Selecting the Right Tools and
Equipment for Small Farms
Ron Macher
Small Farm Today
Clark, Missouri
Many small farmers are part-time, so the tools they select must be durable and dependable, since they must get the job done after work or on weekends.
A great amount of the people entering agriculture today do not come from the farm. They have good business skills and computer skills, but they do not have the basic knowledge of farm tools and how to use them. In our magazine, Small Farm Today, 41% of our readership have farmed for five years or less. Even mainstream farmers entering into organic markets from "spray to death" programs don't remember or never learned how to set a cultivator or adjust a plow. Where will these people get this basic information?
Innovation and the old principles of Make It Yourself, Wear It Out, Use It Up, and Make It Do certainly apply to the small farmer who cannot afford the fixed costs of equipment used infrequently on the farm. The small farmer's biggest limiting factors for success are time and capital.
Capital can be saved with careful shopping. A new small round baler, for instance, can be purchased for $6,500. An old AC-roto baler (which does the same thing) can be purchased for $150. Which should the farmer buy? Small farmers must keep machinery costs to a minimum, and should always "shop around."
Innovation also saves capital. An old one-row horse drill can be converted to a three-point tractor hitch and is good for planting cover crops on the tops of raised beds. On my farm, the cost of purchasing a drill at a sale and converting it was about $70.
A one-row cole planter equipped with a large single coulter wheel enables a small farm to plant in heavy plowed-down cover crops. Two disks mounted on a cultivator frame can be used to till one row of corn or potatoes or widened out to establish a raised bed.
Pallets/packing crates are available in many areas for free. With just a little imagination, shipping crates can be effectively turned into housing, feeders, fencing and other projects at little or no cost to the farmer.
How a farmer markets his or her crop can also affect the equipment he needs. The four problems a farmer faces are weather, pestilence, price, and government.
If 20% of a farmers' income is based on the crop, and 80% is based on income from direct marketing and value-added products (such as selling whole hog sausage instead of the hog), then the risk from these problems is reduced. Direct marketing requires no machinery and value adding usually requires minimal machine investments.
There are a few other things I have learned in 30 years of farming. On a small farm, each tool should do more than one job and be used frequently over the largest area possible to be cost effective. Just because equipment or technology is new does not make it better, and just because it is old does not make it obsolete. Picking the right tool for the right job is the small farmer's greatest challenge. I believe the greatest technological tool a small farmer can use is his or her own brain. A farm cap logo should not be doing the farmer's thinking. Those who work with small farmers need to encourage them to use the tools they have.
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