It was much harder than I thought it would be to snap spinach leaves with both hands at once. I was in a cold greenhouse on my first day working at a commercial organic farm — a job I thought I was prepared to do, because I spent so much of my time working in gardens and with livestock.
Most of those experiences were on hobby farms or with nonprofit organizations facing less financial pressure than a commercial operation. On a farm that someone’s livelihood depends on, calculating the costs of time and labor becomes seriously important.
Applying lessons from those operations to a homestead or home garden can make the work go more quickly and smoothly, creating a more pleasant experience for you and getting the most from the time you have to spend outside.
Work with both hands
Keeping both hands moving independently of each other at the same time makes a huge difference in how much you can accomplish. It takes some time to get comfortable with it, but it’s worth the learning curve.
For example, weeding goes by at twice the speed when one hand pulls as the other throws them into the bucket. If you’re transplanting seedlings, putting one in the ground while reaching for the next keeps a comfortable workflow.
Plan for efficiency
We also planned ways to complete farm tasks that would minimize repeated movement, such as finishing each step of a repetitive task, then moving on to the next. Doing this saved us time and physical strain.
To illustrate: when pulling onions, we harvested into the trays where they would dry for storage. Instead of carrying each full tray to the drying site, we picked all the onions in the field and then walked back down the row, picking up trays as we went.
Work in the right positions
I struggled quite a bit with the physical demands of full-time farming at first. For about six months, I could barely bend my knees. It was frustrating and scary to think about not being able to do work I loved.
Then I learned there were ways to make the motions of farming less painful, like pointing my knees slightly outward when crouching and thinking of my back like a door hinge when straightening up. The Labor-Movement website is a great source for lessons, and if you can find an in-person class, all the better.
My knees also improved once I let my vanity go and got some clunky foam clogs to work in, replacing my trusty old leather boots that had no arch support.
Sanitize
You can spread diseases from one bed to the other if you don’t sanitize your equipment between uses. This is especially a risk when pruning or otherwise cutting into the plant.
Between uses, you can wash your equipment with soapy water and sanitize with diluted bleach, peroxide or even rubbing alcohol. As a bonus tip to avoid spreading disease, I was taught not to handle tomatoes before the morning dew dries, because pathogens travel in the water.
How you act with your livestock makes a difference
This might not be as true for animals that aren’t too psychologically complex, like poultry. But larger livestock will act differently based on your behavior — what you reward them for doing, what you familiarize them with and even your emotions when approaching them.
If you give a goat more food to stop her from kicking on the milking stand, she’ll kick you every time. If you want an alpaca to move comfortably, spend time training it. If you’re trying to do anything with sheep, move confidently and calmly.
Sometimes, it’s worth renting equipment for big projects
The day will come when you need to dig two dozen post holes through clay dirt or bury an electric line. You could do it all by hand, but especially on a small scale, the time, labor and strain might cost more than borrowing or renting heavier equipment like an auger for digging.
Store your salad with extra air in the bag
When bagging salad greens for farmers markets, we learned that leaving air in the bag will make the harvest last longer. Pressed against the plastic and the other leaves, it might turn bad sooner.
When it comes to storing produce in general, keeping it in plastic bags — even in the fridge — will give you more time before the vegetables start to wilt or go soft.
There’s a contraption for everything
I probably don’t need to tell a homesteader the value of inventing solutions to their problems. But I was surprised by the little adjustments we could come up with on the farm to streamline our work.
Unrolling row cover and storing it conveniently was a pain, so we rolled it up on PVC pipes using a hand crank and two old sawhorses. The broadfork’s tines were six inches apart, so we started using it to mark the spacing we needed for transplanting.
I found that thinking like this took some adjusting to, but now it’s almost fun trying to solve problems.
Keep records
Organic certification requires detailed records of what seeds were planted where, what soil amendments went into the bed and what’s been harvested. I’d previously taken a pretty generous approach to my personal growing methods. But paying attention to everything happening on the farm is a good way to look for patterns and know what’s working and what isn’t from year to year, without having to rely on your memory.
