Person hours and elapsed hours are different problems
Add up the default list and it is 10.80 person hours of work: 7.06 cutting and 3.73 washing and packing. Four people at 10.80 person hours sounds like 2.7 hours, and it is not — it takes 4.84 hours, because the two stages happen in order and neither crew can do the other one.
Split those four as two cutting and two packing and the pack line starts as soon as the salad comes in from the field, finishing 4.09 hours after the start plus 0.75 for setup. Do the same work with everything cut first and then packed, and it becomes 6.15 hours. That hour and a quarter is the whole difference between making a load-out and missing it.
The split matters as much as the headcount
Four people is enough for the default list against a five hour window, but only as two and two. Three cutting and one packing is the same four people and finishes at 5.97 hours, nearly an hour over; one cutting and three packing is 7.99. The pack line is not the slow side here — cutting is, at 3.53 hours against the line at 1.87 — but starving the line still costs you, because the line has to run after the last crop is cut no matter how fast the field went.
Four people is the smallest headcount that fits, and only one of the three ways to split four people works. The calculator searches for that smallest crew and reports the split as well as the number, because two crews of two and one crew of four are not the same morning.
One crop is usually most of the morning
Salad mix at nine units an hour is 4.44 of the 7.06 cutting person hours in the default list — 63 percent of the cutting for 26 percent of the units. That is the line to attack if the morning is too long, and attacking it means either cutting less of it, cutting it the day before, or finding a faster way to cut it. The tomatoes are 60 of the 154 units and 0.67 person hours of cutting, which is twenty minutes of a two-person field crew; speeding them up cannot buy back much whatever you do to them.
| Crew split | Elapsed with setup | Fits a 5 hr window |
|---|---|---|
| 2 cutting, 2 packing | 4.84 hr | Yes |
| 3 cutting, 1 packing | 5.97 hr | No |
| 2 cutting, 1 packing | 6.71 hr | No |
| 1 cutting, 3 packing | 7.99 hr | No |
| 1 cutting, 2 packing | 8.08 hr | No |
Where the list comes from and where it goes
The units in the pick list come out of the CSA share planting plan calculator if you are packing boxes, or out of the load you decided on for the farmers market stall break-even calculator if you are going to market. What comes off the line has to get into a vehicle, which is the market van load plan calculator. For a general production-rate crew calculation that is not tied to two stages, see the crew productivity calculator, and for orchard-scale picking by weight rather than by unit, the fruit harvest bin calculator.
Questions people ask
Why does the order of the crops change the answer?
Because the pack line can only work on what has been cut. If the slowest crop to cut is last, the line sits idle early and then has to run after everything else is done, which pushes the finish out. If it is first, the line has work in front of it the whole time. The effect is small on a balanced list and large on an unbalanced one, and the way to see it on your own list is to move a line and watch the elapsed figure.
What counts as a unit?
Whatever you count the crop in when you are picking it — bags, bunches, heads, pints, pounds. The only requirement is that the units and both rates use the same thing, so 40 bags of salad at nine bags an hour cutting and 22 bags an hour packing. Mixing pounds into the rate and bags into the quantity is the mistake that produces answers off by a factor of ten.
How do I get a real cutting rate?
Time it. One person, one crop, one clock, count what comes out in half an hour and double it, then do it again on a different day because the first measurement will be flattering. Published figures for harvest rates exist but the spread across varieties, plantings, weather and people is wide enough that using one is close to guessing. Two measured mornings beat any table.
Does the setup time apply to everybody?
In the cost section, yes — the page assumes everyone is on the clock through setup and clean-down, which is usually how it works in practice. If only one person does the setup, the paid figure will be high by the difference. The elapsed figure treats setup as time that passes before cutting starts, which is the conservative assumption if you are checking against a load-out deadline.
What about breaks?
They are not modelled separately, and the honest thing to do is fold them into the setup field or into the rates themselves. A rate measured over a real four hour morning already has the small stops in it; a rate measured over a timed thirty minute run does not, and using the second one across a whole morning will make the plan look about fifteen percent faster than the morning will be.