Managing Farm Labor Costs

The past few years have posed unprecedented employee management challenges for local farms – from rising wages and employee shortages to the added demands of the pandemic and weather extremes. As your 2023 season ramps up, Presenter Ellen Polishuk of Plant to Profit will share insights to help you respond to these challenges, based on her decades of farm financial consulting and vegetable farm management experience. Ellen will offer tips for tracking and improving work efficiency, supporting effective teamwork, and evaluating labor-saving investments. You will also learn about farm financial assessment tools – like benchmarks and crop costing – that can help you identify the best avenues for increasing farm profitability to keep up with rising costs. The workshop is open to all, with farm owners and middle managers or crew leaders in particular standing to benefit from the on-the-ground tips and broader decision-making context provided in this workshop.

The standard workshop cost is $10. We offer a sliding scale to ensure anyone can attend, and additional attendees from the same farm business are welcome to attend free of charge; we do not want finances to be a barrier to attendance.

Please contact Kristen at kristen@buylocalfood.org or 413-665-7100 ext. 12 with any questions.

Funding for this workshop was made possible by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture, through the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program under subaward number LNE20-394.

Register here!