation because in a way they're promoting you but if they're bringing a net a bad name to your product then that might reflect negatively on you and so sometimes those conversations are had it's incredibly awkward but I've seen it because there's so many people trying to get into this scene that they just want to piggyback on it and have the easy ride but they don't actually want to pay for the stuff and that's that's the thing about local it's important to understand your value proposition when you go and talk to a chef because I have seen time and time again that if you buy quality local at a restaurant you're actually going to save money because when most most restaurants are buying stuff from the big distributors say they're buying a salad mix that salad mix has been in transit in California this might be anomaly because California grows a ton of salad mix but where I'm in British Columbia we get earthbound salad mix from California right it's traveled 1,500 miles 2,000 miles it's been in transit for a week and when the chefs get it it's already a week old right they open the bag they use it for about two days almost every time that the very least they throw 25% of it out and if you ask chefs just just ask them what their food costs are ask them what they're spoilage costs are because because they're spoilage costs are often pretty high so spoilage cost is what do you throw out and that's a write-off for them but most chefs if you have a really honest conversation with them and get to know them they'll tell you that they'll be throwing 25 50 percent of their stuff out consistently right and so this goes into that whole issue of food waste which we we don't have time to go down a rabbit hole with here but this is just the reality of it so you're using local your value proposition to a chef is say he's not totally tuned into the foodie scene yet you can say okay this looks higher as a price point it does but you'll use a hundred percent of it and you'll actually be able to use less because the product will have more volume on the plate has more fresh it tastes better you can use like less is more if the product is really good especially with salad greens if a cell if a bag of lettuce is a week or more old it just doesn't have the volume to stuff that's a couple days old and it's fresh and it's in its puffy it uses it has a lot more volume the first restaurant I started selling two years ago six years ago this place called sturgeon Hall they weren't really a place that we're buying local but they liked what I was doing and we made that value proposition they are paying six dollars a pound for greens from Cisco organic greens Francisco and then I was selling to them at eight but they told me time and time again that they actually saved money on my product because they were always able to use all of it the shelf life was three times as long as anything they got from the distributor so it's important to know that because that's your value proposition right it's like look you'll use more don't that the price is there but you owe sorry you'll use less of it you'll be you'll get more effective use of it so just going back to our this one here is where do they source from it's important to not try to be a one-stop shop as a farmer a lot a lot of farmers have this fear if they start selling to restaurants they have this fear that if that restaurant is going to be buying from other farmers they're afraid that they're going to lose business so the the better strategy is to just try to find a niche try to find a niche product that that restaurant can't get anywhere else or maybe they only get from one or two other places but that you're known for and really go with that like I have some restaurants that all they buy for me is greens I have other restaurants all they buy for me is micro vegetables maybe vegetables I have some restaurants all they buy for me is Tomatoes some all they buy is micro greens and herbs so they know me for different things if you try to be a one-stop shop and you try to continuously just give them everything they need there's times you're going to be short and you don't want to be short consistently cuz if you're short consistently they're just going to go somewhere else especially the big restaurants the smaller ones will have more patience with you they'll be more willing to roll with the punches but the big ones will say no I can't you're not dependable enough so in that strategy it's better to under promise and over deliver than to over promise and under deliver and we're going to talk about fresh sheets a little later on and we'll talk about some of those those strategies out there but you know what what is your competition so are there if there's other farmers selling at to that restaurant what are they selling to that restaurant sometimes you could just in a conversation ask ask the chef you know where are you guys getting your stuff from what are you getting and just you be very forthcoming just be straight straightforward is there a niche is there something that you're not getting that maybe I can help you with it's all about servicing them it's all about bringing value to them this one is very important how long is this restaurant been open when did they open when is when did they first open up and how long has the executive chef worked there that's key because sometimes a restaurant that's been open for five years but had a different executive chef every year for five years is the same as a restaurant that just opened sometimes restaurants are just dumping grounds for people to have write-offs like some LLC some some company they buy restaurants just to throw away expect and just to have right offs and sometimes those restaurants don't really have the best work work atmosphere and they've got a high turnover so it's important to know how long that chef has been there I've got one restaurant restaurants been open for twenty years but they've had the exact same Executive Chef for fifteen of those years that's good somebody that's been there for a long time that says a lot about the integrity of the restaurant and how they do business whereas some it's a place that has really high turnover they've got a new executive chef every couple years and they've got consistent turnover in their staff a volatile environment tough to work in as a farmer sometimes it's really tough to deal with you know when you're starting out sometimes you have to deal with those personalities you have to kind of deal with the prima donna chef I'm at a place right now where I don't have to anymore I've I've told chefs to go and to go and stick it at times not that often I I'm very very fortunate to work with a really cool group of chefs that have been very supportive over the years but I'm not gonna deal with drama somebody yelling at me on the phone about something that they thought they said and something that I that I thought I heard and it's just that he said she said kind of thing I don't have time for that so I don't I don't want to deal with these super high-maintenance aggro types of chefs that want to just chew everybody out so learning about the restaurant is very important and how long they really how long they've been open is the most important thing restaurants that just open tomorrow and then they're telling everybody they want to buy local you got to be really careful with them and generally with those ones you want them to pay you cash you don't want to go into terms with those types of restaurants because restaurants are the most notorious types of businesses for not paying their bills and they often 85% of them tank in the first year and the only people that get paid when they go bankrupt is usually the bank and the government everybody else gets jacked so you have to be careful with how you manage your money with restaurants and we'll talk more about that a little bit later when we get into accounting software and managing your accounts and things like this so why do you want to sell to these guys and why should they buy from you this is a really important thing to understand when you even you're making your pitch because if you don't even think you like that restaurant it's gonna be harder to be sincere and my whole approach with business and farming is I want to be sincere because I'm sincere I'm not selling plasma TVs right I'm not I'm not trying to sell you something that I know you don't need I'm trying to work with you because I think that I we share values and we speak a common language and that's really a good foundation to build in a relationship or in business any kind of business agreement so why why should they buy your stuff what is it about your product that is gonna service them so going through this list up here learning things about that restaurant is gonna give you a way better way to craft your story and craft your language when you go to them and it's and this isn't about fibbing this isn't about exaggerating it's about being totally sincere but making sure that that restaurant shares your values so that you can go in there and be sincere if they're a restaurant that's using baby vegetables which is becoming very common in culinary and in the workshop tomorrow we go through a whole list of plates and food and how things are plated and how chefs are using them but knowing about how they use stuff really helps you create better product for them to use because you know their language you understand what they're doing look at look at their menus learn about the kind of products they're using and what what's what how often do they change their menu is there seasonality to their menu pretty much all field to fork restaurants will change their menus four times a season depending on where they are in the world some places more than others generally speaking the really big high-end Michelin star type restaurants will have less menu changes than the small owner/operator types because the owner operator type restaurant who's just got a few people in the kitchen and a couple servers they can change their menu on a fly they don't really have to educate all this line of command on how to change it they can just do it if there's less stuff this week for this particular product and more stuff the next week doesn't really matter but the big big restaurants that there might be seventy thirty to seventy people in a kitchen they can't do that there's a whole line of command that needs to know exactly how things are plated and what's what's going on there so you have to know what you're getting into and how you can best cater to them so really understand what your what your value proposition is and so that you can articulate best to them most effectively I think I said this the other day but what I say to restaurants when I go in to meet a new chef I'm not there to give them a spiel on the pedal-powered aspect of my farm even the urban aspect of my farm my my value proposition to them is we're a small farm we grow small veg and in in one sentence I can say that and that means a lot to them this is what we do we do small tomatoes cherries and salad ads we do small baby root vegetables baby carrots turnips baby beets radishes we do baby salad mix we do microgreens we do baby courgettes patty-pans and baby zucchinis I can really quickly just articulate to them this is what we offer that's really important when you're when you're getting to know chefs because they're busy people and they're not gonna have tons of time to just shoot the breeze with you they want to hear what you can do for them and then then leave it at that and then you might follow up with fresh sheets or sample products things like that afterwards but keep your initial meeting with that person brief and and all about a value proposition is what you can bring them so this is really important this is an easy way to figure out if a restaurant is solvent or not so you can do all kinds of other research but this one is really easy just go there at various different times of the week and see how busy they are generally just like anything in business the more stable you are with your with your customers day to day afternoon to evening morning to evening whatever it is generally the more solvent you're going to be that means you got enough steady income coming in consistently so that you can pay your expenses if you go into a restaurant and they're absolutely dead on a Monday they're dead in a Tuesday dead on a Wednesday maybe Thursday Friday Saturday they're busy that can be telling because the thing of the restaurant is they're expensive to operate you've got staff you've got your rent or your lease you've got all the machinery or and equipment you're using that has utility expenses you've got all kinds of occupational licensing and regulations that you have to go through having a restaurant just open even if there's just a couple people working there is very expensive some of the smallest restaurants I know that I'm talking they've got fifteen tables in there 15 tables too so they can have 30 people in the restaurant they need $1,000 in a day just to break even just to pay their staff and pay that themselves a very minimal wage so this is the kind of revenue we're talking about you can almost just guess if you look at a restaurant and you go in there and you look at the plates and say you've looked at the menu before you can all quantify what the restaurants bringing in so you've got there's ten Pete there's ten people in there everybody's got an entree that says it's a $20 entree that's $40 a table okay so that means they're making $400 how long are those people gonna sit there an hour okay maybe they're making $400 an hour okay that's a metric that's something you can use to understand and guess where they're at because so many people get burned with restaurants and I've been very I've been burned myself with some because I didn't do this kind of preliminary market research I didn't really know what I was getting into but when you're selling to chefs you really need to know what to do and the more consistent they are the better you're gonna be so I've got a breakfast restaurant I sell to every single day there they have a lineup every morning they only do breakfast so that's a really great customer because they're close to the rest of the day when they're open they're full every single day of the week that's great that's a really good sign but then if you see these other places that are fluctuating and there's not even consistency to that fluctuation that tells you something - if a place is always packed Thursday Friday and Saturday and maybe they're somewhat steady during the week that might be okay but if you go in there on a Saturday night when you think they should be busy and they're absolutely dead that can tell you a lot of things it can tell you that they might not be doing running the best kind of business because restaurants are so risky my dad ran a restaurant when I was a kid it was my first job I worked as a dishwasher in his restaurant and he would always say to me he said Curtis you're only as good as your last meal so the last person that walked out of your restaurant if they were pissed off but what they had that's gonna be a ripple effect and that could affect your sales the next day they could leave there and tell ten people that they had a horrible experience at your restaurant and it can affect you very very quickly so there's a lot of things you can learn just by watching these probably the most important thing with restaurants absolutely most important thing is do they pay their bills do they actually set up with the