From Instinct to Insight

Using Data to Make Better Farm Decisions

Overview

Family farms are facing increasing pressure from rising labor costs, tighter margins, and more complex day to day decisions. What worked in the past does not always provide the visibility needed today.

Hosted in partnership with Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, this webinar brings together real world insight and practical perspective to support farmers across the state.

Join John Paul Baugher, Orchard Manager at Adams County Nursery, and Ashley Reese, FieldClock, for a conversation on how farms are evolving from experience based decision making to more data supported approaches, without losing the instincts and values that define successful operations.

In this session, we will cover:

• How farm decision making has changed over time
• Where operations are feeling the most pressure today
• What data driven guidance looks like in practice
• How better visibility into labor and daily operations supports stronger decisions
• Common challenges facing farms, especially smaller operations
• Why access to simple and practical tools is becoming increasingly important

This session is designed to provide a practical, real world perspective that farmers can apply to their own operations as they navigate today’s challenges and plan for the future.

Transcript

ASHLEY

Family farms are facing increasing pressure from rising labor costs, tighter margins and more complex day to day decisions. What worked in the past doesn't always provide the visibility needed today. I'm actually Reese with FieldClock and we're proud to be partnering with Pennsylvania Farm Bureau to bring conversations like this to their members. Today I'm joined by John Paul Baker, orchard manager at Adams County Nursery.

JP, I really appreciate you taking the time to join me today and what I'm looking forward to here is a real conversation on how decision making on farms is changing, what that looks like in practice, and how farms are starting to think differently about visibility and day to day operations. So with that, JP, I'd love to start with your operation.

JP

Sure. Thank you. Ashley, we are a fifth generation. I'm the fifth generation of our family farm. We grow both nursery trees as well as orchard crops. We grow about 250 acres of orchard crops, 90% of that being apples and 10% peaches. And then we we handle a lot of nursery.

ASHLEY

All right. Well, I'll start with this. I think I've mentioned this to you, JP. I'm a big fan of Adams County, growing up in new Jersey working on an apple and peach orchard. Adams County was one of our primary vendors, so I don't know if you known this, but I was very excited to meet you guys when I first started working at FieldClock

So coming to your operation, learning more about it was is was huge for me, and I'm very excited for this moment as well. So if you could share for not only me, but everyone else listening a little bit more about Adams County, Adams County, your nursery, your operation and what it looks like.

JP

Yeah. So we're a fifth generation farm, growing both nursery stock and orchard production, mainly in apples. About 250 acres of apples and 20 acres of peaches. It's a very dynamic operation. There's a lot going on at many times of the year, so it's hard to keep your head on right sometimes.

ASHLEY

Now you have multiple locations, too. You're not just in Pennsylvania. You're also in Delaware.

JP

Yes. That's correct. So most of our nursery operation is grown in Delaware. We grow probably 90% of it in Delaware, mostly apples. And then we have our stone fruit and pears grown in PA.

ASHLEY

Wow. That's that's a that's a really big operation. Now, having the two operation, having the two locations. How many employees would you say you have during your peak season.

JP

In peak were around 150, I think during the summer and like early fall when we're picking budding and all that, all that.

ASHLEY

That's a that's a lot to manage.

JP

Yeah.

ASHLEY

All right. So now you mentioned that your fifth generation generation, how did you get started working with the family. And what is your role look like today.

JP

So I started sitting apples when I was I think it was 1412. And so that's how I started. It was not the most enjoyable summer job as a teenager, but that's how I got started and I decided I wanted to go to school for horticulture, went to Penn State and came back to the farm and kind of worked under as an assistant orchard manager under my dad.

And after he retired, I've taken on the orchard management position.

ASHLEY

Okay. Very cool. So what is what is that role look like day to day? Are you are you working with employees? Are you working on the back end? What does that look like for you?

JP

A little bit of everything where a lot of hats answer a lot of questions.

Anyone in this business. Whereas about as many hats as you can.

ASHLEY

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. So now going back to when you first started Apple fitting and then taking that to today, how has your operation changed over time? How was your dad managing it back when you were younger, and how is that I guess, transitioned as you and your siblings started to really take more responsibility.

