Farming/Non-Farming Schedule

Probably the most common question we get related to the farm is how do we do it all since we work full-time "office" jobs as well as maintain the farm. For those who see the things we post on social media, one could wonder when the work on the farm gets done when we're both working non-farm jobs during core working hours. The first point I'd say is that I'm the 6th generation Meister to work on the farm so it's been done by many families over the last 200 years and even my grandparents had off-farm jobs with my grandmother working as a teacher while my grandfather worked 100% on the farm. 

The three major reasons we can schedule two jobs are; automation, flexibility, and limited commitments. Automation is the first thing I'll talk about.

The picture above is of my firewood processor. This machine cuts back my time to making our 7 cords of firewood from 3 hours per cord to 1 hour per cord. The processor is an example of finding ways to do work in a shorter and more efficient way with less people power. We have tried to find machines or processes that shorten the time to complete our work which saves time to do other things. 

The second part is flexibility and the ability we have with our "office" jobs but also with the farm work. We are both lucky to work at companies that value the farm work we do and also our careers themselves allow us, particularly post-COVID, to work remotely.  This means we usually are up at 5 or 6AM to do morning chores (instead of commuting) then start working our office jobs around 7:30AM until lunch when we can pop out and do something like take the dogs for a walk or ted hay for 20 minutes or so. Once our work day ends at 4pm we can go right outside and start working on farm work until 9 or 9:30PM in the summers. This gives us about 5 - 6 hours a day to get farm work done, and that doesn't include weekends and vacation time. 

Limiting commitments probably sounds odd when I am talking about the commitments we have with our office work and farm tasks but it really means the evaluation we have on taking on new things. The big one is that we don't have kids, which frees up a lot of capital and time from raising children to doing things like fencing or haying. This also includes things like volunteer activities which we do a lot less then we used to do when we first moved home. It also includes limiting commitments on the farm which for us meant reducing the cattle herd from 31 at peak (calves included) that dad could raise to 12 (with calves). For my dad, it was his full-time job but for us we can't raise that many but 9-12 cattle at any given time is a perfect number for us.