people they owe money to an easy way to find this out is if you get to know other people that are selling to those restaurants just asking other farmers straight up make sure you know those farmers well enough but I think farmers in in small areas should know each other we should kind of try to cooperate as much as we can and we've had this in in my town Kelowna all the growers know each other and we all share information with each other all the time I'll get a call sometimes hey have you got a check from so-and-so recently but you know what let me look at my living locally but I don't think I have actually I've got a checks on those guys in three weeks what's going on there let's let's check out with John what does he say Oh John didn't get a check either hmm okay this kind of stuff is important because they can go a restaurant can go down very quickly it can be a sort of a chain reaction a domino effect where you notice that they they're not paying a couple people here and there so you might know one farmer who's not getting paid but you're getting paid and then you hear of another farmer not getting paid so now you want to start being careful maybe you start saying okay I'm we're gonna we're gonna go see Odie now you know you can you can change things around and I've done that I've had customers that were on terms for a year but they consistently were late on their payments and every time I wanted to get paid I had to phone them email them sometimes go down there and hustle them to get paid there was one customer last year I did this an entire year so the in a year of 2014 every time I got paid I had to go in there and I got tired of it and so the next year I just stopped calling them they they hadn't even settled up this was going into April the next year they hadn't even settled up invoices from November they only owed me a few hundred bucks so at that point I was just not worried about it I don't care because I just tired of dealing with it then they hired a new manager who was a personal friend of mine and she says to me hey how come you're out delivering stuff to us I'm like well because you guys don't pay your bills I can't I don't have time to chase you down for money and they said well we really want to get stuff me on it okay you can get stuff for me again but you got to be Co D if you can pay me cash on delivery no problem then they change to that and it was fine so you sometimes change things as you go but I find the key is just to be honest you know you don't have to get into a yelling match of the chef if they haven't paid you but just to be forthcoming and say look guys I'm literally spending five hours every two weeks trying to chase you down for money I just don't have that time I'm a farmer I'm in the field I don't have time to chase you down so if we could just go to see Odie everybody wins I just deliver stuff you pay me and then we're done so that will make things a lot easier for you so before we carry on I think we should just uh you guys want to take sue have any questions so far do you wanna throw questions at me okay yeah go for it yes so the question was can you charge on terms by adding amount per week you can do whatever you want I wouldn't I wouldn't do that the way the way I do it is if they're late then they they pay penalties they pay percentages so my accounting software actually just does that automatically if I issue a statement and what will look at that near the end of the session when I issue a statement and it says this invoice at this date this invoice at this date this one's like two months old it's got 15% added to it I'll do that but I don't personally charge for terms what my approach for terms is that if you want to go on terms you first have to be doing a decent amount of volume like we're talking anything over two and you've got to be or order ordering well over two hundred dollars a week to be on terms and you've got to have a good history of paying me so my policy now is if you're a new restaurant you start on CEO D and if we do that for a year and you've proven that you can handle it I'll go on terms or I'll go on terms if I know the restaurants been open for 10 years and they're totally solvent based on some of the research we talked about here they can go on terms but I only do it with places that are that are doing big orders and have a really good long-standing reputation and credit you can even get a go to a bank and get a credit approval form you can say yeah you go on terms fill up this credit approval form that gives me consent by you to check your credit you can do this this is available to any business everybody else like all that if you if you're if you're a car salesman or any type of sales person that's going to finance people or put people in terms you can get those credit applications so check check those out and get out yeah so how would you rephrase that as a question if you are in my situation I don't know how to rephrase that yeah yeah so have I encountered situations where Co T is a pain because you'd show up and they it takes a half an hour for somebody to go to the till yeah absolutely but some sneaky people do that intentionally they'll do that intentionally I this one I've sold the so many different restaurants but there was this one restaurant that did that every time they kind of screwed me around every time I showed up just so I'd be like okay you know what just sign the invoice I'll see you later and then they don't pay you so yes I've seen that I mean it's sort of just a character read to figure out if you think they're BSE new or not kind of just taking you for a ride so yeah definitely and that's generally why the bigger restaurants I do on terms because I go into some kitchens where there is ten line cooks the Executive Chefs in an office the executive sous-chef is over there there's four dishwashers it's huge and you know if you want to get paid there it's really inconvenient because they got to get somebody to go to the till you know most of them won't do it right unless there's small orders because I have restaurants that I'm literally bringing a thousand dollars of product to at once they can't they can't pull that out of the till so it's just it just depends on the context of the restaurant really how big their orders are and how much faith you have that they're going to pay their bills the easiest way to put some money on terms if you don't want to go into because some I have some restaurants that are 21-day terms some restaurants that are 30 day terms I have something one of my big distributors that I sell to is on 45 day terms he's only on that because he buys a ton of stuff from me and he's been solvent for years so I trust them but I wouldn't do that normally the easiest way to go on terms with people is just they settle the last invoice when they show up the next week that's the easiest way to do it and then that Rick that takes the least amount of paperwork and monitoring on your end so every time you show up the next week they've got a check for you from last week's invoice because they can only burn you once right and then you you kind of just okay I'm not delivering until you settle the next invoice that way you kind of shelter yourself from it so yeah you're asking about you know if you're a one-stop shop are you essentially asking me that it to buy products from other farmers and then insult to them because I do that I do the same thing yes absolutely there's a huge advantage to that absolutely I would rap so I do the exact same thing I have about four other growers that I buy stuff from if I'm short on one particular thing like I've got a guy who always taught me up on radishes and beets and carrots I've got another guy who will sometimes taught me up on spinach and some other greens I don't have anybody that can make greens as good as me so I don't have anybody that talks me up that way but some of these other products even Tomatoes sometimes yeah because well for one you're keeping the sales channel goes through going through you you might not even make barely a markup on the product but that's not the value of it the value for you is that you are that channel for them that's dependable so you know you're truant you're kind of trying to be a one-stop shop but don't don't get too hung up on sometimes if you can't make an order this is why it's when we look at sheets we'll talk about how we assess the field and all this but it's always important to understand what you got coming off your field for sight so that if a chef calls you on Monday to figure out what you might have for Friday you can tell them what you think you're gonna have yeah and and so sometimes that might just mean oh yeah we've got a lot of this because I know I can get some from my friend Bruce or something like that you know so but at the same time you might just have to be honest to say no because they sometimes though if they're steadily getting something like 20 pounds of arugula a week and all of a sudden they want 50 you know for you to say in that case I won't have that but I will have your standing order that's not a bad thing and and and you know keep in mind that they are gonna buy from other farmers that's just that's there they need to diversify just like you do yeah so how do the logistics work out when they're ordering how much buffer time you have so well I'll first adjust the last part of the question when you're talking about planning and planting that's not based on what I think they're gonna order that's based on when I with my overall sales from the previous year what I think I can sell that's how I structure my farm and we'll look at a couple sheets there that get more into that but as far as week to week it's on my fresh sheet it'll say if you're ordering if you want to delivery on Friday then you got to have your order in by Thursday morning that's generally how it is but when things start to get tight in the summer when there's restaurants are really busy and we're moving a lot of product and there's a ton of demand some chefs will call me on Sunday night to mate to make sure they have a foot in the door for a certain product for Friday delivery so it's a it can be wherever depending on the time of the season but generally it's just what's on my fresh sheet if you're if i'm delivering friday i need your order by thursday morning and it and i say right on there everything's first-come first-serve if you place your order on Tuesday then you're gonna get that order but you know honestly I do play favorites though I will play favorites I generally will favor my long-term customers they'll always get priority so even if a chef I've been working with for six years places his order on Thursday morning and even in new and a new chef placed on Wednesday morning I will favor the long-standing customer that's just that's just the way I do it I'm not saying that you guys need to do it that way it's up to you how you manage your business but but I do play favorites that way could basically from my end I've got about 20 different restaurants that I'll sell to at any given week throughout the season but there's really about seven that have supported me from the beginning and I will almost bend over backwards for them because they take up 80% of the income of my restaurant revenues yeah I my minimum order for Downton is a hundred bucks and if it's out of downtown so if it's you know a couple miles away or more then it's gonna be two hundred but I always put that on my fresh sheet and we'll look at a sample of it to you you'll see it I don't charge a delivery fee no because and that's where the minimum order thing comes in you know the minimum order thing too is kind of if I if I have a group of restaurants to deliver to downtown which is usually where I do most of my deliveries like will do that by bike we'll go downtown and we can hit up seven places in half an hour if somebody's enroute and they want a small order like say they only want to start with $50 of stuff if I can go in and out of there really quick all to take on a new customer and build up that relationship I will offer that service but if somebody says I'm five miles out of town and I don't want fifty bucks of stuff it's like just come to the farmers market that's the easiest way to do it that sometimes the best way to build up good relationships with chefs is just kind of give them a little bit more carefree a relaxed way to purchase from you just show up at the market and then that way they're happy they're forced to pay cash and that way they get their stuff they're happy and then you don't have to worry about coordinating deliveries earning like that it's both yeah so he is asking with how far my delivery radius is and if if I'm approaching new restaurants or they're approaching me it's both it's mostly them approaching me now because I can continue to operate for years to come just on my core base I'm not really looking to expand my farm much anymore I'm satisfied with where it is and but if I do hear of a new restaurant coming into town I'll wait a bit to approach them but they're often approaching me because I sell to about four or five of the top chefs in my area so they when a new chef comes to town and opens a new restaurant the first thing they're doing is looking at the best chefs and figuring out where they get their stuff and what they're doing that's just their doing market research just like we're gonna do market research so usually they're coming to me and but yes there's sometimes I'm knocking on doors more so in the past when I was getting established but you know that's that's what you got to do when you're starting out you're gonna knock on doors you got to make that value proposition and do all your market research beforehand yeah yeah that's a good question so so Jesse's asking what how much do I customize my farm plan based on what chefs want me to do am I am i planting stuff specifically for some chefs yes and no I do it for if I've known a chef for years and and she says okay can you do I want just some of these like you know baby baby peppers that I did this for one chef this year just for pickling for a certain time Susan yeah okay if I if I can plant it in an area that's like not prime real estate I'll do that I'll do things in small volumes for things that for chefs that I know and it's a crop that I think is economically worth it some people might say to me hey can you grow me giant eggplants it's like no that's just doesn't fit my farm model my end it's like if anything goes under what I said earlier the small veg or a micro type thing the baby greens I'll try all kinds of stuff and I'm always willing to take feedback and hear requests from them but it's really just an assessment of what kind of value am I going to get out of that but if I can do things in an odds-and-ends area and experiment which I always do we're constantly doing R&D on our farm like every year we try new crops we'll try a few of but we do it in small isolated ways so we're not taking a huge risk we're just kind of reducing our exposure we'll do stew small amounts and see what they like that's a really good question so do we discuss the price beforehand when going into those kind of negotiations no because sometimes you don't know what it's worth until you grow it and that's a whole other thing of it's better to under prom it's better to under promise and over deliver than to over promise because I have done that in the past I've said okay I'll grow this and I think I can sell out of this based on what I look at other organic farmers are selling it for and then I grow this thing