The Organic Farmers Business Handbook: A Complete Guide to Managing Finances, Crops, and Staffand Making a Profit [Paperback]

Wiswall's book makes a decent start, and the costing templates are pretty good. It's nicely illustrated. The writing is appropriately colloquial and flows reasonably well within chapters.

The chapter structure, however, is rather incoherent, interspersing chapters on assorted aspects of cost accounting and very simple cash flow management with others on marketing, time management, and employees. A chapter on office paper flow is followed by one that lumps together retirement planning and business spending. Then comes one on greenhouses and field production efficiencies. The next chapter discusses writing a business plan, and then a final (3-page) chapter on estate planning. Huh?

The sections on production management will be quite helpful to people who've not considered such things systematically, but they do contain some rather sloppy errors. For example, on p. 100 he talks about setting the wheel spacings on all tractors to 60 inches (which is the same as we use for our vegetable production), yet in the very next paragraph he describes large plants such as squash as being on a "6-foot spacing overall."

Similarly, his basic stuff on office organization will be helpful to growers who are currently doing little more than handing a grocery sack full of receipts to their tax person once a year. Unfortunately, his ideas on managing the flow of funds between family and farm are somewhat convoluted. Intuit's accounting programs (which he uses) have easier ways of addressing the same problem. And using the same credit card for business and family purchases is just a giant make-work project.

Wiswall is way out of his depth in regard to all he writes about capital management. Since this book is obviously written for people with little management experience, how is it that a book published in 2009 is talking about interest yields of 5% for Treasury bonds and bank CDs. Bondholders will get clobbered when interest rates rise from their current multi-generational lows; and how many *sound* banks are offering 5% on a CD? Not only that, but average long-term returns of 8% in the stock market? That simply does not happen for people who invest when market valuations (in relation to corporate income) are as high as they are now. Following such simplistic advice will be hazardous to your money.

Which brings me to the most egregious error of all. On page 95 Wiswall declares "Tax avoidance is the main reason I capitalize my farm business. If I have a less profitable year and I'm not in need of a tax advantage, any machinery I purchase must strongly increase farm profitability; that is, the machinery must pay for itself quickly by saving other costs."

Tax avoidance should have absolutely nothing to do with capital purchases. Either they make sense, or they don't. He admits he's more careful about big-ticket purchases in a weak year than in a strong one. What kind of management is that? Such thinking leads to clusters of poor capital allocation that threaten business viability over the long term.

This book is written from the perspective of someone who thinks like a production manager. The great weakness of most family farms is that the owners don't think like business owners, or even CEOs. Their management and decision-making generally remains at the level of a production manager, or perhaps a VP Operations. Wiswall's book provides no departure from that managerial framework and does not effectively address the higher-level managerial challenges faced by most family farms. He nibbles at Holistic Management with his comments on goal setting at the beginning, but thereafter offers absolutely nothing from the excellent HM decision-making model. By all means visit [...] for some vastly better guidance.

That said, if you can't pick up two hundred bucks of tips from this thirty-dollar book ... you probably shouldn't be farming. It's definitely worth the money, and the companion CD will save you many hours of attempting to build the same thing yourself. Just treat his advice on higher-level management with lots of diligent skepticism, and do not expect any sort of logical and coherent over-arching structure to the writing.

Author Richard Wiswall has been farming for over 25 years on a cool organic farm in Vermont.

He has done farmers everywhere a service with this new book on running a profitable organic farming business.

Fine writing, good examples of what he's writing about, and a workbook style approach made Wiswall's book come alive for me.

I'd say he's written the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Organic Farmers, but there are at least ten habits farmers can learn about by reading this book.

And as someone who runs a small business, I would recommend the book to anyone who wants to succeed at building a business, growing a rich life for themselves and their community.

[...]
Loved the Tale of Two Brassicas where Wiswall tells how he learned the difference between growing kale and broccoli.

This book covers a lot of ground, from basic bookkeeping to crop-specific enterprise budgets. But my favorite thing about it is that is starts by asking the reader to consider his reasons for farming, and to use the resulting answers to create a personal statement of purpose. Even if you aren't a farmer, I would recommend reading the first two chapters and going through the process of prioritizing your values.
I own a small farm, and with three years of trial and error experience now under my belt, I found this book an incredibly useful distillation of some of the lessons I've already learned as well as some great new ideas for making my farm more productive and financially sustainable.

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