08/25/2026
We tie every harvest on this farm to what it cost us and what it sold for, all in one Google Sheet, and we just put the whole system on YouTube.
Most farm records live in pieces. Harvest totals in one notebook, labor hours on a timesheet, packaging receipts in a folder, sales invoices somewhere else. You can have all four and still not know if last Tuesday made money. Our sheet connects them.
Every harvest day gets its own line: what came off the field by variety, the packing labor it took to get it into crates, the packaging cost for those crates, and the sales that specific harvest produced. Read across one row and you see what that day actually did for the farm.
That is the part the video is really about. Not bookkeeping for tax season, but understanding your day to day function while the season is still running. Which days pick efficiently.
When packing labor creeps past what the fruit is bringing in. Where packaging is eating margin. Which accounts pay well for what you have on the days you have it. When the numbers sit next to each other in an easy to read format, the decisions make themselves.
2026 was a frost year for us. We expected somewhere between 17,000 and 24,000 crates based on the prior season and harvested 24% of that. Because every one of those harvests was logged with its labor, packaging, and sales attached, we can document that loss for USDA line by line instead of guessing.
If you run a farm, a farm stand, a You-Pick, or sell wholesale and your numbers are scattered across notebooks and receipts, this is for you. Free copy of the template is in the video description. Make a copy, rename the tabs for your crops, and you are running the same system by tonight.
Link in bio.
Tell us in the comments the one number you wish you had tracked last season.