JP

As time has progressed and more tools have become available to us, we've really tried to use those tools to the best of our advantage. You know, when I started, we were all doing paper time sheets and.

It there was a more a gray area in management than what we can afford to have now. And so we are really driven to know everything that happens when it happens, why it happens, and the outcome of it in our generation because we have the tools available to us.

ASHLEY

I I'm so glad you're doing that. A lot of, a lot of farms do struggle with the visibility aspect and have that really gray area. However, some farms aren't as willing to utilize new tools. Would you say that you know the culture in your family and your operation has been to look forward, look for, and adapt new tools?

Or would you say that there's been some reluctance?

JP

There's a little bit of both. There's reluctance. But as these tools and softwares and everything has developed over the last ten, 15 years, it's become a lot easier of a of a question to answer.

There definitely is some reluctance for trying new things, but whenever you can dip a toe in it, prove it, and then use it, it's really powerful.

ASHLEY

Excellent. Yeah, a lot of a lot of farms do struggle with that. I'm glad that you guys are able to do it. And, you know, the cost of labor couldn't be any higher. I mean, it can. It's going up every year. But it's so important to to remove that gray area as much as possible and control what is in your power to control.

You know, last night JP was out doing apple apple sprays. And you know, we all know this time of year is really difficult with frost and all of those things. So those those aspects are really outside of your control. But being able to control your visibility, your cost of labor as much as you can. That's really where you where you help work on your margins for sure.

Well, that's really helpful context when you think about how things have evolved over time, what pressures are making decisions more difficult on the farm?

JP

I think the biggest thing that makes decisions more difficult is that they are more.

Real. You know, every decision that he makes needs to be generally a good decision. Not that they weren't in the past, but there was a little bit more margin for error, I think a little bit more margin for that gray area you were talking about more and more. You know, we are labor has gone up and the price of our crop has not really it's been fairly stagnant.

So we feel that squeeze. And so we need to understand exactly what we're doing, what the outcome is and what it is costing us or ours. It's taking us. It helps us plan. It helps us. It helps us do a lot of things.

ASHLEY

So going back to thinking about how you operate now and going back to the pen and paper days where you had that gray area, how how was your family making decisions then?

JP

Got.

Educated decisions? Of course, less quantitative decisions than we are now.

ASHLEY

I bet now we're talking a lot about, you know, labor and really understanding where your people are and, and helping to, to control things on the farm. Where do you see the most benefit from that visibility, and where do you think that other operators or farms need that visibility?

JP

I find it useful everywhere, really visibility by task of what you're doing and the cost associated with that task and correlating that to the outcome of that task. You know, you decide to go summer, prune this block. Is it worth it? Well, it might feel like it's worth it. And you look back and you're not getting the outcome that you wanted for the time and money that you put into it.

And so it's a good it's a good measuring device. It's great for forecasting. I mean, it takes time to build up your own data set of hours during certain times of the year. But it can be a really powerful tool whenever you're deciding how many H-2a employees you bring or.

Just kind of forecasting where your crop might be or might not be, where you might be coming short, whether you might, it might tell you that you might need an extra guy or two that you can hire locally. So it's it's very powerful that way, but it's also powerful, I think, from historical data collection standpoint. I mean, the data that you're collecting by tracking whatever you'd like to track.

You have the history of what you're doing, how long it takes, how long it should take. And excuse me, developing trends based on that can be very useful for forecasting as well.

ASHLEY

Well, that's interesting that that you're bringing up trends. And then just going back to JP age 12, I feel as though a lot of farms have an ebb and flow to their season, and there are certain things that they do every season because that's what they do every season. And I like your example of, I think you had mentioned summer summer pruning, summer thinning.

I apologize, but it's something that you seem to be doing every year. But is it is it cost effective? Is is this worth it? And I really like being able to look at some of the historical tasks that farms do every year. And really being able to understand, is this worth the effort that we're putting into it? And a lot of times I feel like the cost of labor, even though we know is increasing, we're not really understanding how it's impacting those tasks day to day and whether or not they should continue doing them.