and I'm like that's not worth that price and then I come up asking for double what I promised as a price and then they're not happy about it so I think it's better to not really get into it if they specifically want to know then maybe go on a ballpark but you know kind of reiterate to them that there's no guarantee I can do it at this price having said all that this kind of thing isn't going to be your bread and butter these kind of negotiations and these kind of situations are going to be far from your bread and butter there are going to be things that are just little garnishes and top-top ups here and there your bread and butter is gonna come from your prime real estate on your farm your core group of crops that's what you're gonna do 80% or more of your time on and what you're gonna be selling everything else is kind of just little additions here and there so don't get too hung up on those things yeah just okay so are you asking that if they're telling me they're not using certain products like oh it's a garnish like like a little parsley like it like a right I don't I don't put much real estate into that quite literally the in those situations we're talking about six foot bed chunks and I I do a lot of my herbs and that way I'll do like six foot chunks of cilantro so I'll take a twenty five foot bed I'll do a six six foot chunk of cilantro a six foot chunk of parsley and then I'll do another cilantro and parsley in succession I might make a 25 foot bed that way so just small chunks sometimes it will be herbs that are inter planted amongst tomatoes or along the edge of the fence or in some sort of odds-and-ends area I would do those things or even spring onions I do I do spring onions here and there they're not a very profitable crop they are as far as all the other aspects that make a profitable crop on my farm it says they take so long to wash that they become barely economical but I still do them so that my farmers market I can have ten bunches of them so they don't take up prime real estate there sometimes interplanted they're just I'm always thinking about what's my prime real estate that's my bread and butter everything else is Corners odds and ends little chunks here and there that makes sense No so that no I don't have time to do that I mean it sounds like an e it could be an itch I mean that's an interesting question because you're kind of going on the whole idea of being a broker so I do that I I did that in a CSA one year I was I had eight growers that I was sourcing from as well selling my own stuff so there might be a market for that but especially when you're starting actually especially when you have less product you might find an opportunity to be helping get other growers stuff out there while kind of piggybacking your stuff on there too it is brilliant yeah it sounds like a great way to transition and then you can you can learn a lot about the marketplace too without actually growing the stuff yourself you can it's kind of it sounds like a cool model okay either way let's carry on what we'll have questions again so there's sort of the top end information that's the most important information to track and then there's things that are less important but tracking is really important in general so there's sort of three things we're looking at when we're talking about tracking information essentially what goes in so what are your your your field caught like what goes into the field as far as what did you plant in the field what are your input costs what did you spend on compost and fertilizer what how much did you spend on labor how much do you spend on materials irrigation biofilm or you know landscape fabric or mulch or any of that what goes in tracking all that stuff's really important the next one is what comes off the field and so there's gonna be a bunch of different sheets for all these what comes off the field what comes out so what was harvested also what was ordered and then what was delivered so this these two things are a a reduction of one another so what in a restaurant order and then what did I deliver them the difference is the shore you want to track your shortages you don't want to short people but you want to track where you are short so on my farm because I broke her from other growers when I'm short I'll still track the short so if I if somebody says I want six cases of radish and I only had five of my own to delivered and now that means I was one short even if I sourced that from another grower I'm still gonna track that I I was short because I want to know next year from my production plan that I might increase my radish plantings at that time of year so in tracking all this stuff is really important so there is a difference between what's ordered what's delivered there's also a difference from what was harvested and then what was what was delivered so the difference is your spoilage right so the shortage difference is what was ordered what was delivered the difference is the shortage the the spoilage difference is what did you pull off the field versus what you what was ordered the difference is what went in the compost pile recording that is important because it tells you what you're over producing you're producing too much of something but it can also be a tax write-off too it's different in every jurisdiction so I don't want to say you can do that for sure because I don't know in California but restaurants claim spoilage right everything that they throw out gets claimed as a write-off it's an expense so we claim spoilage on our farm if we if we had you know one year we had twenty thousand dollars of spoilage we wrote that off that was when our farm was huge I had two and a half acres we had $20,000 of spoilage that's a write-off right so these are just what any good accountant is gonna tell you try to find all these different ways to write these things off but again be careful with it make sure you check out your tax jurisdiction and if that's possible because it might not be I know even in Canada there's some places that that's not allowed so check that out and it might save you some money the third thing is what needs to get done on a day to day basis so what are you going to harvest each week what are your weekly - dues what are some projects that need to get done or what you have is ideas for the next season so these are things that we're gonna update constantly and we can track them we can put them on lists and we'll check that out so this is my most used tool on my farm I used this more than my stirrup hoe I use it more than a greens harvester I use it more than my BCS walk-behind rotor tiller smartphone is the most used tool on my farm every single time I go to a plot I'm taking pictures I'm making notes I'm always recording information so I've just created habits to doing this and essentially the smartphone has just replaced the journal because when I first started one of my first mentors was a was an organic seed saver named John Alcock and he said you got to keep a journal with you all the time and always record what's happening on your farm and that's good advice problem was my hands were always dirty and my handwriting sucks so when it came time to actually flip through this thing in the winter and try to figure out what was the thing I did about carrots what happened to their flipping through and I can't find it and so I wasted probably dozens of hours of time trying to navigate my journal so the smart phone the technology we're gonna look at is what allows you to leverage all of that information because like I said at the beginning information is like seeds you must harvest it clean it sort it in order for it to be useful that's what the spreadsheets allow you to do whereas in the journal you can't do that as much but the smart phone in my situation is my first interface between what's happening now and what will get logged into the computer so these are things like calendar reminders I use Siri on my iPhone for everything I'll go in I'll click it and I'll say add to calendar do this at this time remind me when I get home to do this I use this constantly as soon as something comes to my mind I put it in here so that I don't forget because that's the thing on a farm is there's so many things happening at once sometimes you can just get overwhelmed with all the little things you'll always remember the big things you know an irrigation line blue somewhere so you got to go fix that what about all those little things oh you forgot you were gonna finsihed lean out or you're gonna turn over a couple beds all these little things if you don't create habits for them to for recording this information it won't get done so I'm constantly adding stuff to my calendar and every week at the beginning of the week I look at my calendar what are the major things that need to get done this week outside of what is on our normal schedule so if everything goes well on an average week on our farm Monday through Friday we're doing bed prep and planting on Monday and Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday were harvesting Friday we're portioning and packing and delivering and Saturday the farmers market Sunday we have off if everything goes well that's our week but we're you know oK we've got it we got to install irrigation at this new site okay we're gonna go to we got to go rototill to turn over a new plot of land you're always going to have these big kind of boulder things that you've got to push along so if you're not using a calendar it's gonna be hard to allocate time for that and this is why when I was starting out on my farm I also used my phone to record all the tasks I did on the farm and this sounds totally methodical I understand but it will tell you a lot about how you can plan your week because if you don't know how long a certain task takes then how do you structure your week so for a period of time I used to have a I would have a clipboard with me with a bunch of different tasks and as I as I would do it I would just hit the stuff I would just okay I'm gonna go harvest the better greens or I'm gonna harvest a better radishes by hand let's say cuz harvesting beans now is really fast for us so the greens harvester but I just set the stopwatch on my phone start harvest that better radishes track how long that takes you and then make notes of these things put these things in your spreadsheets when we look at the the yields sheets that we're gonna see up here you'll see that there's always little note patterns on there and how I can keep tracking this information but if you if you know how long it takes you to do something you can guess how long it'll take somebody else to do it generally speaking I find whatever time it takes you to do something an employee will take at least 25% longer to do it than you will because nobody usually will work as hard as you as the business owner so always tack on a little bit more time for that if you say okay I can harvest radishes in 45 minutes assume that if you send somebody out to do that it might take them an hour maybe an hour and fifty minutes depends how new they are it depends on experience they are but if you don't have a list of expectations of how long things take in your farm you don't know how to plan your week and this is really important because I know I look at my calendar every Monday morning and I know I need to have a certain amount of time available to harvest root vegetables harvest greens pack those greens deliver to restaurants I've got basically static blocks in my calendar that have things that have to get done no matter what then it's trying to figure out where do you put in all the other things you have to do where do you find time for those and if you don't know how long the static and steady things that you do take then how are you going to figure out how everything how long everything else is going to take so that helps you with delegating so to-do lists is something that we're constantly updating I actually use a Google Doc now on my phone it's a to-do list that is shared by anybody on the farm so everybody has access to that doc and when I'm out looking at things I'll add tasks to that document I might put them on the top when I put them on the bottom depending how important they are but I'll say you know it might be something priority in all bold this is priority this needs to get done and then we'll have another column on there that says who did it what time was it done that way I know where we're at I don't have to go out and check in with everybody I can just look at the sheet and figure out where we're at with it and the other thing I'm using for my phone is adding items to my spreadsheets so like I said this is my most used tool I'm out of plot I might make a voice memo take a photo make a video consistently recording things that I basically record into Evernote so this is a program it's free there's other programs that do the same thing I like Evernote because it syncs the Evernote app on my phone it's synced to my computer so when I'm out on the field so this is just like a weekly harvest note for me I can actually use the voice memo on my phone my phone with the Siri a poor the Siri program on iPhone I can I can say this stuff I can arugula bed 5 lawrence comma 20 pounds enter enter spinach bed 8 lawrence comma 35 pounds I will literally speak that into my phone and then when I when I come home it's all right there it's almost just cut and pasting it into my spreadsheets but you got to have systems for it so the first step of the system is constantly record everything data is so like space is so cheap now you know iPhones this is like a 64 gig iPhone I don't really have to worry about maxing out my phone on information so you might as well record as much as you can but you want to record the top-end information and what will look at that shortly but so every time I'm out harvesting I'm recording this as it happens I'll have a scale with me I'll have my Rubbermaid totes there I'm harvesting what are recording what I harvested that goes on the phone and then every Tuesday and Friday I spend a half an hour before the end of the day recording that information so you want to get into a habit of doing office work as part of your farm work you don't want to make the mistake that most farmers do which I made many times is that you do all the data entry when everybody else goes home and that means you're sitting on the computer for sometimes hours you want to schedule out into your day if you want a balanced quality of life make sure that you do that because otherwise you're always gonna be spending extra time so for myself Tuesdays at 4:30 Fridays at 4:30 I spend a half an hour log in this stuff in so at the end of Tuesday I'm logging in everything that was planted all the beds that were turned over at the end of Friday I'm recording what was harvested throughout the week and consistently doing that gets you stuff like this and we're gonna look at this and in further detail but this is my yields sheet how much did I pull off I can sort it by crop arugula what did I what did I harvest off all of those beds of arugula this season this kind of information is very telling because it'll tell you where your benchmarks are what are your standards what can you learn to depend on because I mean I've got examples of it in my book I'll tell you average bed of arugula 25 foot by 30 inches I can get 20 pounds off but that's a benchmark you know Eric Schultz here in Arizona might have a different benchmark he might have something that's totally a different experience because he's in a hotter climate he