Feeling The Pinch

Feeling The Pinch Over the last three months I have really felt a bone aching tired that I can’t seem to shake.  Sure, work on the farm has increased and it's encouraging to find customers are seeking out real food, but I couldn't believe the workload had increased enough to make me feel this way.

I started to write down the tasks I do on a day to day basis, figure out what was involved from a time and energy perspective, then sift through the data and see what came out.

This was an interesting exercise and I would recommend it for anyone running their own business.  One element that I really wanted to share was the amount of work I was putting in to getting the chickens feed ready.

Let’s take a one tonne bulker bag of feed.  At the moment I do everything by hand so I bucket this into a wheelbarrow where I add additional elements of our custom ration.  Obviously, this means I have moved grain once.  Then I mix it by hand until all the grains are mixed evenly, lifting and dropping by hand more than equals moving the grain for a second time.  Then I shovel it into bags (this is three times) and then finally I feed this out to the chickens being the fourth time I have moved this grain by hand.

For every tonne of grain that we use, I move it by hand four times!  I’m too scared to calculate the tonnes I have moved by hand over the last year, but lets just say I now know why I’ve been starting to feel the pinch.

We have two grain silos on farm that were here when we bought it.  In the past I wondered if I would ever use them, well let me say the time has come.

While I will still bring the feed out to the chickens by hand, three quarters of the physical effort should not be needed any more and that is something I am certainly looking forward too.