Do you have any other examples of an area where you were able to really identify? Maybe this wasn't worth the effort or you were able to quickly pivot?

JP

Yeah. So another good example or a good way of looking at it is and kind of a historical just way of doing things was having large group doing large tasks. And that gets a task done quicker because the amount of people. But the amount of output per person we have found when they're in larger groups is less. So it's are you better off spending an hour with 15 guys doing this task, or are you better, better off spending ten hours doing this task with, you know, ten guys or whatever the math is?

And it's just allowing us to precisely locate where our inefficiencies are. And, you know, yes, the job doesn't sometimes the job does need to get done in an hour. And in that case, you would put 50 guys to do that task. In other cases, it might be okay for that job to take nine, ten, 20 hours with a smaller group and it's done more efficiently.

ASHLEY

Yeah, that's that's really interesting actually. That's really interesting. And what I love about the visibility aspect and almost testing out different concepts like that. So a lot of our farmers who are still using pen and paper are looking at their year in December when they're going through their numbers and they're making decisions and weighing out and figuring out their plan of attack for the upcoming year.

But what I like about having the right tools in place, or real time tracking tools, is that you can see something like this. You can see your group of 50 guys and that you're not as effective in that larger group. And look at that today and decide tomorrow I'm going to break that group up into smaller groups and see from one day to the next day if it has a result on your productivity.

So you're not waiting till the end of the year to make those decisions and hopefully remembering to implement them the next year, you can actually test those theories out day to day.

JP

Yes, that's absolutely right.

ASHLEY

That's I mean, I know I'm a big nerd, but that's really cool. Have there been moments where.

Clear information changed your approach? So taking your example of 50 employees and understanding they may not be as productive. Have you started actually changing your approach to farming or some of the tasks that you're doing simply by having more information?

JP

Yeah, or at least start thinking about different ways of doing them for sure. One of them was working in smaller group task, but another thing that we've kind of teased out is we started trying to get into platform work to move crews through the orchard and for picking. We do it throughout the year, but for picking mainly, and we we were able to tease out data that shows that we are more efficient in the platforms, which we were presuming, but more so even more efficient than the crews working in the bottom, which takes up a lot larger weighted average of time because of the number of people.

And so now we're starting to think, okay, well, how do we make the bottom picking the bottoms of the trees more efficient? How do we need to reconfigure the crews to balance to our picking style that we're doing right now? You know, how do we get the bin wagons with the bins closer to the people that are picking?

Maybe instead of picking forwards at a time, we pick 2 or 1. You know, having that data that's clearly shows that the the efficiency difference between those two groups, we can pinpoint the one group and go, okay, how do we make this more effective and easier on the guys and easier on everybody? How do we do that? Because we can actually see now the numbers.

It's a stark difference.

ASHLEY

That's amazing. Just being able to understand where you're at. Add a small tweaker change for the day. See if it has an impact and then grow from there. Is is incredibly helpful and insightful. And I can see how something like this would be very powerful as well. When you're when farms are thinking about maybe mechanized in some way or investing in some machinery and they want to know, is this worth the investment?

It will this tool will this platform will this whatever we're buying make sense. And do we want to expand on it. Is it worth the investment. So that's a really great way of using it. And you know just from the outside looking in I think that your family, your operation is is very dynamic. And I'm, I'm so excited that you're using tools like FieldClock to make these decisions and make your operation more effective and efficient.

JP

Yeah, it really helps you benchmark like your historical, you know, we go out and do this, you know, it helps you benchmark those practices and it helps you. It's a phenomenal tool whenever you're doing these reinvestment things to say, oh, this is actually working or this isn't working. It's a good measure on that investment.

ASHLEY

Absolutely. And you made a comment earlier too, about wanting to to try something to see if it's worth the investment. So having something like FieldClock allows you to do that with other tools. And you know, again, farming is, is is really, really difficult and challenging. And we need all the help that we can get and having something that can help make those choices and decisions measurable is incredibly essential.

