Farm Math and the Unpriceable Deliciousness of Snap Peas

Back on the math train we started last week, we did yet more number crunching this winter for the first time. I promise I will move off math for next week!

Because we are a CSA farm, we’ve never done an item by item cost of production analysis because we know that some of the crops we grow are simply not going to be profitable. I know that it probably costs us $11 a quart or something crazy to grow and harvest peas and get them into the shares, but they’re so important and delicious that we will never cut them out.

But since we kept extra time and labor records this year and inflation made for uncomfortably crazy prices in farm supplies, it seemed worth the effort to take a week and crunch these numbers for the first time. It also is the increasing “in” thing to do, as a lot of farmers in the northeast are getting to our certain age and establishment level and looking ahead to the big questions—can we stay in business as a farm? For those with kids, what does it mean for their chances to get out into the world—do they have money to send them to college? Can we ever earn enough through farming alone to save for retirement? We don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but we do know that it’s likely worth digging in to our farm’s specific numbers more these next few seasons.

And don’t worry members, we aren’t planning to cut beloved crops from the CSA, but it’s more that we just want to know when we are growing something that’s costing more than we think it does.

There’s storm’s a’coming, Pa!

In the past as a CSA, we just calculated the average of what it costs to run the farm and stay in business, and then divided that out over the number of beds we have on the farm. So if a crop brings in less than $600 per 200 linear feet of bed space, we have to pay to produce it. (It’s not that it’s not profitable, but that it’s negatively profitable!) If a crop brings in more than $800 per bed, then it contributes to our income from farming. Crops that fall between these two numbers can go either way, depending on how much labor they entail.

This is why we don’t grow a few crops at all. For instance, sweet corn on our farm (with 2013 pricing) yields about $162 per bed of saleable product, which means it costs us $450 out of pocket for every bed we grow. We don’t mind growing some crops that are below average value, but growing an acre of corn for our size CSA would literally mean that both Matt or I would have to work an second off-farm job overnight during the growing season just to subsidize that corn (and we farmers need our beauty sleep)!

If we don’t get enough sleep, we go out into the world camouflaged as vegetables

Cost of production is a funny thing though, because a farm in a different place or with different tools might find sweet corn an easy crop for them. We aren’t set up for sweet corn and there are so many corn pests around here is why our economics on corn are so terrible.

Big farms (or ones that aren’t mostly growing for a CSA) usually specialize in a small number of crops and run very tight cost of production analysis because if you’re going to sell 1 million units of carrots you need to make sure that it doesn’t cost you fifty cents more per unit than you’re selling them for.

I find this sort of thing incredibly interesting because it’s like a giant math problem with infinite intangible variables.

Like peas, how much do we really value peas?

The first peas of the season (which I promptly ate and did not share)

Sure, you can get them in the store for a couple bucks shipped in from Mexico or China or someplace much cheaper than here but are those ones worth eating at all, even at only two or three dollars? Whereas in June, we’re all starving for fresh vegetables, everything that’s ripe is a root or leafy green, and then all the sudden there’s this insanely sweet podded treat. Of course it’s worth double or triple the price of those bland off-season snap peas!

Now maybe none of us are crazy enough that we would want to pay $8 for a pint of peas, but that’s why you are in a CSA 😉 For every box of peas that costs twice to grow over what it’s “worth,” in a CSA we can afford to produce it by growing a crop whose production costs are half of what it's “worth.” In short, you should thank that bunch of kale for doing the work of subsidizing those snap peas!

Any guesses who’s doing double duty in this share box?
The kale, onions, and eggplant are doing a little overtime to make up for the (slightly underperforming) mini peppers and beans :)

Doing this whole cost of production analysis for the embarrassingly first time in 20 years of running a farm (in my defense, I’ve been a CSA the whole time) turned into a surprising ego boost since my estimations (of dividing the farm into beds and rating crops as what percent they under or over-perform) were 100% on the money.

Our time analysis (in last week’s blog) surprised me, but our crop cost analysis, not so much. (If you want to find our biggest loser, we posted it over on our Instagram feed.)

But I won’t keep you in suspense, it’s broccoli, the bane of my farming existence and surprisingly beloved by more people than you expect.

But combining this analysis with being the child of an economist thoroughly unchaperoned in the library stacks (what parents would let their third grader read “It” (I’m paralyzed by clown fear to this day) or sixth grader read Adam Smith?) really just makes me want to go off and create my own darn economic system, possible based around vegetables, because sometimes it feels like our financial measurements are that darn made up.

We can reduce all our products down to commodities and the tight numbers of money and labor in and out, but do numbers like that hold when a good pea picked at the perfect time is such perfection? Or does/should food exist in an intangibly special space beyond the dullness of economic value? And how do we move food system and vegetables beyond the dismal science of economics so that everyone can enjoy the amazingness of a perfect pod?

