Keeping records through the busy season
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
This Vermont grower raises certified organic vegetables on a small acreage and produces eggs, pork and other staples with her partner.
Before farming she studied public health, wrote grants and taught kids about food, cooking and goat milking. She later started an online program that shares resources, tutorials and talks to help small farmers build habits for a good living with balance and well-being.
For more on building work-life balance into your days, visit HabitFarming to join the community, download planning sheets, pick up clever and time-saving habits and farm hacks, watch videos and find lots of food for thought.
Note
Third-party images; credits as listed.
Numbers help tell your season's story, but which ones matter most? Do you need records for a certifier? Do you want to know how much you really make on carrots? Or do you know what to record but always end up with a pile of half-finished, confusing notes?
This article will help you decide what to record this season and how.
Why keep farming records?
Farms keep records for many reasons. Some are required by outside parties such as organic certifiers or the IRS, others capture information that helps your business grow, and some do both. Keeping records can also reveal inefficiencies and give you a chance to look at your systems more closely.
What's required for farm recordkeeping?
A farm business has to keep certain business records for the IRS, your state and Social Security. They're also useful when you describe your business to a bank or other lender.
At a minimum, keep records of:
- income and expenses (generally at least 3 years; many advisors suggest 7);
- records for assets such as equipment and buildings (until several years after you sell or dispose of them);
- employment records such as W-4s and timesheets (at least 4 years);
- legal documents such as leases and LLC agreements (keep them permanently).
Any farm certified or inspected by an outside agency must keep specific records. That could be state or USDA organic, animal welfare certification, or regulators overseeing food safety, meat or dairy inspection and more. Most require records and receipts for:
- seed;
- inputs such as potting mix and fertilizer;
- pest control products.
You'll also need to record when and how much of each seed and input you used, and finally how much you harvested, when, and who bought it. Certified organic farms typically must show records covering every stage of a crop, from seed to sale.
What's important this season?
Many new farmers feel pressure to record everything, from minutes of irrigation per tomato bed to bunches of kale sold at market, and end the season with a pile of incomplete, messy and useless notes. Often the real need early on is a big-picture view of how the young farm is doing. Once things settle, you can dig into details, picking which data to track based on what you need to know now.
An established farm might have systems for its organic certification records plus room to track one or two other processes each season. One grower closely tracked high tunnel cucumber production for a full cost of production (COP) study. It helped refine how they grow cucumbers, and the results justified paying for screening in the cucumber house. The next season they tracked high tunnel irrigation, as required by an NRCS grant, and, having seen how useful cucumber COP was, added a COP study on one more crop.
COVID contingency plan
One season's plan included the usual planting and harvest records plus a detailed COP study comparing summer and winter kale and mustard greens, the farm's top winter sellers. When the pandemic hit and the business changed overnight, record-keeping priorities changed too.
The farm had tracked labor on a few crops but had never asked staff to time other tasks outside a COP study. That year, the new CSA box-packing process was clearly slow and frustrating, so they began timing it and noting every mistake. Each next day they fixed each item on the mistake list, redesigned the system and timed it again.
After a few weeks aiming for no more than a couple of mistakes per packing session, efficiency improved enormously, and they had data to consult when deciding whether to keep the new system or go back to their old sales channels.
So, how do you decide what to keep track of?
Setting yearly goals helps show where to focus, and good goals often come from whatever frustrated you most last season. If you're unsure something is worth the effort, or sense that something isn't working, that's a good place to look. Pick a common frustration, picture a better result, then ask what number, date or photo would help you get there.
Here are some typical starting points depending on how long you've been farming.
-
New farms
In years 1–2, keep the records outside agencies require, plus planting dates and harvest yields. Even if you've farmed for years elsewhere, planting date records show how varieties grow on new land. One farm found after a couple of seasons that its frost dates left about two weeks less planting time than a town just a short drive north. -
Once the basics are in place
After you've learned your land's quirks, built markets and settled your methods, you can dig deeper. Ask what information would help you understand your farm better. Fighting pests or disease a lot? Keep a calendar of when each pest arrives and how bad it gets to guide prevention. Growing sweet corn to draw people to your farm store but suspect shoppers buy only the corn and skip more profitable crops? A point-of-sale (POS) system will show exactly what they buy and help you decide whether corn is worth it. -
Experienced farms
Got the basics down? It may be time for a full cost of production (COP) study, which tracks every step, including all time and costs, for one crop. Consider one if you suspect a crop is losing money or want to price by your real costs rather than what other farmers charge. Set up all your record systems before the season starts; COP needs lots of data to be useful, and nothing is worse than tracking all season and then realizing you missed one key piece.
How to keep records
Once you've chosen what to record and why, set up a way to capture the key data. Picture yourself at season's end opening a notebook that holds everything you need to answer your original question. What does it look like? What's in it? Who wrote it? Where was it kept all season?
Any new habit, record keeping included, sticks best when it's easy, enjoyable and has a clear purpose. You already have the purpose: the numbers will show how you did on this season's goals or help you sail through your organic inspection. So how will you make record keeping easy and pleasant?
- First, decide who on your team will keep the records. If it's someone else, meet with them to build the system together.
- Next, figure out whether you're a digital or a paper person. A paper person may not like entering data on a tablet, and an app person may lose paper and pencils.
- Then build a recording setup that works for you. Keep the tools handy right where the data happens. If you're tracking harvest times, for example, put a bright waterproof notebook with a pencil attached in your harvest bin, harvest binder or clipboard where it can't be missed. If you tend to lose things, record on a dry-erase board and photograph it at the end of each day or week. If you don't want to retype paper notes, use an online form on your phone that feeds straight into a spreadsheet.
- Some data gets recorded only now and then; put those tasks on a paper or digital calendar with reminders for later in the season.
Finally, set up the system, buy supplies and schedule reminders before things get hectic. (And if glittery pencils would make record keeping more fun, go for it.)
