Office work used to be what you had to get out of the way in order to get back to farming. Now, with e-mail, the ’net, financial planning and marketing, it is farming
Betty Turner gets right to the issue. “I always look out for ways to save time,” says Turner, who has farmed alongside her husband Dennis for 30 years near Killarney, Man. and who is also responsible for most of the accounting and bill paying. “And I take time to do it, just a little bit, every day.”
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As on many farms, the Turners have evolved a pattern based on their own skill-sets and preferences. They’ve also targeted efficiency, and are steadily improving by developing strategies to get them there.
Not surprisingly, the Turners’ drive to make their business administration even more efficient involves more and more use of the Internet. But there are lessons to be learned, agrees Wayne McDonald, a Cartwright, Man. farmer who found that as his specialized meat business expanded, his hours in the office were becoming a bottleneck that was hampering business growth.
McDonald operates a 1,000-acre grass-based farm in the province’s southwest, where he raises cattle, sheep, and Berkshire pigs who live their entire life outdoors. Grass-fed is a growing market, both locally and in Winnipeg, but growth creates its own problems.
McDonald quickly realized that manually tracking inventory, managing orders, arranging payment, and scheduling deliveries was an inefficient use of his time. As an alternative sales strategy, he began direct-marketing his beef, lamb and pork in 2006, focusing his efforts on Internet-based marketing through his business website at
“Most of the products that I have are seasonal, so there are certain times, particularly in the summer, when I get multiple
orders every day,” says McDonald, who also supplies a number of high-end restaurants in the city.
“With so much other stuff going on in the summer I don’t have any extra time to spend doing paperwork. Before I got the e-commerce software I was spending 15 to 20 hours per week during the peak season answering e-mails and co-ordinating deliveries by hand.”
The Turners, who farm on land originally homesteaded by Dennis’ great-grandad from Wales in 1891, have cut back from working their 2,000 acres to a more manageable 1,000 acres over the past couple of years. They used to run a 200-head Charolais-Angus cow-calf herd as well, and grow cereals and oilseeds, but now they are focusing on just the grain farming.
They are trying to take it easier, says Betty, but life is still surprisingly busy, and a key learning is that organization remains just as important as before.
Successful management, Betty says, starts by finding a routine that works, and then committing to it.
“First thing in the morning, I check the email and do the books,” Betty says. “Maybe 15 minutes a day of bookkeeping, on average. And I try to do as much online as I can.”
“I do things (cheques, payments) post-dated if I can. If something is due
