In 1995 Greenway Farms came close to going under. Costs were outrunning income, the operation was running at a loss most seasons, and something structural had to change. We sold off 40% of the farm to a silent partner just to keep going, and then made a decision that looked reckless at the time: rather than simply cutting back, we put what we had into machines, and into training the people already on the farm to use them well.
That decision came out of a trip to Australia, where we watched farms doing similar work to ours getting it done with a fraction of the effort we were putting in. The difference wasn't how hard anyone worked. It was the tools they had to work with, and how deliberately those tools were matched to the people using them.
We call that matching man and machine, and there's an actual term for it: ergonomics, the study of efficiency in working environments. It isn't about swapping people out for equipment. It's about making sure that an hour of somebody's time, backed by the right machine and the right training, produces something worth paying properly for. Get that right and the farm gets more productive, which is really the only lever that matters if you want a business, and the people in it, to actually thrive over time.
There's a line one of our founders used that's stuck around the farm ever since: a worker can only give an honest day's work, but the farmer is responsible for what that work is capable of producing. It's a useful reminder that productivity isn't something you can demand from people. It's something you have to build, with the right equipment, the right systems, and the patience to train people into using both well.
What we found, thirty years on from nearly losing the farm, is that this principle scales. It shaped how we think about soil, about water, about every input that goes into growing a carrot, not just machinery. Efficiency, done properly, isn't about doing more with less. It's about making sure nothing on the farm, land, water, equipment or people, is being asked to do more than it's actually capable of doing well.
We didn't arrive at that lesson from a textbook. We arrived at it close to bankrupt, with no other option left but to get better at the one thing we could actually control.