might have to plant it at a wider density or a tighter density it depends so the only way you can really figure out where you're at is by recording this information and that's how I've come do all the stuff that's in my book is because I've spent years doing this but it sets up expectations because you'll see patterns in this information and we'll talk more about that coming up but you'll see patterns with things like arugula you might notice that you get higher yields in the spring you get lower yields and less cuts in the summer and you get more yield in the fall you might notice those patterns and that will allow you to plan accordingly and set up your expectations better so you know what's going to be coming off your field that allows you to speak language when you're talking to chefs so that you know what to especially you don't have to worry about over-promising and under-delivering you can consistently over deliver that's that's where you want to be so it's the same thing with planting every time I'm out in the field and I'm turning over beds and I'm planting I will literally sale the stuff into my phone July 5th Laurens radish EE which means Easter egg bed five I'll just lay all that stuff out so that when I come home and I'm back on my computer I'm just putting it in there typing it in real quick it does it barely takes me any time but once you have to create a habit for it if you don't create a habit it won't get done so that's my planting sheet and again there's so much information we'll look at this one closer later on and these are tough things to put on us on a projection screen right it's like how much can you actually get of that but when we look at it closer we'll go through the parts and not have this on the screen so long but all this information tells me so much about what I can expect if I record my planting dates for every single crop on my field and I also record the date of emergence which is referred to as the do-e so how long did that seed take to germinate at each time of the year when was the date to harvest when did I harvest that crop at each time of the year when was that what was the average days to maturity all those things will help you plan better and understand your system going forward so why do we use spreadsheets well it's because the journal just isn't that effective any longer and the technology is there we might as well use them I would say pretty much everybody who has a computer has access to this stuff today and there's very few people in Western society that don't have computers so you might as well use this stuff because it will help you learn and double down on things that aren't working or are working and decrease the things that that aren't so the the primary sheets that I'm using on a week on a day to day basis on my farm are tracking my sales tracking my plantings and tracking my yields there's some others we're gonna look at too but these are the ones that I use the most of and so how these sheets are built is very important because you could track a lot more things on here than is necessary and if you look at this sheet it's an example of exactly that you'll notice that on this sheet just even if you can't even read the fields you'll notice that these three fields here are filled out every time and a lot of this stuff over here isn't so I've got example I've got sample spreadsheets for all of you guys to take from my website but I understand that there's some things that are really important to track and other things that aren't as important sometimes if you think you want to add a certain field and you only add you record something to that in that field every now and then you're better off just recording that in a notes column so I always have a notes column on all my spreadsheets and if it's something that's anomalous then I'll just put it in there you don't necessarily have to have a field because if you're if your sheets get too nebulous and there's way too many fields it's kind of overwhelming and you're not and it's not gonna be as inviting to be adding information to that all the time it's gonna seem kind of overwhelming whereas if you have a really simple sheet that has six fields and it's just like bang bang bang bang you know it goes and all those things it'll be more inviting and you'll create better habits to to use them consistently so those are our main things sales planting yields we're going to look at all of them typically these ones we'll look at some of them we're only gonna have time to look at our spoilage expenses but the other things tracking your budget expenses your seed order your labor scene order spoilage budget expenses all that stuff's in my book it all with those spreadsheets so these things are still important but they're not as critical as the field information the sales information and that the yielding information because that's the stuff that really allows you to leverage your abilities in your farm so we also have shared sheets this isn't a picture of a Google Doc but we have a Google Doc that anybody who's working for me puts their hours into so that's all there I actually will copy that into my home office spreadsheet at some point I know that sounds a little bit inefficient but I do it just because sometimes Google sheets can get messed up and if one person messes it up then I don't even know what happened before so I to copy I like to have hard copies of everything just for my own purposes so weekly tasks as well I'll have a weekly sheet that says this is everything that gets done this week there's usually something static in there like what's being planted what's being harvested and then there's going to be a to-do list that is constantly being updated so anytime somebody shows up on Monday morning to work for me they already have a pretty good idea of what needs to get done and writing things down when you're working with crew is very important because you can you know you get into the thing this sort of game of telephone when you're somebody comes to work in the morning and then you give them a list you're talking through a verbal list of things to do they might only remember the last two things and forget the rest of it and then at the end of the day you're going what did you do with all the other stuff what happened they're like oh I thought you just said this or that so having it written down makes your life so much easier because it's all there there's no debate or argument about what needs to get done and what didn't get done so we track all that stuff what's the task what plot was it out how long did it take so it's it's easy and and it helps leverage everything else going forward so let's look at what we track in further detail and I mean we'll take some questions after this this part here - so sales there's a number of things that we track within sales the first thing to point out about with your sales is in order to get sales in order to track your sales you need to have something to sell and you need to have that line of communication with the chef's you're working with on what you've got to offer so that all comes down to the fresh sheet the fresh sheet is something that goes out every Monday morning it goes out at 9:00 a.m. no matter what it goes out I have it set to automatic if I didn't update it it'll just send out the same version as last week to say this is what we have what I do with my fresh sheet is I'm compiling at the week so as the week wraps up on Friday I'm compiling all the information on my on my phone that goes into my spreadsheet of what I think I'm gonna have the next week so how many beds of radishes do I think I'm gonna have available just looking at how many beds of greens I've got try to come up with a rough assessment of what I think will be ready the next week that's what goes into my fresh sheet that's what I talk to chefs about that's what I plan to take the farmers market so you're constantly doing these assessments as a farmer if you don't do them and you don't know then you might get orders of stuff that you don't have so you want to really be careful about how you build your fresh sheet so again this is available for free on the website it's a sample you can totally rip it off put your logo on the top of it do however you use it however you like yeah all right so this is a mobile friendly fresh sheet right so that's why it's long and narrow like this it fits perfectly on the mobile phone chefs use their phone that way they can be in the in on the line looking at what their kitchen staff are doing they can go into their walk-in cooler with your fresh sheet look at what they ordered last week and they can they'll don't just often text message me right there they'll be looking in their walk-in cooler and say okay we need this this this we've got this much of this left it's easy for them so try to make it as easy as you can I actually developing an app right now with a guy in Montreal where we're making a fresh sheet that is going to be an order form as well so he can send these guys a fresh sheet and then they can just push buttons on it an order so that might be in a year so maybe a year so this goes out every week it's consistent it's mobile-friendly one really important thing about this fresh sheet is you only want to list what you know you have a lot of if you've got you've got you say you think you got fifty to a hundred pounds of arugula coming next week you've got 80 pounds of radishes so on and so forth but you won't you know you're short you autumn oh I'm only gonna have like three pounds of cilantro this week when normally you had ten don't list cilantro on your fresh sheet don't list the things on your fresh sheet that you know you're gonna be short on this is where I play favorites all the time is if I have some chefs that are consistently ordering things and I might have enough to just meet their order all this em and send them a text message and just say hey I've got your cilantro this week but it's not on the fresh sheet I'll do that because if you list it and you don't have enough there will be times where everybody lorded at once and then you're shorting everybody you don't want to be in that situation you're always going to be shorting somebody here or there that's just the nature of this business we can't consistently meet everybody's demands all the time but you want to reduce your exposure to it so that you're not you're pissing off less chefs so only list the things that you know you have a lot of and you're absolutely confident that you can move big volumes in all the little things we're gonna be short don't list you'll notice on here - it's kind of hard to see if you get that if you get the sample you'll notice it closer that everything I list on here is in a case lot not if not everything some things are sold by the pounds but generally what we're doing is we're selling a package deal of something so just like at my farmers market I'm selling a three dollar unit or two for five I have a very simple mix and match pricing system that makes it easy for people to calculate make transactions and just hand over larger groups of money because they're not thinking about what's the individual price what's the package deal do the same thing with chefs it's you're selling encase lots are you selling a box of salad mix you're selling a case lot bag of radishes you're selling a 10-pound flat of tomatoes things like that bundling things together instead of selling things by the pound or by the unit because that's what they're used to anyways they're buying all that stuff in case loss when you look at the wholesale catalogs for big food distributors that's what it is you can't buy one bunch of this or one pound of that you have to buy things by the case so you do the same thing on here so I have a generic twenty dollar unit for all of my greens I have a twenty dollar unit arugula ten pound or a two pound bag of arugula is $20 say a two-and-a-half pound bag of spinach is $20 could be a three pound bag of something is $20 it doesn't matter you change the volume based on supply and demand but keep the price the same that way it's simple they get the sheet they just think all $20 units that's easy so that's generally what I do it I'll do and on and I'll change the prices for certain things so if you buy a two and a half pound or say a two pound bag of spring mix for $20 I'll send you I'll sell you a ten pound box of spring mix for $80 right so you and you incentivize larger purchases and even outside of the fresh sheet I have some customers that I that they operate outside of it like they're they're gonna get their own deal I have one customer that literally buys a hundred pounds of salad mix a week from me so he gets a special price he gets a price that's not on the fresh sheet because he's he's committing to buy volume and I don't do contracts or anything with restaurants I wouldn't necessarily recommend that but it's kind of just a verbal like I have a lot of chefs that say I've got I want a standing order of this every week if I don't order just show up with it so we do those kind of things you got to be careful with those two but that's that's what we're doing we're doing things in bulk we're doing things in volume and we're disincentivizing smaller purchases and incentivizing larger purchases so all of this is May a program called MailChimp there's other programs out there there's one's called Constant Contact there's probably dozens of these programs they just their email management programs that's how you get lots of spam basically it comes through these programs so that's one thing that's important to on a tech side of this is you want to make sure they're getting your fresh sheet because sometimes you'll be sending it out and you won't be getting responses sometimes you should follow up if you haven't heard from chefs this phone love and say hey or you get in the fresh sheet oh no it's it's going to my spam box okay make sure you unspun at so you get it sometimes you have to do that because they might not see it at all yeah I the fresh sheet was created in MailChimp yep no no but what that's a good question he's asking if I text the fresh sheet no I don't but what I do is every time I make my fresh sheet there's a there's a feature after it's been published there's a button that says share and it'll produce a little a web ulr link i always copy that link onto my phone so and it's in my notes it's like it's it's in an Evernote I always have like most recent fresh sheet in Evernote so for some reason a new chef that I'm talking to on the fly says hey can I see what's in your fresh sheet I can just I can copy that link on my phone and text it to them then they can open it up exactly exactly so that's that's a good thing to do for sure so that's so that's our fresh sheet on the so we've got case lot units I divided my products up by type and then down on the bottom I've got order cut off time so you can change this whatever you want it to be right however you're structuring your week this is up to you it'll just say for me it's if you want to deliver your Friday you need to have your order in by Monday at 9:00 p.m. and then there'll be some other stuff down there like minimum order if you're downtown your hundred dollars if you're out of downtown $200 phone number email and then I always put a disclaimer on the bottom that says everything is on a first-come first-served basis just set up expectations from the beginning will make your life a lot easier so that's the first part okay sorry go ahead yeah okay so yeah well I mean that's kind of going back to what I was saying