Farm Hands
What is a Farm Hand? Well, it’s an extra set of hands to help you on the farm.
Many hands make light work
I’m not a full time farmer so I just hired someone to help on my farm. The coronavirus pandemic has put hundreds of thousands of people out of work and now is a unique opportunity to find high quality workers that are literally hungry for a job. It’s refreshing to see that our society is not entirely comfortable with living off government subsidences and many Americans are looking to get into farming. Has there truly been a “Great Realization” [see video below] and is our vision now 2020? Is this just a blip on the radar or is this a transformative cultural event? Who knows but what I do know is that times of change always provide opportunity.
The Job
I initially only wanted to hire a part-time employee but the person I found needed full time work. This made me think about Tim Ferris’ book the 4 Hour Work Week, the executive assistant model, Lewis’ book Moneyball, and several other sources of inspiration for someone who fulfills multiple daily task allowing me to:
Accomplish my own person goals
Accomplish farming goals
Improve my life
Farm Component
I came up with an acronym to direct daily task:
CHAMPAS
Cultivation
Harvest
Amend- assist me with an ecological approach to building and amending soil
Maintain- Includes all the normal maintenance and landscaping task that are present on a farm
Plant
Animals- Make sure they are cared for, have new pasture, feed and watered.
Secure- Make sure everything is locked up at the end of the day
Off Farm Component
I have several rental properties and a personal residence
Assist with running errands
Maintaining this properties
Rent and leasing
Organization of task
Keeping on open and organized line of communication is vitally important for this job to work so I’m utilizing three platforms
Trello- This is where our weekly to do checklist are located
Tend- This is where I have kept all my crop plans and task
Google drive- I’m utilizing the Trello integration with google drive to share my crop rotation spreadsheets and documents.
Goals
Improve Land Utilization- See the graph below to see my significant lack of land utilization (especially from Sept-Mar).
Improve food output
Completion of infrastructure projects
Improved ecology
Orchard growth
