I made some minor changes in 2025, had no major accidents, and it was one of the smoothest years in a long time labor wise. As a result, the net dollars per hour were the highest I’ve seen yet, averaging $22.15/hr. If you want to see the fancy graphs and longer explanations of how I come to that number check back to posts from prior years.
2025 was a decent year weather wise, pretty warm and dry actually. The biggest way we feel this is that when we have good weather, especially dry weather, it takes us less time to do things like preparing beds, planting, weeding, harvesting, etc. We still had a lot of residual weed pressure and some spots that really got away from us, but more than in the past few years we also had labor available and good weather when we needed it to stay more on top of the weeds.
Staying on top of the weeds helps with yields. Fewer weeds and higher yields help make harvesting more efficient. Dry weather tends to make cleaning the produce more efficient. So all of those things seem to have added up this year.
My crew this year was experienced and worked consistently. Sara has been with the farm for a few years now and that makes a difference saving time in how much of an explanation any given task needs. A few years ago we had a great high school student work with us for a couple of summers and this year his younger brother came and worked with us for the summer, and he was just as good as his older brother. I also didn’t do any major travel this year so that helped smooth things out. When I look at the graph of labor hours per month this year compared to the past seven years this year was the smoothest and we were only slightly above the labor budget I had set.
In addition to the weather and labor lining up well this year we went back to year round harvesting, adding the spring season back into the mix. That meant more gross revenue than last year when we took the spring off from harvesting. Part of what we were seeing was likely the result of having rested a portion of the beds last year and those beds were relatively weed free and fertile after a year without crops. We put the onions and shallots there, crops that love fertility and are sensitive to weeds, and it definitely helped their yields, and more importantly for us, reduced the amount of time it took to prep, plant, weed and harvest.
Having said all of that, I probably should reduce the net income a bit in the calculations to account for the relative lack of maintenance we did this year, something we’re going to have to address this coming year. This just means that in a sense I expect next year to not look nearly as good on paper as I spend more time and money making needed repairs on equipment and infrastructure. For any of you wanting to get nerdy about how I’ll account for that in the books, think depreciation. I’m currently not using any depreciation expenses and that will change next year.