about don't put things on there that you don't think you're gonna have but yes so jesse is asking you know what do you do if it's the case where a bunch of people have ordered something you thought you might have had a lot of but you realize you don't it's not an easy thing to navigate it's it's really kind of playing favorites you know it's it's just you got to just do the customer service thing you know you got to do the song and dance a little bit to be like well you know we're we're short we had too many orders of this I find just being honest and frank which chefs is that is the best way to approach it just to say you know sorry we had too many orders but like I said I play favorites so my first and longest term customers they always get first dibs unless they are consistently being late or something but they're usually gonna get first dibs and then I tell people that you know sorry we're short but here's the way you can avoid that altogether to some degree this is what I do when I take on new chefs I only promise them things I know so they won't even get the fresh sheet if a new if a new restaurant comes to me tomorrow and they want to start buying from me I'll only promise some things I know I have a ton of so from on my end I can scale my greens production and micro greens production really quickly like in the summer time I can start planting more greens maybe reduce something else and I've got a 21-day lag you know I can put arugula in the ground in the summer 21 days and get the first harvest so with the quick growing high-density crops they have a lot of option ality in that way because you can constantly react and interact with what your product production is so when a new chef comes to me and says hey I would love to get your stuff I'll say to them right off the bat we're totally maxed out right now and this is a good it's a good place to be in a situation of abundance where you're like I'm sorry got so much demand all I can promise you is greens and I can do any kind of amount of microgreens you want that way you to set up expectations right off the bat and so they won't even get your fresh sheet if you wanted you could MIT you could make it like say a second or alternative fresh sheet but that I don't think that'd be worth the work so I did that for two or three customers this year I said all I can sell to you is spring mix if you want spring mix I got it and then say to them look you know if we're doing business for a long time and I can I can start depending on you that I can start integrating my production differently based on what your demands are yeah it's on the fresh sheet yeah totally like it'll say is this says it's what you can't see it here but it says arugula twenty pounds two pound bag right it's it's all there so so they know but it's just there they're just used to getting these packages of things like they're not getting little bunches or pounds of this and that yes yep so I do confirm what is that's a good question thank you for asking that so Thursday morning orders start coming in on mass I'm usually getting orders trickling in throughout the week and then Thursday morning I'll wake up and I'll get a bunch dumped in at once and then there'll always be a couple that are late so I'm following up and just saying hey it didn't get your order I usually will send them an email or text and just say same orders last week question mark and most of the time they're saying yes okay easy copy and paste there last week order into this week's orders and I'll get a follow-up yes no problem we'll have that sometimes it's a follow up saying hey I've got all of this but there's a chance I'm gonna be short on these two things this thing I definitely won't have I was sold out earlier in the week these things I might have else I'll give them a ballpark and the best way to do this is to understand your field production if you did and this is the challenge of selling to chefs especially on a small farm because if you don't intimately know what's coming off your field and you've got content people continuously ordering and asking and your over-promising then you're gonna run into trouble really quickly this is where you can go to making a lot of money from restaurants to making no money from restaurants and then you're not getting any business so it's really all about just knowing your field production and that's what this is all about is just continuously updating with phone photos are the easiest way to do it when you're at a plot or a block anywhere in your land I take photos every single day so that I can just go back on them and just look at the field because instead of me going out into the field to check with what I have is available or not I'm gonna scroll I can lay in bed and sleep in and look at my phone and just go oh yeah I got tons of spinach here okay there's a rouga there it's it's just a lot easier right but it's just about intimately knowing what's coming on your production to be able to communicate that with chefs yeah so the question was do I schedule a time of the day to do those orders yes I so i Thursday morning every every Thursday morning that's the first thing I do I'm up I start work at 7:30 and most most times of the year except for the summer I'm up at 5:30 first thing I do the guys that come into work there they already know what they're doing they check the Google sheet on the way to work they're already out doing stuff I'm there finalizing the orders and taking a lot stuff in we're gonna go through that process here but yeah that's that's part that's usually the first hour of my morning is taking that stuff in put it in then if I didn't hear from one chef I'm following up send him a text message calling them did you are you ordering is just the same as last week or whatever it is like that so let's let's look at this so how do I receive orders so I'm inputting information I'm modifying that based on what work what we harvest and I'm calculating shortages or things that I might not have so this stuff is either coming in the form of a text message an email or a phone call so usually like if it was a phone call I put it in an into my notes so sometimes I'm out in the field on a Wednesday and we're doing some we you actually start harvesting before we get orders you know I'll get into that shortly here but I'll be getting orders and somebody will phone me as soon as I get off the phone with them I'll just go into my Evernote and just regurgitate that order back or I might ask them would you mind texting that to me or would you mind emailing that to me they'll usually do that I like to have it in writing that way there's no miscommunication of anything so another spreadsheet so again we don't don't worry about too much of the detail of the spreadsheet but the important thing to understand here is that there's two parts there's this part up top which is orders passed so that's all of my orders from the beginning of the season to last week this here the one below it is the current order sheet that starts off every Monday empty as I receive orders they go in there so as I get emails text messages and phone calls those orders get inputted here and the important thing here is that I can sort it it's a separate sheet so that I can sort it to relay that information to harvest tally so what is gonna go what do I need to pull off the field the orders that I get the information of the specific orders here's a restaurant Rod's regional table they want a case of beets they want a case of carrots they want a case of Tokyo turnips they want a case of pea chutes so on and so forth when I'm out in the field it's not important for me to know who ordered what it's only important for me to know what is the total of all the products on I need to harvest so the thing for us on our farm is we at we balance out our harvesting period we don't do everything on Friday a lot of farmers who don't have proper cold storage they hammer everything out on Friday they pack it they portion it they wash it that do all that stuff and then they deliver it the next day or they go to a farmers market we don't do that because it's a recipe to burn out and the product doesn't last as long if you don't have a cooler so you must have a walk-in cooler to do things the way that we do them we harvest things when they're ready so the strategy here is if a bed of something is ready I want to harvest that entire bed because it's at its premium size if that means I go out on a Monday and I see a bed of red rush Kayle baby red Russian kale is perfect size I'm in a harvest at kale not only because it's at the right size and I can sell it as a premium product but also it allows me to turn the bed over quicker I'm always harvesting in units of beds so my beds are standard 25 some are 50 feet long we harvest entire bed units when a bed of radishes is all mature it gets cropped out and gets planted immediately so that means sometimes I'm sitting on more radishes than I then I know I can sell right away but as I take you through this process you'll see how this plays out but the main reason is is I would rather have a little bit of spoilage loss with the crop so that I can turn that entire bed over because if I go through and I just harvest the radishes that I need say I've got a full bed that's ready and I won't and I know I can get 80 bunches out of it but I've only got orders for 50 if I go and I harvest those 50 bunches and then I leave the other 30 in there next week they might be too big anyways and then I've delayed planting that bed again for another week so I would rather slightly sacrifice having a bit too much product so that I can replant that bed quick and that I have so that I have consistency in my product that's way more important to me did you want to ask them oh yeah the radishes I harvested on Monday are they gonna be on that fresh sheet yes so what goes on the fresh sheet isn't what I've harvested it's what I'm expecting to harvest based on what I see in the field yes so on usually on Friday that's what I'm either going through photos that I took throughout the week or if I'm at a plot I'm making an assessment of what I see it's not what I harvested though there's part of that I'll show you is a bit on what I harvested well we'll look at that in a second so with this what's happening is I'm receiving orders and I'm putting these orders in here and then so this sheet is just what's on order this week and now like once I've gotten my orders I'm going to sort this sheet by items so I can sort of hear by customers to see the orders in completion as they appear or I can sort it by items so I go alphabetically arugula beets basil so on and so forth everything alphabetically do you ever heard of okay I'll get you'll get just finish this thought and I'll get to you and then that correlates directly to my harvest tally so this is another sheet that I take out in the field with me and it's basically so I'm out in the field when I'm harvesting I don't need to be thinking about Oh rods wants this waterfront wines wants this it that's irrelevant to me all I need to know is what is the total poundage of everything so that's what this sheet is this is this is my you know this is my order sheet so I've sorted it by items arugula brazing mix kale pea shoots radish it's all alphabetical I'm going to make totals in there that correlate to this sheet and this is what I take out in the field with me I print this up every Thursday morning it's and it's the what is the total amounts of everything that we need to harvest right I don't need to know what all the orders were so I'll go in here arugula so it's all sorted by items I'll just take here's total weight here's my total income I'll just take a I'll grab those two and get the sum and then I'll input that into this sheet so what's my total order okay I've got a total of 19 Rula on order because we harvest sometimes sometimes on a Monday sometimes on a Tuesday it depends on the weather depends on how prime that crop is there's going to be stuff in the cooler that's in stock so we record that as well we'll have a little sheet clipped to our walk-in cooler or sometimes that is due with masking tape that says what's in the cooler everything in our cooler is labeled so if there's a tote of arugula it's weighed and has a label on it it has the date and how much it weighs so as I get all of my orders and I go through this sheet and I put all the stuff into my harvest tally I've got a list of all the things that name the harvest before we head out in the field I'll go to my walk-in cooler look in the cooler and make adjustments as to what's in stock ok so let's say I've got six pounds of arugula in the cooler I put that on here I subtract the difference I need to harvest 13 pounds so it's just a field sheet it's simple right it's not the exact orders it's just what I'm gonna take with me in the field so that was it that was that's what I was just explaining what's in stock that's my in stock so we first arrived at a tally of everything needs to harvest what's in stock what's the difference on this sheet - I've got crop locations where is that crop for me on a multi locational farm that's really important for me on a single site farm perhaps less important but you might call it block locations or block number or bed number something like that on our farm every single plot is is named and is numbered so it'll be Borden Avenue plot beds 1 through 24 I will put that on there because again everything in writing is super key especially when you're working with a team because I've said before go harvest out a ruger they harvest the wrong one I was hoping to have that one for next week now I've got a bed of arugula that's too big so you really need to be specific with this stuff yeah actually mostly by text message no the orders I'm doing on Thursday morning so that's a different that's a different admin time my Tuesday and thanks for thanks for pointing that I should have been more clear about that my main admit it meant I'm for inputting data into my sheets as far as what's coming off the field what's being planted that's on Tuesdays and Fridays my orders and stuff like that that's Thursday morning because that's when I've capped out Thursday 9:00 a.m. you got to have your orders in that's when I get that flood of orders and I'm putting all that information and then sorting these sheets accordingly literally yep yep yeah that's a good one so so max is asking about the farm ego problems programs and there's some of these software apps out there that allow people to do orders for you short answer I'm making my own and the other thing that I don't like about those programs is that I actually want to talk to my chefs this is important to me as a market gardener to know my customers and and I think like there's a lot of people trying to get on this bandwagon of just streamlining everything so that the the restaurants talking to the software and the software is talking to you it's true that that does streamline some things but at the same time there's a lot of value in talking to your chefs right there you're getting updates with them and how busy they are what their volumes are what they expect next week like there's a ton of information there and if you if you just pass off those interactions I think there's there could be a loss in value for the farmer so I've looked at them I'm trying to make my own with my own fresh sheet but I like to personally talk to my chefs each week and I like to go in the restaurants and see what they're doing I like to see how they're using the food I like that interaction