Book Review: “The Farmer’s Office”

Review The Farmer's Office
“The Farmer’s Office, Second Edition: Tools, Templates, and Skills for Starting, Managing, and Growing a Successful Farm Business”
By Julia Shanks
New Society Publishers, 2024
336 pages, paperback, $39.99

Avoiding office work is the reason many of the farmers I know have chosen this profession.

But no matter how well you can grow tomatoes and onions and lettuce, or how smooth you can talk up the products at your farmers’ market stall, the time you spend in your farm office is one of the best ways to make sure your farm stays profitable. “The Farmer’s Office” by Julia Shanks is just the book to get you set up to better plan and manage your farm. And the second edition of this great book just came out!

Before I go further, I should mention that I’m friends with Julia, but you shouldn’t think that’s a conflict of interest with me raving about her book. The main reason we became friends was that I enjoyed the first edition of “The Farmer’s Office” so much. Ever since we’ve been talking about spreadsheets, farm finances, and business management.

Let me tell you about the things I loved in the first edition of “The Farmer’s Office” because they are also in the second edition.

This book is well laid out and flows well from topic to topic. Julia starts by walking you through all the accounting and bookkeeping basics that you need for the rest of the book. Then she goes through how you can use these concepts to set up a business plan for your farm and your very own bookkeeping system to make sure you stay on track. And then she jumps into how to make decisions with this information to scale up your business, or perhaps stay at the same scale and simply optimize your operations. At each step, Julia uses case studies inspired from farmers she’s worked with to give real world examples.

One of the strengths of this book is how clear the charts and tables are. This can be a problem in books about farm finances, but Julia makes a point of making them understandable. My personal favorite is a table illustrating the relationships between the statement of cash flow, the income statement, and the balance sheet. I had never seen these three elements visually presented quite that way. It let me see the financial statements in a new light.

The last few years have taught us how important it is to be able to pivot your business with very little notice. Having good bookkeeping systems and financial analysis definitely helps with this. But you also need the mental frameworks so that you are resilient and have the wherewithal to make these decisions. The second edition adds two extra chapters to address these topics: one on building resilience into your business model, and another on cultivating the entrepreneurial mindset. I particularly love these new chapters.

You can’t have a sustainable farm if you don’t understand your numbers. And Julia is the person to help you understand them. This book will guide you from setting up your farm, to how to make tough business decisions when things aren’t going so great, to scaling up when things take off again. Whether you love spreadsheets or barely tolerate them, you should read “The Farmer’s Office.”

– Dan Brisebois, the Seed Farmer Podcast and the Farmer Spreadsheet Academy, Les Cèdres, Quebec

This review was originally published in the winter 2024 issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener. Browse the archives for free content on organic agriculture and sustainable living practices.

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