Time-motion studies in the garden

A neglected aspect of farming, in my opinion, is studying how to do repetitive tasks in the most efficient way. For example, finding how to shave a half second off a one and a half second movement that's repeated thousands of times in the course of a morning task would be helpful. Trickier still is getting people to share what they learn, and for others to adopt the improvement.

Between Whole Circle Farm and myself we've planted 20,000 garlic cloves in the last ten days (10,000 each). We clocked our rate (# of cloves per person hour), and found that it ranged from 300 cloves per hour, to 500, and as high as 1,000 cloves planted per person per hour.

In a recent garlic planting competition in the back garden Andrew aka "Pinchy"
hand-carved a wooden stake for his planting implement
(above right).

While Heather and myself threw down garlic in the assigned rows, Yana, Pinchy and Abhi braced themselves at the starting line. Pinchy started out strong, wielding his wooden stake with masterly strokes. He maintained the lead for the first 2/3rd of the 420' bed. But the effort of stabbing the soil to plant each clove tired him out, and by the end Yana pulled ahead, with her flat trowel. She finished ahead of Pinchy and Abhi with a comfortable margin, convincing the panel of judges that her planting modality is worthy of further study.










Below - Abhi and I working on another garlic bed.