it's given me a lot of value I think those programs are often most applicable when it's sort of like you're a hub and you're ordering from other growers I think they're more applicable then because then you're coordinating all this other stuff that could save you a lot of time like there's a new program out it's a new decentralized food hub software it's called ubi out of our own backyards it's a it's an acronym started in Auckland New Zealand and there and there that's what they're doing they're coordinates so somebody sets up a food hub business there's filling boxes and then this program is is coordinating all the stuff with all the other growers which I see a lot of value in that cuz that's a lot of back and forth but as far as if you're a small farm you know you're half acre you're an acre even you know a couple acres and you're selling two you've got 20 30 customers personally I think that personal interaction is important it's important to a small business it might not be with the biggest farms like Susie's farm down in San Diego here but the small ones I think it is important so that's another open source software open foodnetwork.com cool okay so dork okay open food teknorg so there's other ways we can view this information so portioning so once we've harvested from the field are our harvest tally sheet is no longer needed now what we're doing is we're going to sift through our orders and and buy our items again so we've got it in items so now when we've got all the product back on the farm we're still using these sheets so now we're going to have this same itemized grouping or sorting with the same sheet with our orders not the harvest tally and we're going to pack this way so we're going to just do all the arugula so we pulled the arugula out of the cooler and we're gonna pack all the arugula so we're gonna go do all the case lot bags for the Frantz some people will do it where they packed the farmers market stuff at the same time we don't we do all the farmers market stuff near the end of the day we we do all of our packing for restaurants for a salt take out my bins of arugula packed the case Lots I'll consolidate it and then put farmers market arugula and I'll put that back in the cooler and then my helpers who come to help me pack for the market on Friday afternoon they'll sort that out for the small portion bags for the market we do all the restaurant stuff first so we're just going through item for item packing all that stuff or portioning all that stuff I should say and then we're gonna pack it so now I take the same sheet and I'm going to sort it by customer so it's it's the same information but I just sorted it in a different way so now I go through by customer now I'm going to pack all those orders so it does seem a little bit inefficient for us to pack stuff put it in the cooler and then take it back out and then pack it into boxes for specific orders but we have to do it because it's hot where we are we can't have product sitting outside of the cooler for very long so that's why we pack things we portion things put them back in the cooler they're labeled so one box will say you know case lot bags of arugula for restaurants case law it boxes of spring mix whatever it is so that when we're going to pack before we deliver we've basically set up our bike trailers or our truck it's all there and then we pull out all the case lot stuff that's packed and all we're doing is essentially just going through like this we're just laying up boxes we reuse these certified organic boxes we get from the back of organic grocery stores like Whole Foods they give them to us they let them take the wheel they let us take them and we just you know put piece of tape on the box and then we're just Kate there's quails gates order he wants the case of arugula he wants the case of spinach he's got a box of spring mix whatever it is it's all labeled it is until then that I go and print my invoices because at this point there still could be shortages right hopefully at this point I know that there's not going to be but you never know so once everything's packed up and it's all boxed up like this then I will run inside do my invoices and I'll show you that at the very end of this and then I'm off to the races load the truck I'm gone or load the bike trailers and we go and deliver so that's how that essentially works for us every we do this every week entire season that's kind of how that routine works for us and how we use those sheets any questions about that so far okay because we're gonna okay yeah go ahead just yeah I learned it just from trial and error and I don't I don't I'm not big on formulas like I do have formulas in there in the sense that I've got units unit weight and then this is just I go equals and this is this times this so I have some of these formulas that just autofill in there but I I'm not I'm not advanced with spreadsheets as they could be where I've got different sheets that have stuff connected and all that I'm not quite there this is just function it functions great for us there's probably some software out there that could make it better and again that's why I'm working on an app but yeah that's essentially it's just trial and error but the sheets that I have on my website are just have simplified a lot of that process for you there's a whole chapter on in the book too if you don't get it all today any more questions so far cuz we're gonna leave everything to do with the restaurant orders and all that we're going to look at more production stuff yeah John yes yeah I use invoicing software we're going to talk about that at the end what's the most sustainable packaging yeah it's a tough one I mean the sustainable packaging packaging thing is okay where do you get the yeah I mean we order from there's suppliers like Uline there's I get most of my packing bags from a local store in my area called Liz Jen they're just a retail marketing store there's just just search in your own area just search retail supplies kind of thing usually they'll have the four ounce bags they'll have the the roll bags for the bulk orders stuff like that yeah well then a company like Uline they they're their US company they ship all that stuff they'll have all that kind of packing material for you yeah yeah that's that yeah so the question was if I use those you know PayPal or square or whatever yes I don't use them anymore just as no but no none of my customers need them but they're great that's a great way to get Co D that's like the best way to get Co D yes the credit card company takes 3% or whatever it is but yeah I've used that it's actually really helped me get paid sometimes because like I do have one I just never use it is I go into a restaurant and they're like four weeks behind pane and I show up with that and they say oh we don't know check for you today I'm like oh well that's okay you can just pay him your credit card here you go and they're usually there there will pay you because it's they're not gonna say well no because then you know they're full of right so so yeah that those are great my friend Steve who's a really cool sort alternative economist in Kelowna he says the more ways you have to get paid the more you get paid so I can actually take Bitcoin credit card cash I'll take gold and silver I'll take I'll take barter you know barter to a certain degree granted that you have something that I actually want but yeah the more ways you have to get paid the more you get paid any more thoughts on thoughts questions on restaurants all right so planting recording how your what goes in the field recording how much of things you planted how many beds you planted how did you plant it all of that stuff is really important this all relates to our field sheet for plantings so in this with this sheet worse specifically talking about direct seeded crops and transplanted crops so only things that go in the field things that are for microgreens or planted in the nursery that's something else altogether so what goes in the field is what this sheet is for and again don't worry about all the little information on the sheet you've got you can download it on the website and it's actually this one's actually referenced in the book the three most important things to note about this sheet are the date the crop and the location that those are the the most important things what for what was planted because it's used and compared to a yields sheet so I don't know why I had three of these in here there is on the planting sheet and the yields sheet that we that that I'll show you coming up these three fields are exactly the same so when something goes in the field and is direct seeded I'll record the date the crop and the location so that when it when I go back and I harvest that crop and I put that information into my yield sheet it starts with the same information the date the crop and the location so now I can go I can the to correlate so I'll go to my yield sheet which is this one and I will look on it and say I know it's this one I'll look at it and say well how much of that crop that I get when did I harvest it I'll go back to my planting sheet and I'll put that date in here so this the planting sheet is really the ultimate sheet that has the most amount of information because on this sheet I'm tracking all the three things I just mentioned even a crop variety how long the bed was was it direct seeded or was it transplanted what was the do e what was the DTH and what was the DTM so the do e this is a good thing to track this is your date of emergence this tells you how quickly that crop germinated from seed so it's only relevant to direct seeded crops not as much to to transplanted crops because something like arugula for example in the springtime you'll plant it might take ten days to pop out of the ground but in the summertime it'll pop out of the ground in three days and everywhere in between there's slight variations so when by recording this stuff it really tells you what is the optimal time and the quickest time that crop will grow because crops are very nuanced some crops do better in the spring than they do in the summer like spinach germinates better and faster in the in the sort of mid spring than it would in the summer sometimes in the summer won't even germinate at all it's too hot so tracking all this information over time gives you a real skeleton of what your next season should look like and if you do this for a year and you're methodical about it I guarantee you when you start up the next season you'll have a total framework in front of you on how you can adjust expectations so if I plant arugula today when can I expect it to be ready you can really only figure that out if you do this tracking yourself I can tell you in my book what it's been for me but that might not be what it is for you so this kind of stuff is very nuanced to your own situation so the date of emergence is when that crop came out of the ground the date to harvest was the date that you harvested that crop and that will go back on the planting sheet and then the DTM which is the days to maturity is a subtraction between the DT the date to harvest and the and the date planted the difference is how many days did that crop take to mature if you do that for an entire year you'll have an amazing framework for how to go into the next season so that's that's our planting sheet oh yeah so that's what this is so this is my direct seeded stuff these are these are what started in the nursery and some of these are what was transplanted so I can sort this at any given time I have this these fields up here NS I'll just say NS DS D s which means nursery or direct seeded or transplanted or whatever I can sort it by that and say show me all of my direct seeded crops it's all there show me all of my transplanted crops it's all there it helps you filter and figure out what's working and what doesn't by sorting the information you can't sort it in an in a journal the same way you can on a spreadsheet so same thing there that's for all is that's for all of our field stuff so the nursery same thing when when did we start a crop when did that crop emerge when do we expect to transplant that crop into the ground so it's just an extension of the field sheet you can keep them the same if you like I prefer to keep them separate because this one might have more information on it like I'll have more information on here about how many sell what was the size of the sell flat that I did was it a 72 was it a 128 was it a 200 was it a 400 sell oil block flat all that information is on here I prefer it to be separate just because this one has more fields and if this is just essentially a modification of the first one so microgreens I keep this entirely separate because this one there's just way more information on here and I'm updating it more constantly so when do I plant microgreens when did I harvest them everything that I do as microgreens is done on this sheet it's not too different from all the other sheets but there I don't need as much information on here and you can still see here that there's really only about five fields or six fields on this that I consistently use the data was planted the crop how many grams of seed I used how many flats I planted what was the yield and what was or what was the yield per pounds was the yield per grams Canadians are confused about Imperial and metric so we like to use both of them don't ask me why but we do and so that's really all I need so on my on my micro greens sheet I use it as a planting and a yield sheet just because they're so consistent right now planting might be the same thing every week 10 flats of pea shoots every week and I harvest those 10 days later so it just all goes in here that way I've got it all in one place it allows me to track my averages look at my average yield how much scene am i using I'm getting more yield off this type of seed than others if some of you guys were in Chris DeRose workshop about Mike Greene's he probably would have talked about different seed varieties and how some black oil sunflower seeds will yield really high and some white striped sunflower seeds will have a different yield and so I track all that stuff I'll put in my notes was this a different seed lot was it was it something different than I was used to I track all that stuff because if you don't track it you don't really know where you're at you don't you're not setting up expectations and recording them so yields is very important what comes off the field what are we how much are we yielding on average for a bed of carrots what are we a virgin for a bed of lettuce a bed of spinach how do we know this stuff if we don't record it we don't really know where we're at so the yields sheet is almost like the planting sheet in this the same the first three fields are always the same date crop plot everything else we've got in here over like how many yields or bunches did we pull out of it what was the area so here we got a bed of arugula this was a 53-foot bed I harvested 26 pounds so I have a little yield ratio in there and that correlates so this is how many how many how much yield did I get per foot so it's just dividing the yield by the length of the bed it gives me a yield ratio if any of you guys have read my book or you're coming to the workshop tomorrow I'll talk more about this system of rating a crop I have called a sieve er a crop value rating system I have say target yields if a crop is high value I want to get 1/2 a pound a per linear foot of bed so I use that the tract this kind of thing what are the averages what am I getting