Our project, “How Do You Know Your Pricing is Right and Your
Investment is Protected” was created to assist fresh produce growers in
understanding their financial status in order to make informed business
decisions that ultimately improve profitability. Many farmers price their
produce without fully understanding the costs of production. Without knowing
their costs, making important business decisions throughout the year increases
the risk of losing money. Growers often trade sweat equity for low returns on
their investments but find it hard to pay for expansion, improvements, or labor
down the road.
Farmers often take pricing for granted without the
background knowledge of what it took to get product to market. Having customers
give them loads of cash for sales isn’t a measure of how profitable (or even if
it is profitable) the business is. Our discussions with participating growers
in the project made this point clear. Many set prices based on supermarket
pricing in their area. Many set prices based on what their competition at the
farmers markets were charging. Others took whatever pricing wholesalers (restaurants)
offered. Only a small handful actually kept track of their costs and set prices
accordingly.
The majority of project participants who had been farming
for more than 5 years, started to realize they needed to increase production
volume. To increase production they were faced with decisions of acquiring more
land, add equipment, and/or add more labor. How to pay for these changes were
definitely not clear to them because they lacked the financial data to make
those decisions.
Labor issues were a problem. Farmers wanted to keep their
experienced workers for multiple seasons. It took time to train new workers
each season. It made sense to do more to keep workers from year to year. Paying
enough is one avenue but like in other workplaces, other attributes for the
workers were important. Having a clear understanding of the farm policies for
workers, providing more advanced training, providing more responsibilities, and
having the workers feel they were a valued partner in the business was also
important. This project assisted growers in advancing policies to address improving
the working environment. A video was created as training tool for farmers to learn
how to write an employee handbook using the template provided. A second video tool created was how farmers and employees can overcome issues that can otherwise generate conflicts. Reducing stress and maintaining a healthy work environment is hugely important for owner/worker relations. This tool is titled Diffusing Conflict on the Farm.
In NY as in other parts of the country, extreme weather
conditions have played havoc with field production. Too wet. Too dry. Too wet
then dry then wet again in the same season contributed to yield losses. New crop
insurance programs for specialty crops along with other financial tools that
FSA and other agencies provided were available. The produce growers we worked
with had little or no knowledge about these programs. Many had misconceptions
about eligibility mainly believing it wasn’t for operations of their smaller
size. We brought in speakers from some of the county offices to address the
growers. Links to their websites for the information was made available.
A cross section of the growers involved in the project
represented farms from the organic and sustainable ag communities. Most of the
farms were very small (less than 5 acres) and the rest were less than 25 acres.
New farmers made up 30%. Beginning farmers made up 45%. The remaining 25% were
growers with 7+ years of farming experience. Women and non-gender-specific
individuals accounted for 10% of these groups. Urban farms accounted for 5%
The approach we took for initial outreach to growers using
online surveys (self assessments on labor, cost of production, and familiarity with
crop insurance) did not work very effectively at all. It seems like Extension
and other organizations were sending out surveys for everything and the farmers
“tuned out” the requests for responses. The pandemic didn’t help.
The pandemic stymied
most of the in-person workshops training and a lot of the in-person one on one
follow up. We took to calling farmers we knew to talk over the project and get
them to fill out or at least provide verbal information for the self-assessments.
Virtual conferences and stand-alone training were held but unlike in-person
meetings, the online audiences were smaller than hoped for. When we did have a
couple of in-person meetings, attendance was still low owing in part to the
late season burn-out of growers. To accomplish what we set out to do, we had to
rely on personal contacts with growers. To be less burdensome, we scaled back
the self-assessments to simple verbal questionnaires and relied more heavily on
just conversations/discussions.