Spiller Farm, a mid-sized, century-old farm located in a coastal area near the southern border of Maine, matches the best responses we got in the sections on Labor and Managing the State of the Vegetable Industry 2021.

For example, the family does all the management tasks on the farm (as do 61% of all vegetable farms) and he hires local residents (like 39% of his peers). And like 58% of all producers, Spiller ranks labor as a major management challenge.

Even with all of this in common with other American vegetable growers, Spiller Farm is not that common. Here’s a snapshot.

Local ties support the farm

Spiller Farm, based in Wells, ME, did pretty well last year. Owner Bill Spiller attributes this success to his close connection to the community. It is a basic management philosophy that guides most decisions.

The operation is heavily focused on local businesses, selling its harvest through a mix of CSA, You-Pick, farm stalls, supplying small grocery stores and food banks.

Spiller is a founding member of Mainers Feed the Mainers, a program with 75 farms working together to provide pantries statewide. Farmers provide not only produce, but also fish, dairy, and any other food item that benefits Maine families.

He also invites certified gleaners to the farm twice a week to harvest the remaining crops or the occasional field he plants just for them.

How Spiller Farm handles the work

Like most of his peers, Spiller struggles to find enough manpower even though he’s running a lean operation. He only has one year-round employee and two family members who work on the farm. The farm employs up to seven full-time seasonal workers and five part-time seasonal workers during the summer.

As a result, he is seriously considering using the H-2A guest worker program over the next two years.

“We didn’t bring a lot of people back, and finding young students didn’t work,” he says.

The program is notoriously labyrinthine, and Spiller tries to find where he can place housing with waterways and cattle restrictions. It sits in an area bordered by streams and streams, and has a wide range of agricultural neighbors, including livestock.

A great success for him in recent years has been working with a village in Puerto Rico.

“They are American citizens, hard workers and part of the family,” he says.

He visits the community every winter (except this one, due to the pandemic). This allowed him to forge a strong bond with the workers there.

I told them once that I have almost no family. They said, ‘You do it, right here. You’re in luck, we’re all tied up here.

Your point of view – State of the industry in 2021

We asked you to share how your part of the industry is doing this year. The issues you highlight will shape management strategies for the coming year.

Your views fell into several categories, from labor issues to the rising costs of operating a farm.

Here is a sample. All responses are anonymous.

Pandemic boost. “COVID is changing customer expectations. They want more locally grown produce.

Regulations. “Agriculture is or was the backbone of the US economy. Politicians and regulators have good intentions, they seem to lack strong leadership in making economic decisions. They are taking a short-sighted view of things adding more regulations here in the United States and very little oversight on imports from third world countries. As a nation, we will be vulnerable to the failure of our autonomy to manufacture our own food supply. ”

Labor. “I think the lack of manpower is the biggest problem for agriculture. We are reducing production due to the lack of workers in the field. ”

Recruit future farmers. “We need programs to keep young people in agriculture. We are losing too many older farmers.

Production costs. “The costs of growing, harvesting, cooling and shipping produce have increased dramatically. However, customer prices did not follow the same upward trend. Since the products are perishable, retailers tend to compress the competition. ”

Relief programs. “I think the vegetable industry is very healthy, even if the margins are thinner than before. Various government COVID programs have really made a difference to our success. ”

Losing farmland. “It is becoming more and more difficult to produce because growing industrial clusters take up more space in the productive space. ”

Direct to consumer. “For those of us who sell direct to consumers, this has been a good year for sales and building new relationships. But it was a very difficult year here for the weather.

Percentage of farms in key positions

We asked if you employ different types of workers, from field crews to farm managers. Since some farms depend almost entirely on the family to run the farm, we’ve added this option, giving you 16 types of workers in total.

Here are the averages for the four key positions, along with a ranking for where this job falls in the list of 16.

How small, medium and large producers differ on the job

The size of an operation naturally influences workforce decisions. We have therefore compared your responses to the 2021 State of the Vegetable Industry Survey by farm size.

We would like to thank our sponsor for supporting our 2021 State of the Vegetable Industry Report.