per linear foot of bed for these crops what is the profit per foot or flat of that crop this gives me a way to look back and see am i meeting my benchmarks and I've always got a notes field because I might be out in the field and I'm harvesting something and I go oh wait a second this is really low yield why is that I might write that in my spreadsheet and then I'll use that information at a later time in the year to figure out do I see it a pattern in these trends I had consistent failings of germination of arugula in July in August is there a pattern there did it happen with a particular seed variety did it happen because I was planting the bed too dense or I was planting the bed too wide was there an irrigation problem all these things allow you to ask better questions to problem-solve situations because there's always things the problem solve on a farmer that's essentially what we do as farmers so the plantings the the the yield sheet directly correlates to the planting sheet the date the plot and the crop are the things that are consistently recorded on that sheet the date harvested is the this very important on that sheet the date of emergence and the DTM which is the days to maturity those are the most important pieces of information on this sheet and it directly correlates to the planting sheet so that is again our yield sheet okay so those are the three most common ones that I use in the farm and we'll look at a couple others and then we'll have time for questions and then we'll wrap up the day so spoilage is important to track mostly because it tells you what you're not selling like I said earlier you can sometimes use it for tax write-offs depending on the jurisdiction you're in and you've got to be careful about that but this information just tells you okay I had 15 pounds of arugula composted this week that's $150 a crop but it didn't sell maybe I'm producing too much arugula right I wasted 30 pounds of tomatoes last year maybe I'm producing too many tomatoes all this stuff is just a better way for you to understand what's working what isn't working what's selling and what isn't and it'll it'll give you a better frame when you go forward into the next season decide well maybe I'll do a little bit less tomatoes this year maybe I'll do more arugula and lettuce if you don't track it you won't know where you're at but again sometimes you can use this for tax purposes but it's hard to say whether you can do that in California here or not I'm not totally sure yeah that's a good question is there a tax benefit to donating stuff to food banks again it depends on your jurisdiction I know for certain that some people will get a receipt so that's a great way to do it I donate all my spoilage to the food banks anyways I just I don't need a receipt from them because I can claim it I can just claim the spoilage but some if it is a jurisdiction that requires that then you would want to do diligence and and make sure that you get a receipt from them so that you do have something to show and if that's the case then you've got as a small business person you've got a more incentive to donate it than to compost it because then you get that that receipt another way you can do it these guys in New Zealand we're doing this they were what were they doing they were selling it yeah there's sort of a loophole and how they could donate it because the government wouldn't let them use receipts from a donation to for tax purposes but what they were doing is that they were selling the product to the to the charitable organisation and then giving them the money back so the money was the chair billed charitable donation for the for the for the tax purposes so it's kind of like you know you find these creative ways to navigate the system and every corporation does this stuff so why shouldn't we do it right we don't want to pay tons of tax if we're working and sweating on the farm like we do so okay so that is spoilage it's simple there's not really much else to explain besides some that is tracking what is wasted what wasn't sold what goes in the compost piles and what was donated this is a sheet that is very simple but I find super effective on figuring out where I'm at with my farm so I call it a weekly overview it basically is just a top and information of what's my total weekly revenue so this is a total of what I sold at the farmers market what I sold for restaurants what I sold in box programs or whatever market streams I'm selling and this is just a total I made a thousand dollars this week I made three thousand dollars this week whatever it is but this sheet is allows me to to look at fluctuations and sales based on seasonality it allows me to spot trends and then use that information to speculate on the future and this is what all stockbrokers do it's a similar idea so this is just an overall this is all the weeks of my season that I'm in operation and how much I made each week so I've got 35 weeks in production here my farmers market season might start in April and my you know my market might end here at the end of a November but I'll have a bit of shoulder season sales to restaurants or cafes or things like that so this is my my all the top end weekly sales so I can do things like this I can isolate in here and go okay look at from here I get to 2,000 dollars a week and then that starts to taper down about here so this is my primary marketing season this is my not high season but it's my primary market season whereas here I go from in May making $1,000 a week on the farm to making thirty nine hundred four thousand dollars a week so on and so forth so you can isolate your peak seasons and this is important because it it sets up expectations for you to know when are you gonna be really hitting the ground like when are you gonna be hammering it out once we get into peak season we're just we're maxed out there's there's not really much else we can do to increase production where day to day we're doing the same things we're planting and harvesting we're rocking and rolling constantly and these things will allow you to predict the next season because if you know I mean and I've harvested this information for years I know that this period here from July 13th till August 30th that is my peak season that is when every restaurant is wanting as much as I can sell them it's when I'm sometimes shorting consistently and where everybody's busy because it's it's all for in my market it's all based on tourism so I've identified that period as my peak season so when you look at that chart you go okay this is the time that we have very little screwing around that can happen when that time comes on we need to make sure that we are ready for it that we've got everything that's going to be available on the field is available we've got to make sure that we're not wasting time on tasks that are going to occupy time outside of selling planting and harvesting we need to make sure that we're ready for that period so I just know that that is my peak season but it might be different for you guys it's there it's different everywhere depends on what your market circumstances are so there's times on this sheet too or I'll put notes on this sheet this isn't the whole sheet but I can have a notes factor to say this week here we did 3900 dollars in sales I was short on lettuce and radishes this week so that's the top end information I don't need to know exactly how much but I want to know that so next year when I review this I can see all the top end information of boiling this information down further so we looked at all that before we looked at my micelle of Mya my sales sheets my yield sheet my planting sheet this is the top end stuff what's coming off the farm and it just it's basically like the chapter overviews it's like the index of a book right it's like what's the top end stuff and then how do i navigate from there so if I put information of notes on here of trends I see you know consistently short on lettuce at this period of time consistently short on this had too much of this then I look at that as an overview and then go further into my sheets and go from there but this is the top place to start because it's just like reading the the the the overview of a book the outline of a book okay one little bit and then we'll go into we'll go into questions and just finish the day with that so accounting software I do use there's many different software's out there it's all very important especially if you're dealing with bigger accounts if you're selling to restaurants and you're selling to people on terms you really should have some kind of accounting software there's many out there there's QuickBooks there's zero the one I use is called a count edge there's nothing really particularly special about it it was just what was available to me at the time you can use this for doing your budgets expenses and all that but I mostly just use it for invoicing I I keep everything else in spreadsheets that's just my preference but please you know do it however you think is is the best way to do it but what I do with this is it just manages my account so when I go to print out an invoice so after I've put together all my orders on a particular day I can open up this software open up a new invoice here and in seconds I can fill out a multi-line item because everything auto fills so all I need to know is certain keystrokes that just will autofill so I can go if I'm putting in spinach I just go sp1 it auto fills all the information and the price and I hit tab so I can fill out a 20 line invoice in seconds just by doing numbers and quick keys so it takes some getting used to but it really makes it easier because if you're going to be filling out these old-school things which most farmers do you're standing there and write it all out and it sometimes takes five minutes to fill out a pick a 20 line invoice the other problem with these things is that if you lose your carbon copies you have no recourse you have no knowledge of who owes you money or not the beauty of the software is that it tracks who's settled up their invoices and who doesn't so every week when I'm on stream by about mid-may I start to get checks that are just coming in on stream every single week I'm getting checks from restaurants when I get those checks I go on to my accounting software this is something I would do as part of my Tuesday night or Friday night routine in the office I go in and I just open up their account and I just select their invoices and they'll have a check that has a pay stub on it that says this invoice number this amount so on and so forth I just go in and input that into the computer paid done so now I know who's paid for what invoice and who hasn't so that if somebody is short all I have to do in my software if like they haven't paid me recently as I go into my sales I go into my sales register I select the name of the restaurant and then I can go view open invoices so it'll just show me all the invoices that they haven't settled up in seconds I can grab that and print a statement or email them a statement that just has you know these invoices these amounts here's the total hey guys haven't seen a check from you in a couple weeks here's just a reminder of of the invoices that haven't been settled thank you you know you can just be really brief and you can stay on top of them you'll get paid more sometimes you just have to keep bugging these people but generally I would say if you have to continuously bug people for money then they're probably not the best customer but this allows you to just know where you're at who owes me money and who doesn't it's it's really that simple and it just makes the invoicing faster these I still I have these I keep them around my farm just in case a chef calls me midweek and is like oh man we're out of lettuce can I come by and grab some lettuce I'll often say yeah sure slide by and one of the people myself or somebody else will fill out an invoice for them give it to them just so we don't have to go back in the office to print it but then I'll put that into the system later on so it's it's just there as an option so that is essentially it you guys will go into questions after this but I'll just do a little review of the things that we looked at know your market know what you know what you're what you're getting into before you start selling never walk into a saturated market keep records of all the important information the planting the yields them and the marketing the sales information is the top information everything else is important - such as budget and expenses and all that but the weekly information is really important and you got to create habits to keep up with that use the technology use your phone use the spreadsheets they're all there they're all available find time to review the stuff and it's good to do that throughout the season to stop and just look at where you're at look at your yields keep an idea of where things are going if your farm look at the plantings always have an assessment of where you're at and then look for trends and then use that information to speculate on the future so that's how you can make guesses of what you think's going to happen the next season based on what happened last year those kind of things will really help you and I'm certain that they'll help you learn faster and and be more successful quicker thanks guys so if we have any questions I'll just leave this stuff up again tons of free info on my youtube channel there's the podcast idea with Diego online course coupon code if anybody wants it and it was take some questions yeah John keep with that but but it's all context right my farm is small now I'm not managing 100 member CSA I was I used to have at 100 100 member CSA but we're small and so I spend an hour a week on those sheets not including in putting my orders and stuff but that's it that's it you know if you you know it's a stall contact if you've got so much demand for product and you can move it through a hub and that works for you yeah that's easy that's easy I personally myself though I like to be diversified as with customers I find being diversified of customers is just as important as being diversified as crops because businesses come and go people come and go trends change there's what we're changing marketplace all the time there's so many new innovations that's happening in the sector with food and and agriculture that who knows what it's gonna look like in 20 years so I I like the diversified approach as far as customers and so that's generally why I trend towards restaurants with many different types of restaurants and farmers our customers and I've kind of leaned back from the CSA yeah I get these I get those too oh yeah so the question was how do I those boxes that I get that are recycled from the back of grocery stores if there's other things that I get that are like that I also get these tomato flat boxes I get them from the same grocery stores and they're great for harvesting Tomatoes because we don't have to have big layers of tomatoes we fill these boxes and it's just one layer of tomatoes and they store better and we deliver to those tomatoes in those like we can pack 10 pounds in one of those flats we sell that as a case lot so I would say those that's about it really no I that's a good question about you know do you can use recycle tarps yes you can you can use recycled anything you want but the question is is it worth the time I I found over the years it's not I used to go and get all these lumberyard tarps and I'd have to cut because they were they were they were sold so