Elisabeth’s Reviews > The Lean Farm: How to Minimize Waste, Increase Efficiency, and Maximize Value and Profits with Less Work > Status Update

“If I have more greenhouse space or more cultivated land than I know what to do with, the. I am working for my farm rather than letting it work for me,” Paul explained to me. In recent years the Arnold’s have scaled back from 7 acres to fewer than 5 in cultivated production, “and we’ve seen our sales go up, not down.”

Many crops or animals are fun to care for yield low returns. Take the energy you were spending on low-return projects and put it into producing more of your best-selling items, it might sound obvious, but it is surprisingly hard to do.

Eliminated waste leaves a vacuum of time and resources to fill any way you please.

Cutting costs is an equally legitimate way to grow [profits] and comes with several benefits.

With vegetables it’s best to put together an accurate list of items you need to fill orders, then harvest precisely this list. This is more efficient than harvesting first and scrounging for markets second.

Farm meals can be a good way to turn extra produce into profit

Anytime you make a sale before you spend money on production, you create ideal conditions for controlling production.

Forecasting is hard work but absolutely worth the effort. The best way to forecast is to presale, as in a CSA model, which was a Japanese invention. CSA, which involves customers paying at the beginning of a growing season, eliminates almost all over production waste because the farmer knows exactly how much to produce.