Getting The Farm Ready for Spring: A Beginner's Guide
Getting our farm ready for spring can seem overwhelming, especially when you look at the to-do list we have drafted over the winter. We often get asked how we do it all on the farm but the fact is all farmers, including the 5 generations before us, had the same long list of spring tasks to do and had it harder with less mechanization in the process.
After working on the farm over the years, watching how Dave's Dad did it and also watching other farms, we have come up with some tips and tricks we use to stay on track with the spring workload.
Start small: Don’t try to do everything at once. Start with a few small tasks and work your way up. Keeping a running to-do list and breaking it into a monthly calendar helps break the tasks up.
Get organized: Keep your farm well-organized and clutter-free. A farm naturally has a lot of things to clean up from downed trees to overgrown bushes around roads as well as even just keeping machine implements out of the way. Keeping things organized and cleaned up will help reduce stress and increase productivity.
Learn from others: We are always looking for new ways to do our work around the farm and learn from others. We follow a lot of farm groups online specific to Nova Scotia, and we like to see the Q&A discussion that often takes place. This often is a good space for learning what other do to tackle spring work.
Take care of yourself: Maybe it's a sign of getting older but we try and build more time for self-care during these busy periods. In years past we would often work every waking minute to keep up on everything but over the years, we have cut back on the number of cattle on the farm and tasks that have low rates of return in revenue or benefit to the farm. This means when Christina wants to take a day to go thrifting or I want to go try a new place to eat, we build in the time to do it.
Be patient: One of the biggest lessons we've learned over the years is that we can't do everything at once and not only that, things can get delayed. We may have a machine breakdown, weather issues or an unexpected building repair to tackle. That means other things get delayed and we have built in a lot more patience over the years because of it.
Stay flexible: Similar to being patient, staying flexible is one of the biggest lessons we have learned about not only farming but being entrepreneurs. Sometimes our spring time to-do list needs to be changed to adapt to new situations and circumstances. We've learned that the only constant is change and we have to maintain a degree of flexibility in all our spring planning.
Have fun: Recently I (Dave) read an Instagram post about a farming couple in the US where they felt they were losing some of the fun of farming due to the volume of products they produced and the stresses that come from issues out of their control. One thing we don't want to lose, specifically going into spring, is the sense of fun and excitement we get from all the farm work we currently enjoy.
Keep records: This is something we are always trying to improve. Currently, we record things like calves being born, garden plans and even event details from previous years. They are super helpful when we do go into spring to track what we do but see what we did last year but we could always improve on this. Since it resembles a lot of our non-farm work in our office jobs, we tend to push ourselves on this more.
Stay organized: This is almost a year-long activity but in spring it seems to be a focal point for the year. We try an organize our planning and thoughts for the coming year during the spring. Christina specifically tries to organize our farm paperwork for income taxes while I work on planning for the cattle to go out to pasture in May. We also find staying organized means keeping up on digital work like our website, social media and blog posts as well as finances for things like income tax.
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