| The Organic Farmer's Business Handbook: A Complete Guide to Managing Finances, Crops, and Staff-and Making a Profit
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Contrary to popular belief, a good living can be made on an organic farm. What's required is farming smarter, not harder.In The Organic Farmer's Business Handbook, Richard Wiswall shares advice on how to make your vegetable production more efficient, better manage your employees and finances, and turn a profit. From his twenty-seven years of experience at Cate Farm in Vermont, Wiswall knows firsthand the joys of starting and operating an organic farm-as well as the challenges of making a living from one. Farming offers fundamental satisfaction from producing food, working outdoors, being one's own boss, and working intimately with nature. But, unfortunately, many farmers avoid learning about the business end of farming; because of this, they often work harder than they need to, or quit farming altogether because of frustrating-and often avoidable-losses.In this comprehensive business kit, Wiswall covers:
- Step-by-step procedures to make your crop production more efficient
- Advice on managing employees, farm operations, and office systems
- Novel marketing strategies
- What to do with your profits: business spending, investing, and planning for retirement
Technical Details
- ISBN13: 9781603581424- Condition: New
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By Bart Hall (Kansas (USA))
Wiswall's book makes a decent start, and the costing templates are pretty good. It's nicely illustrated. The writing is appropriately colloquial and flows reasonably well within chapters.
The chapter structure, however, is rather incoherent, interspersing chapters on assorted aspects of cost accounting and very simple cash flow management with others on marketing, time management, and employees. A chapter on office paper flow is followed by one that lumps together retirement planning and business spending. Then comes one on greenhouses and field production efficiencies. The next chapter discusses writing a business plan, and then a final (3-page) chapter on estate planning. Huh?
The sections on production management will be quite helpful to people who've not considered such things systematically, but they do contain some rather sloppy errors. For example, on p. 100 he talks about setting the wheel spacings on all tractors to 60 inches (which is the same as we use for our vegetable production), yet in the very next paragraph he describes large plants such as squash as being on a "6-foot spacing overall."
Similarly, his basic stuff on office organization will be helpful to growers who are currently doing little more than handing a grocery sack full of receipts to their tax person once a year. Unfortunately, his ideas on managing the flow of funds between family and farm are somewhat convoluted. Intuit's accounting programs (which he uses) have easier ways of addressing the same problem. And using the same credit card for business and family purchases is just a giant make-work project.
Wiswall is way out of his depth in regard to all he writes about capital management. Since this book is obviously written for people with little management experience, how is it that a book published in 2009 is talking about interest yields of 5% for Treasury bonds and bank CDs. Bondholders will get clobbered when interest rates rise from their current multi-generational lows; and how many *sound* banks are offering 5% on a CD? Not only that, but average long-term returns of 8% in the stock market? That simply does not happen for people who invest when market valuations (in relation to corporate income) are as high as they are now. Following such simplistic advice will be hazardous to your money.
Which brings me to the most egregious error of all. On page 95 Wiswall declares "Tax avoidance is the main reason I capitalize my farm business. If I have a less profitable year and I'm not in need of a tax advantage, any machinery I purchase must strongly increase farm profitability; that is, the machinery must pay for itself quickly by saving other costs."
Tax avoidance should have absolutely nothing to do with capital purchases. Either they make sense, or they don't. He admits he's more careful about big-ticket purchases in a weak year than in a strong one. What kind of management is that? Such thinking leads to clusters of poor capital allocation that threaten business viability over the long term.
This book is written from the perspective of someone who thinks like a production manager. The great weakness of most family farms is that the owners don't think like business owners, or even CEOs. Their management and decision-making generally remains at the level of a production manager, or perhaps a VP Operations. Wiswall's book provides no departure from that managerial framework and does not effectively address the higher-level managerial challenges faced by most family farms. He nibbles at Holistic Management with his comments on goal setting at the beginning, but thereafter offers absolutely nothing from the excellent HM decision-making model. By all means visit [...] for some vastly better guidance.
That said, if you can't pick up two hundred bucks of tips from this thirty-dollar book ... you probably shouldn't be farming. It's definitely worth the money, and the companion CD will save you many hours of attempting to build the same thing yourself. Just treat his advice on higher-level management with lots of diligent skepticism, and do not expect any sort of logical and coherent over-arching structure to the writing.
By One Straw (Wisconsin, WI)
Probably the most important book I'll read this year. Why? For Sustainable Farming to be TRULY Sustainable, farmers must be able to earn a living -- and that means healthcare, retirement funds, and college funds for the kids (those are costs of production too!). This book gives you the record keeping tools to get you there. Farming is a business - treat it like one. At least for an hour a week or so...
Wiswall has earned his title as the "Uber Bean Counter of Organic Farming". This is all the UN-sexy boring stuff about Organic Farming. But, if you want to move from gardening to farming, and by that I mean earning money and scaling up, then you NEED to read this book. Why? Because of the all books on organic farming I have read, Wiswall's is the only one that tells you the hard truths. YES a business plan is important. YES itemize your receipts. DO a cash flow analysis. The difference between the a successful organic farmer and an EX-organic farmer comes down to record keeping and their knowledge and comfort with the IRS's Schedule F form. Can you make a living --and you owe it to your family to include health benefits, retirement savings and a college fund in your profit planning- I will give it a qualified YES. OF course we all know it takes massive know how on the procedure side --how to grow things well with less input- but even more so on the business side. Gardening is a hobby, farming is a BUSINESS. Not the most fun book, but HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Start planning for profit, rather than making do with "what's left over".
By Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA)
The Organic Farmer's Business Handbook is a top resource for any farmer trying to link their finances with farming realities. It shows how farmers can become more efficient, better managers of employees, and how they can turn a profit and is based on the author's twenty-seven years of experience at Cate Farm in Vermont. Business and farming collections alike will find this a key acquisition.
By Siri Erickson-Brown (Seattle, WA)
This book covers a lot of ground, from basic bookkeeping to crop-specific enterprise budgets. But my favorite thing about it is that is starts by asking the reader to consider his reasons for farming, and to use the resulting answers to create a personal statement of purpose. Even if you aren't a farmer, I would recommend reading the first two chapters and going through the process of prioritizing your values.
I own a small farm, and with three years of trial and error experience now under my belt, I found this book an incredibly useful distillation of some of the lessons I've already learned as well as some great new ideas for making my farm more productive and financially sustainable.
By M. Paulin (Pass Lake, ON)
Great book for beginner farmers and small business owners with little experience and accounting background. Easy read, lots of great ideas based on tried experiences. Methods for calculating costs with regard to labour, machine use, supplies etc. will definitely be used on my farm and these formulas were worth the price of the book.
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