The value of informal record-keeping

If you record your production and general farming notes in a diary, you’ll have ready access to a wealth of information in a few years, says Bill Kerr.

The value of informal record-keeping
These diaries hold useful information that would be difficult to allocate to a specific file, whether on paper or digitally.
Photo: Bill Kerr
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Most farmers have some form of record-keeping and usually keep a file for each crop. Each farmer will have a slightly different system, depending on the crops grown and the volume of each, and the information will include a record of expenditure and income.

Many farmers find themselves wanting to write a brief note on something, but don’t know where to do it, as there may not be a suitable file available. So they either omit to do it, or scribble it on a piece of paper, but fail to file it away properly for later reference.

The diary
I have found that a page-a-day diary is ideal for this purpose. It can be kept conveniently on your desk and used for recording many things that don’t justify an entire file.

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Examples are names and telephone numbers written down after conversations, a reminder to yourself to buy some production inputs, or farm-related events such as a hailstorm or the breakdown of a pump.

Having done such record-keeping for many years, I’ve always found the information easy to look up, as I can usually link it to the time of the year. Even when I cannot remember the precise year that the event occurred, it still doesn’t take long to find the information, as I simply go through each diary at that time of the year.

I keep all my old diaries together on a shelf for easy reference.

Small-scale farmers
The diary method can also be used by small-scale farmers for production purposes, and can include costs.

The crop planted, the land under cultivation, the time of planting, the dates of spraying, and the product used should all be recorded.

The dates of harvesting, too, can be noted. This often clearly shows that the plant-to-harvest periods vary during the year.

For example, when working for a large estate years ago, I saw that the same quantity of cabbages planted every week over the planting season would sometimes produce 12 000 bags of cabbages a week and, at other times, only 4 000 bags.

This made it difficult to work out our labour requirements, and also resulted in wildly fluctuating prices. What was required was a uniform harvest, and I set out to achieve this.

I noticed from my diary records that the same variety of cabbage would take 80 days to mature at certain planting dates, and 130 days at later dates. So I used the records to calculate how much to plant and when.

When my boss saw I hadn’t planted for three weeks, he became worried and asked for an explanation. He was rather sceptical, but allowed me to continue.

It worked like a dream: we produced 7 000 bags a week throughout the season, which made management of our workers far easier and prevented us from periodically overstocking the market and lowering the price.

Bill Kerr is a vegetable specialist and a breeder of a range of vegetables.