While most farmers would rather be in the fields pulling weeds than making spreadsheets, recordkeeping is an essential part of your farm business to track financial health, keep track of what works and what doesn’t in your production, and for your taxes. It can also be required for food safety certifications.
What kind of records might I want to/need to keep?
- Financial records: including income and expenses, receipts and invoices, payroll records, tax records.
- Production records: including crop yields, livestock records, feed/fertilizer/inputs, and pesticides/herbicides.
- Operational records: including equipment maintenance, inventory, crop rotation, and soil tests.
- Regulatory compliance: including permits & licenses, food safety compliance, enviornmental compliance, and animal welfare compliance.
- Sales and marketing: customer information, sales records, marketing campaigns.
- Labor records: employee information, work schedules, training records.
- Insurance policies and claims.
- Safety records: incident reports and safety trainings.
- Other: contracts and agreements, important correspondance, and logins/passwords for apps etc.
That sounds overwhelming. How do I make record-keeping as efficient as possible?
The answer to that question is going to depend a lot on who you are, how your brain works and what the flow of work is like at your farm/office space. The resources below give some examples of how other farms do it, but one of the key takeaways is that the system has to make sense to YOU. This means, if you are a tactile person, your system might be more based in pen and paper, with binders and laminated checklists. If you’re a phone person, you might do a lot with pictures, videos, and notes. If you’re into apps, there are many created for farmers, or you might go a long way with creating spreadsheets on google sheets.
Small Farm RecordKeeping Workflow: this is a great 4-minute video which shows one farmers’ systems (both on paper and on the computer) from crop planning through to taxes. She mentions a few apps that are helpful to make the process easier.
This is a webpage that has a simple system using photos/videos on your phone, some paper systems, and some spreadsheets and docs. https://www.hobbyfarms.com/record-keeping-is-essential-for-farm-operations/
These are two articles that have some helpful big-picture thinking about creating your own record-keeping system.
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