So this is actually I was really excited to ask you these questions because again, we're doing this webinar for Pennsylvania Farm Bureau for other farmers in your community in the state. And a lot of our family farms are are struggling. And sometimes that comes from, you know, not wanting to to utilize a tool like this or change their operation, maybe understanding what is effective or isn't.

But when you look at other farms, especially smaller operations, where do you see them struggling?

JP

I think I can see the struggle in the reinvestment, the investments necessary to stay relevant in the industry. There's there's some of that. And also just the struggle between managing the business operation and the physical operation there, there two different things that need to work together. And oftentimes if you sacrifice one for the other. So I think this is a good tool to help kind of bring them back together.

ASHLEY

So I agree and I really agree. You had mentioned in the very beginning, you know, that you wear many hats and you do have a I would say you have your family in general. You have a great United team and a lot of people in, in the process of being able to help you. And I'm not saying that that makes it easier by any means, but if your operation is the size that it is and you're wearing many hats, a lot of our family farms that maybe have just one person, two people trying to manage all of those things, the the back end, the office work and the farming.

There is a sacrifice there. Absolutely. Is there are not enough hours in the day. And I think what sometimes farmers don't realize is that there now are tools available and they aren't like they were. I think there's some farmers are hesitant to use technology because they think that it's going to be a lot of work, and if they do something wrong, it's going to break the whole system, where if you have a smartphone today, you really can't break it.

It's it's very difficult, right? But if you have tools that work for you on the back end to make your life easier, it becomes a little bit easier to balance. And not only that, a lot of our family farms to have multi-generational farms as well, where we're learning from mom and dad and and you then take over that institutional knowledge needs to come with you.

But it's also a good thing to start recording that knowledge, recording the ebb and flow of your operations. So in case something were to happen, you're not relying on that person to be able to pick up and move forward. So if mom does payroll right, and you've never done it before, how do you pick up the pieces if something happens?

So I think that that's that's really important too. But I love that you you talk about the disconnect between the office and the farm, and I couldn't agree more that farms are really struggling in that area.

JP

Yeah, yeah. And in this scenario, I would almost even say there's a there's a back end, there's a front end and there's a middle end. Yeah. Yeah. I, I spent a lot of time at the end of the days, especially during busy seasons when I don't have time to look at it. You know, I can go in after dinner, before dinner or whatever and say, oh, we spent X amount of time or X amount of money or we picked this many bushels today or whatever.

And it's really cool to see real time.

ASHLEY

Absolutely. What would you say to farms or operations that are hesitant to using new tools because of adoption? Maybe they're they're think their employees won't be able to use it or understand it, I guess. What advice would you give them and how have you handled that aspect on your farm?

JP

Well, you got it's mindset. You got to try.

You know, the first step to adoption is trying it right. And there's definitely been some.

Hurdles to adopting some of these things. And just just you have to put your good foot forward and work through them. And, you know, kind of maybe be a little bullheaded and say, well, this is what we're going with. But.

It does take some follow up to get people to change. People don't like to change. I understand that.

But it's been our experience with field has been great. There's a lot of support, which is very important when you're entering into.

These newer investments. We've had some softwares and stuff that hasn't had that support like field has, and that's been very helpful and really just.

Continuing to try to move forward.

Has been has worked for us.

It it's not the easiest going for everybody, but we've been using it. How long actually.

ASHLEY

Well longer than I have been here actually. So I was I've been here for three years now. So I know that you've you've been here before that.

JP

Yeah. So it's been. Yeah, probably 5 or 6 years and there's still some I wouldn't say hesitancy, but people that struggle with it and those people are always, I think, going to struggle with it. But we've been able to manage.

ASHLEY

Very cool, very cool. I appreciate I appreciate the answers. With that, going back to our our community, our family farms, what would you what are some big gaps that you see for them right now when it comes to information and tools?

JP

I think there's a huge data gap.

Similar to like we were talking earlier.

Nowadays, data is everything. You can't afford to make a wrong decision really. And having that data as a tool, whether for forecasting or historical data or knowledge or.

Starting to collect that data, you can you can leverage that for a lot of things moving forward. And it's the hardest thing to start collecting it because it's like, well, I'm doing all this work, I'm collecting all this data and what am I doing with it? But, you know, eventually 2 or 3, five years down the road, you have this incredible amount of data that's kind of pointing you in the direction that you need to go.