The Nature of Time

One of the things that I have a love/hate relationship with on the farm is time. Individual days and weeks can sometimes seem so long (especially when that harvest list runs onto three pages!), but since there’s so much repetition of patterns and tasks from year to year and day to day, it becomes hard to hold onto time beyond the general feel of seasonality.

But on a farm of our scale and crop mix, time is the main limiting factor!

Raising diversified veggies on a smaller scale is kind of a crazy thing to do (more on this topic in later blogs). Last year we had something around 700 plantings total, of over 150 crop varieties, and each was handled slightly differently at each stage (seed starting, greenhouse water and heat, planting, cultivation, harvesting, and post-harvest).

When you think of farming, likely tractors and planting and weeding pop into your brain. Yet the actual growing of the crops doesn’t even get anywhere near 50% of our time! We actually always have a few nice young guys call wanting specifically to be hired for a tractor work job each year, which we don’t really have. We use our tractor hard, but even after seven years of what feels like constant use, it barely logged over 2100 hours (that’s the tractor equivalent of a car’s 100,000 mile mark or so). It works out to about 300 hours a year, which spread out over 30 weeks of active field work, is only about 5 hours a week of sitting down tractor time each for me and for Matt!

Note Beulah’s careful supervision of the plow. For some reason, the plow and the field conditioner (but not any of our ten other tractor implements) require constant monitoring?

In 2021, we took out a loan to build a shiny new heated greenhouse. We filled it up almost immediately (I have utterly no idea how we managed to grow almost the same number of flats in our old 17x36’ one for so long—the new one is 30’ x 72’ and literally was filled to the brim).

My old greenhouse was bought in 2004, so this addition really impacted the economics of starting seeds for us. On one hand, we have to pay for the tunnel and the added heat needs, but on the other hand, we are saving A LOT of time on shuffling flats and banging into each other all the time. However, we needed to recalculate what it costs to grow a flat so we know how much to sell plants for, and to guide our annual decision of if things that can be both directly seeded into the field or seeded into the greenhouse and transplanted later make more sense one way or another. (For instance, in spring we transplant spinach since it gets a big jump to be ready for the first CSA boxes, but in summer it’s more cost and time efficient to just seed spinach in the ground.)

All the seedlings getting big for CSA shares and farmers market sales

This greenhouse math and stop-watching seedings started our first year of doing time analysis of how long things take (extra shout out to Rachel for being the best at remembering to do so and leaving reams of helpful notes for me this winter)! In case you are farming along at home, or a math nerd, when the greenhouse heat is running, it costs us between $25 to $40 per day to run the greenhouse for both heating and watering (this doesn’t reflect construction costs or supplies/seeds). Yet what was most interesting to learn is that even with relatively high propane costs, the human time of watering flats costs as much as the heating as soon as it’s over 32 degrees at night (watering well is a skill that just eats up time, but also allows us to really observe crops for potential issues).

This inspired me to do a few more labor time analysis this summer—how many hours do we spend harvesting? Can our harvesting metrics improve? In the heat of the CSA—those 18 weeks where the CSA is going—we spend a solid 65% of our time as a farm team solely picking veggies, so any slow downs in harvest (or speed-ups) greatly impact how much time we have to do other tasks on the farm.

Harvesting daikons on a chilly morning, putting them into groups of ten for efficient boxing and counting!

We were a little short staffed this summer (we strive not to let this happen but some years it does), so I ended up having to harvest one crop for the week pretty much every Sunday morning. This labor shortfall did give me a nice controlled window, however, to time different crops and how long harvest and washing and packing runs.

I have to confess here—while harvesting is typically most of our team’s favorite work on the farm, it’s hands down my least favorite activity (which is too bad, because I’m the fastest harvester so I never get excused from it). What I love to do is WEED. I could weed 12 hours straight and be happy as a clam. Unfortunately, I never get to live my dream because we spend so much of our time managing the farm to have fewer weeds that I have to harvest rather than embrace my OCD heaven with a hoe.

Harvesting again… note the sad deficit of weeds in the background.

Anyhow, we didn’t perfectly capture everything, but the result of all this recordkeeping was that we have our first look at where we actually spend time on the farm (rather than where we “feel” like we spend time on the farm).

Because the feeling of time lies. If you are having fun or in the zone (or me with my hoe), you can look up and be amazing that it’s afternoon or the sun is setting. But other things FEEL like eternity. For instance, when we go into the zucchini or cucumber mines, it feels like all four of us have been harvesting fruits out of their scratchy walls and floors for eternity (or at least three hours). But the darn stopwatch tells us it’s only been 45 minutes.

This temporal reality check was super helpful this winter as we think about upgrades for the 2022 season. We farmers so often think about equipment upgrades on field work (like new plows or tillers or all that stuff), but through time analysis, it became clear that we really need efficiency tools to help with harvest and washing of the veggies! So greens spinners and more shade tents and things on wheels. A super unsexy cooler floor overhaul. And of course so many more tote bins to harvest in to!

More math next week! But we did a story (saved in favorites) on our Instagram if you want to see more of the time breakdown numbers!