Make Smart Equipment Choices

The right equipment choice can dramatically increase your chances of success.  The wrong choice can have the opposite effect.  The information required to make a smart equipment choice can be found throughout The Organic Path.

Assessing the impacts of the transition on your farm's production practices can illustrate the need to investigate tools for mechanical weeding.  Developing a Human Resource Management plan may lead you to the conclusion that the right kind of farm labour will not be available when you need it, therefore you will need to look a mechanization.  Good farm records can help you look at how much time was spent on different tasks, informing which activities should be done by hand and which can be helped by machines.  Market research and interviews with customers can provide feedback on product shelf life or preferred delivery days in can inform decisions about on-farm refrigeration.

The most important lens for you to view equipment choices is your Business Plan.  If you are farming ‘as a business’, it doesn’t matter whether you are looking at a REIGI weeder, a waterwheel planter or on farm refrigeration, equipment investments must make business sense.  They must advance your production, fit your system, save time, save labour, increase yield or quality.  You should always compare equipment purchase costs to alternatives such as hand labour, rental and custom work.  A further consideration is to include the maintenance costs, operation and repair skills, storage requirements and other potential users.  The fit with your current farm system is critical.  Is it matched to the size of your property, your row spacing and shed layout?  Can you use it for multiple crops and activities or just for s specific purpose?  Will the new piece of equipment work with your existing equipment or will you need a new tractor to pull that plow?  As a rule of thumb, equipment that can serve the most uses and provide the best bang for the buck should be acquired before more specialized pieces.

Equipment purchase decisions should be made in the context of your financial requirements, long term plans for the farm and personal and family situations.

In some scenarios, you may decide to not use the equipment or find alternative ways to procure it. (see Buy, Lease, Rent, Borrow?).  You may also be able to answer the question “can I get an animal to do this?”. Whether working the fields by hand, hiring a neighbour or using chicken tractors and draft horses, those decisions should be subject to the same analysis as mechanical equipment.  Labour can be scarce.  Using draft animals takes considerable skill and your neighbour may require the equipment at the exact same time as you.

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