I grew up on a commercial dairy farm and we had to grow hay to feed 300 cows. As you can guess, that’s a lot of hay. One of the things that was common knowledge was if you harvested hay at the beginning of July, it had grown as much as it would and started to dry down, making it easier to harvest and giving you the most tons of hay per acre. With this time frame, you could then harvest again in September and maximize the tons of hay per acre for the year.
Then came the new ideas. Harvest the hay as soon as it starts to bloom, and then every 30-40 days afterwards depending on the weather. In Northeast Ohio, you could usually get 4 cuttings per year this way. The total tons per acre was about the same as 2 cuttings, and often less. And you did double the work.
So why in the world would anyone consider doubling their work? Because we discovered that tons of hay per acre was not the important thing. It was the protein content of the hay that made cows give more milk. By cutting the hay as it was just starting to bloom, the protein levels were peaking at 18-20%. The plants were storing up energy for blooming and reproduction, protein levels were at their highest. If you wait until the plant hits full growth, the protein has been used up and is only 3-5% of the total weight. This hay is bulky filler with little nutritional value outside of fiber. From the standpoint of producing hay to feed to dairy cows, the important thing to maximize is not tons of hay per acre, it is tons of protein per acre.
All of this is a very nice lesson in agronomy and feeding cows, but most of you don’t milk cows for a living. What lesson is there for you? As entrepreneurs, we do many things, but what we all have in common is we spend time producing or selling a product. And most of us measure our efforts in hours per day or week. We take pride in knowing that we can outwork just about anyone else. We know what it takes to make our business go, and we’re not afraid of the hard work to get there. But what if we are measuring the wrong thing? The tons of hay per acre, not the protein per acre. Would it be better to measure productivity in a way that did not involve hours per day? Something that relates to the value of what you produce? And even more shocking, what if working fewer hours actually produced more value to your business?
I can tell you with absolute certainty that time is even more important for you to budget than money. And on top of that, not every hour is equal in terms of productivity. But as long as we measure productivity as working hours per week, we will never find out what is truly important.