It it it's.

Showing you what you, what your gut feeling was. Sometimes it's showing you sometimes. Well, this wasn't the right way to go. Maybe we need to adjust a little bit, but the having that available to you to use is very powerful.

ASHLEY

Have you ever have? Do you have a time where you or your team has been surprised where you really thought something was working, and it just wasn't?

JP

I can't think off the top of my head of a specific moment, but more so going back to the large group work kind of thing and speed at which you're moving through a specific task and or block.

And it's a different way of thinking about it. But as long as you're able to complete the task in a certain amount of time, a time window, you know, it's a lot more efficient sometimes to do it a different way. Yeah. It's any specific? Yeah, it's yeah. It's counterintuitive.

ASHLEY

No, absolutely. That's it's just a really interesting way of thinking about it. From your perspective.

Why is it important for farms to have access to simple and practical tools?

JP

I think, or ease of use to help lighten the load.

As simple as good, practical is good.

Helping out with back end work whenever the front end is always there, staring you right in the face. Okay, it's very helpful that way. But like I said, I think, I think the data aspect of it is very important, even more so now than ever.

ASHLEY

Absolutely. And just I guess from your perspective, I think sometimes when, when some smaller operations like here, data reporting and for me, I think I envisioned something super complicated when it comes to the dashboard and reporting tools. I know that what you guys are working on is a little bit more intricate, but when it comes to the general reporting and ease of use, how would you describe the dashboard reports to someone who would be just starting out?

JP

There? Very meaningful at face value. I think I think they're even more meaningful when you dive into it. I like data, I love Excel files, so I, I'm not sure if I use the tool correctly, but it works for me.

You're you're able to pull data on a task and block or however you set it up. Pretty simply, I export it as a CSV and put it into Excel file for myself.

ASHLEY

Very cool, very cool. And for for those listeners who are not Excel gurus like myself, there are some one click tools that will give you some great visual aids as well, with no need to export Excel files.

JP

That's how I like to do it.

ASHLEY

No. Hey, listen. And that's why I love this tool. Because if you love Excel, you can download raw data quickly and easily. If you're a visual person like I am, you can just do one click and you can actually see graphs and you're at task by by block, by variety. So, you know, there's there's a little bit of something for everyone for sure.

All right. That's a really valuable perspective. And as we start to wrap up here, just being nosy, what made you being what made you open to being part of a conversation like this?

JP

Generally speaking, I've been very pleased with our experience with.

We've worked with you now for many years, and I think it's been a wonderful tool to use. We used 1 or 2 other timekeeping softwares before FieldClock but the and we found field to be the right fit for us.

ASHLEY

Right. What is one thing that you wish you had started tracking sooner?

JP

I wish we would have started sooner. Tracking all of our tasks just from a historical perspective, to have more meaningful data earlier on. I feel like right now we have some really meaningful data, and it would have been really cool to have five years ago. But the important step was to start as far as specifically. It's hard to say.

There's just so many things that we've found out through tracking over the years. And just generally speaking, I wish we could have started accumulating that information sooner.

ASHLEY

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Now, before we close things out, what do you hope other growers take away from this webinar?

JP

I think if other growers take away that this is a good tool to use to help with administrative tasks of timekeeping, as well as just starting to work with systems that help you develop a deeper and more thorough understanding of your data and your day to day decision making and the effects that it has on your operation.

ASHLEY

I couldn't agree more. Farms certainly need every every tool available for them that's going to make them more successful, their operation more successful, so that this way they can keep their farm for generations to come.

JP

Yeah.

ASHLEY

Well, JP, I really appreciate you taking the time to share your perspective with us. And I really do think that this is something that's going to resonate with a lot of other growers. So thank you again for your time and and talking with me today.

JP

Yeah. Thank you.

All right.

ASHLEY

The goal is simple. We're here to help farmers keep better records, gain visibility into their operation, and make better decisions with confidence. And through this partnership with Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, we're making that more accessible and affordable for farms across the state. Thank you for your time.