Anyone who has owned a farm can tell you it’s hard work. What proves most challenging is not the type of work you do, but the sheer amount. As is the case with many small businesses, the owner doesn’t really have set working hours or an overall schedule.
Still, there are things even the busiest farmer can do to maintain a healthy work/life balance, allowing them to be productive while enjoying a fulfilling personal life. This, however, needs to be an active effort.
Management Style
The first step is to acknowledge that farming is a job, and a farm is a company. This will help to establish a managerial style that isn’t so much about individual decisions as how you tackle decision-making overall. The key to cultivating a managerial style is to know which tasks can be delegated, and which need to be done by the owner or manager themselves. Once you know this, no task will be a waste of time.
Time Flow Worksheet
Some tasks are very much dependent on the time of day, as well as the time of year. There is nothing you can do about that, but you can plan to work in batches, around these more intense slots of work. This will create a workflow that has its ups and downs, allowing you to focus on smaller tasks and chores during the time when your attention is most available. It can be useful to present this in a visual way, and display it somewhere handy for easy reference.
Pool Resources
Farming may seem like an exercise in self-reliance–however, this is rarely the case. It is in fact a communal effort, and it’s important to get to know your neighbors and establish a friendly relationship with them. Oftentimes, a productive business relationship can follow. This will lead to farmers pooling their resources together, removing the need to borrow money right away or invest in expensive machinery. Instead, you’ll be working with a small team, sharing your successes and failures.
Rely on Machinery
Some farmers find it difficult to decide whether they should invest in machinery. It’s a large expense: one you should make early on, yet many hesitate before making the purchase. Simply put, the answer should always be yes–you should buy a bigger machine.
Machinery exists to make your life easier, cutting down on the time and effort spend on manual labor. Machines will pay for themselves, working on a larger scale and giving the owner more time to focus on other parts of the professional life.
Team Effort
Farms are businesses, but not in the same way as small shops and companies. They are also a home for you and your family. This means that work needs to be a team effort done by the entire household. When family life and professional life are one and the same, both become richer and more meaningful. It is also important that farming tasks be divided based on the abilities of each family member, as well as their individual preferences.
Hiring Outside Experts
It is important to know when you need to hire an expert to do work outside of your skill set. This is mostly in regards to bureaucracy and financial aspects of doing business. Many also decide to hire an accountant outside of their initial team, since that’s something best done by experts.
It is certainly an expense for any small farm, and many hesitate to hire professionals as a result. However, taking the dive and making such investments early on will save money in the long run.
Conclusion
A farmer needs to find ways to achieve work/life balance, since farming is a difficult and time consuming job. You’ll need to make sure that you have a long term plan for your business while also maintaining detailed schedules that fit each season. This will provide you greater flexibility, and more time for yourself.