they'd fit on a piece of like a lumber stock and so I'd get all them so I got them free I had a friend of the lumberyard but I have to cut them all up and then lay them all over the plot put different you know had to have all these different things laying down it was just a hassle so it's just a cost-benefit analysis of whatever it is you're you're looking at yeah that's a good question Scott yeah so Scott's question was is it worth it to track your time at the beginning first particular farm tasks than it is to once you get good at it I would say yes there is because then you use that as a benchmark on how you can improve I like that when I was when I was starting out it was really cool to track how long it took me to harvest a bed of radishes like you said and then after four weeks noticing that I'm doing it twice as fast so I like that kind of stuff because I like goal-setting I just find that when you have these benchmarks to work towards you can always find better ways to improve on and increase the speed or increase the quality so I would say yes but you know don't don't kill yourself in managing it at the beginning it's good to know but you know try to streamline it in try to with some of the technology I've shown try to find ways where you can really easily record that stuff but you know if it's if it's pissing rain out and you're Neal you're bending over harvesting radishes don't worry about recording your time do it when it's convenient but do it enough that you do see benchmarks that you can improve on for forever note I have I use the basic one I probably upgrade to the premium because I use it a lot now and the premium has got some better features in it but I've been able to use the basic one for years yeah any any benefits to save your body was far as harvesting goes yes the right tools the quick greens harvester is is a very worthwhile investment $500 tool it'll save you thousands of dollars in labor save you lot of strain on your back you still have to bend over with that tool but it's less bending over and it's faster so that tool for sure the quick greens harvester quick cut greens harvester guy named Jonathan I believe in Tennessee invented it what's that is it on backorder man yeah I guess people are people like JM and I are promoting it so much that everybody wants it and it's a great tool I would say is outside of that it's just a lot of technique stuff I've got a lot of videos on YouTube actually and how to harvest specific things in my workshop sometimes we get into it yeah it's just it's appropriate technology I mean the way our beds are structured is really it's a classic example of how function defines form the fact that we use a 30-inch bed is I can stand over that bed I can walk across my plot because I can step over the beds I've got access in and out it increases my it decreases my transit time so things like that are really built into the system and it's yeah ultimately about ergonomics I can stand over that bed easily this way I can kneel in it one way I can I can have different positions on the bed I think the the whole basic idea of the 30 inch bed is based around ergonomics and accessibility so I think it really kind of comes down to that more than it does specific tools [Music] yeah yes so the question was when I'm talking about numbers of projections of what I can pull off a plot is it based on beds or just perimeter and on whole area it's based on beds so in my book I or in the online course as you know is a a 30-inch bed 25 feet in high rotation can make $800 on average that's a conservative estimate so when I when I look at a plot and I could look at say a the 2,000 square foot area I can just guess okay I can probably fit 20 beds in there if I did high rotation that would be $16,000 or whatever the multiplier is of it yes I have looked at other ways to maximize that mushrooms are tricky in my context because my walkways are narrow I mean for what were your guys's farm that sounds like something that's a lot more feasible for you the way I do about my farmers things like inter planting so inter planting tomatoes into the walkways of our greenhouses patty-pan squash inter planting beds of quick crops in between the rows when they first go in kind of time-based strategies on how long will this primary crop take to grow before it will affect the crop that's planted next to it so it's usually paring a longer season crop with a quick short season crop yeah that's a good question so does the quick cut greens harvester affect the regeneration of a particular crop yes it does but it's actually better I find it because it cuts flat it you get a consistent cut and you get a consistent regrowth whereas when you're going by hand it takes more time but also there's going to be slight inconsistencies and variability in the lengths because we're human we're not we're not a machine that is perfectly level so I think it's actually better than when we used to do it by hand and it's a twentieth of the time Sal anova amazing yeah Sal anova lettuce we do all of our lettuce of cell and OVA now we do it is we planted as a head at six inch centers I use landscape fabric for it there's a video up on my youtube channel about making those fabrics and so there's six inch centers we have to harvest it by hand which takes a bit more time but the yield is so high that it's it's still very much worth it the salad Nova I plant if you on write this down is I I grow four varieties 75% of all the lettuce is one called green sweet crisp that comes from Johnny's and then the other three are basically the remaining 25% I use red sweet crisp green green butter and red butter those are the four I use and green sweet crisp is like I said by a huge more order of magnitude more than the rest cuz it's the highest yielding and fastest growing yeah Rob it comes they stay send it to you the first time you order it I don't know I don't use that because what we're we're harvesting it as a cut and come again crop right I'm I'm standing over that bed grabbing it by hand and I'm cutting it off leaving about an inch of foliage and then it grows back so that coring tool is if you're selling it by the head to a chef and they use that to cut all the leaves at uniform sizes what do you mean if you were to cut it right what do you mean no well it wouldn't a funky looking way and that's the thing you have to be careful with Sal anova is if you cut it too low to the point where it's just white it looks like a kind of a cut stem you'll get very little regrowth you want to cut it so that you've got about an inch off the ground and about an inch and a half to two inches wide of left over so there's enough foliage there to get a lot of photosynthesis but enough surface area where each of those leaves can actually grow back and I that was a big trial and error thing for us at first were cutting it too low and we're getting barely any regrowth we just found if we cut a little bit higher we got way better second cuts in third and fourth cuts so can I speak to people doing this kind of farming on a part-time scale like they're going to they want to transition or something it yeah yeah so there is a chapter on it in the book like specifically on different farm plans that I've consulted people for and that I've seen or if I were to do this again what I would do but to touch on it again yeah I think it's a really ideal situation if you're in a day job and you know you've got a job that you might not like but you make it good enough income from it if you in a situation where you've got a front and back yard and you think you could get some production on it like based on my numbers I show people that hey you can make 20 grand in two thousand square feet so you could say hey let's let's do a leafy greens specifically focused niche let's let's grow greens at the farmers market and sell to a couple cafes or restaurants maybe our target is to only make twenty grand a year we do that by working you know we scale back our hours at work maybe you say okay I feeI if I work 40 hours a week Monday to Friday how about you go to your boss and say is it possible to work 40 hours that Monday to Thursday and then how Friday is a harvest day and then Saturday is at a market and then you've got maybe a couple evenings or early mornings you're working in your farm to manage it totally possible to do if you're gonna do that though you want to go super niche like like what you said you don't want to grow a bunch of different stuff you want to grow a couple small varieties of things that you think you can produce and volume I think greens would be the best one but it depends on your market right if there's not a demand for greens then I wouldn't do that maybe it's growing cherry tomatoes in in a greenhouse or maybe it's growing baby root vegetables and microgreens you know a microgreens business very stackable one that you could start with a shelving unit like one of the ones I showed earlier you know you can grow a thousand dollars of microgreens a week very easily like ten hours of work or less with packaging harvesting washing delivering all that kind of stuff you can stack that on to a part-time job or almost full-time job if you're willing to kind of transition spend a couple years where you're kind of grinding it out but the great thing about that system is that say your honor your second or third year you might at this point have enough of a customer base established enough of social equity built up in your community where you can say you know what I can transition to a full-time farmer now I already know all the little nuances of running this and just go for it I've seen it done many times and I think I think it's probably the best way to do this if you can if you can scale your job back in here in a situation you can do that I would totally encourage people to do it again man it depends on your situation like it depends on that it depends on that farmers market like the stuff we looked at the beginning when we were assessing what makes a good market and what would be appealing to sell it that one for it's all about that I mean it really depends on your situation my impulse would be to say if you could just do restaurants you'd be laughing because you wouldn't have to do weekends right if I didn't have to sell it at the market and just do restaurants I'd have Saturday and Sunday off every weekend that would be super but I actually really like the farmers market I kind of feel empty when I'm not there because I'm so connected to my my community but you know just for quality of life sake if you never did them from the beginning maybe you don't have to sell the five restaurants that'd be super easy then you have to individually pack all this stuff you know 5k slot orders boom done like talk about really streaming it into your already job you know would be simple yeah okay yeah that this is a good question so Jessie's question was am i operating any and under rules and regulations that require me to wash certain things a certain way or handle certain things no for myself but this is something that's different in every single jurisdiction down to the municipal state or federal level it's different everywhere are different countries states and cities so you really just have to look at your ordinance your situation and figure that out where we are we're pretty lucky because vegetables are considered low risk by health authorities so they're the last one to be looked at whereas dairy sprouts and meat products are like the high-risk stuff so the vegetables grown things are on the lowest so we don't and we're very lucky that we don't because those things can be pretty nebulous sometimes but you really want to know what those restrictions are before you go in because I have seen farmers that's set up and they get ready to roll and then some bureaucrat comes in and shuts them down so you got you got to be careful about that stuff I guess so question regarding insurance yes I have a general liability insurance that protects us as far as anything to do with the way if something sold and somebody gets sick though those things are extremely hard to actually track especially with restaurants because the restaurant is usually the one that has the liability insurance they're the one that's responsible but we have it we that that insurance also covers if I add up one of my garden plots on irrigation line breaks and I fled my land owners basement or something like that that's all covered I even in my mo use and lease agreements which we if you download that stuff from my from my website the urban farmer code there's some lease agreements in there will have stipulations that'll say in some cases if we have to take out a claim so say say it's at a landowners place if some was one of my people gets injured there and they have to take out an insurance claim on their property will agree to pay their deductible so we'll structure that's stuff into our contracts too but yeah but as far as all the basic insurance stuff we have it and it's it's not much I think I pay 300 a year for this simple insurance yeah yeah so question about business structures I have been a sole proprietor up until now but now I'm a I'm a corporation my farm is a corporation a good accountant will tell you where the good the line is for to do that you don't have LLC's in Canada our corporations are slightly different the way you guys haven't set up down here it seems like you can be operating at a pretty low level and justify having an LLC but for us to incorporate you really need to be making over a hundred grand to really make it worth it because you pay a lot in in fees and services to do that so it's just different in each country but we're sole proprietor for most the most part we I did it one year so the question was about incorporating fast growing flowers I did it one year but just didn't have enough demand but I personally I think it's a cash crop if you can if you can do it I mean I've seen these beautiful little you know two ounce or 1 ounce containers of chrysanthemums and just you know a lot of that stuff like you can make a lot of money at it there's a lot of labor with it though with some of the ones you have to pick the petals off but I think it's a niche market I mean do it if if that's a you want I just find that what we did it it wasn't things that chefs wanted a lot of it was like people would order $5 of chrysanthemum petals or something like that here and there what one way to do it well is to offer a flower petal salad mix and then sell that at a premium that's been the best way I've seen so you know you got a normal spring mix oh you got a lettuce miss makes you got a spicy mix you got a brazing mix and then you might have like a premium mix or call it something really sexy and then it's got little petals of things here and there some high-end restaurants were there like that yeah totally yes selling bouquets I mean yeah man I mean there's this huge potential with that if you've got a market for it like I know I know a lot of businesses that just do strictly strictly flowers they do perennials and annuals and they make bouquets and they kill it so there's huge potential in that I can't speak to it so much personally though because I've only done it to a certain level you

Channel: Diego Footer

Views: 31,220

Keywords: permaculture, homesteading, farming, organic farming, market gardening, grassfed, grassfed life, vegetable farming, gardening, Curtis Stone, urban farming, the urban farmer

Id: 0waRcPktmBA

Length: 166min 0sec (9960 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 02 2019