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Talk it. Track it. Keep it.
Turn What's in Your Head Into a System Your Whole Crew Can Use
A hands-on, 90-minute workshop with Elizabeth Almeida and Julia Shanks
Live: Friday, September 18th, 1pm EST
You already know things about your farm that took years to learn — when the squash bugs show up, why the sweet potatoes failed last July, what the crew actually did with those 300 labor hours.
The problem isn’t that you don’t know it. It’s that it’s stuck in your head, in a notebook, or in a WhatsApp thread you’ll never scroll back through. It is hard to synthesize for strategic planning and even harder to share with employees.
What we’re building together:
In this hands-on, 90-minute workshop, we will walk you through building a simple system to capture what you already know — using your voice — and turn it into data you can actually search, ask questions of, and hand off to your crew or your successor.
We’ll also connect weather data automatically, so your notes are tied to the single biggest variable in any farming season.
This works whether you’re a solo farmer carrying a season’s worth of observations around in your head, or running a crew where multiple people are touching plants every day and each one is a source of field knowledge you’re currently not capturing.
You’ll leave with:
- A working talk-to-text Google Form set up for your own farm
- A Google Sheet that collects it automatically and pulls in weather data for each entry
- 5 ready-to-use AI prompts to turn a season’s worth of scattered notes into real answers
No coding. No new software subscriptions. No data going anywhere but your own Google account.
Total cost to run it: $0/month
“My 30 minute conversation with Elizabeth and Julia was extremely eye opening about all the ways that AI could help me do what I'm already doing, but do it better and save me so much time.”
Reserve your spot today!
Register before Sept 4th and save 40%
Use discount code EarlyField at checkout.
Course Topics
Setting up your talk-to-text Google Form
- The exact fields to include so a two-second voice note in the field becomes usable data later, not just a longer note
Connecting it to a Google Sheet that does the work for you
- So every entry lands automatically, organized and ready to search
Pulling in weather data for free
- Tying each entry to the conditions that actually drove it, without you typing a single degree or inch of rain
Building quick-entry links for each field or plot
- So it’s fast enough that you (or your crew) will actually use it standing in the row
Turning a season of scattered notes into answers
- The 5 AI prompts that let you ask “when did the squash bugs show up last year?” and get a real answer instead of scrolling through months of texts
“Julia delivers pertinent information in a very accessible way! [Her classes are] well structured, the content is relevant, and the easy access to Julia for questions is a powerful package.”
Ellen Polishuk, Plant to Profit
Reserve your spot today!
Register before Sept 4th and save 40%
Use discount code EarlyField at checkout.
The Instructors
Julia Shanks is the founder of The Farmer’s Office and author of The Farmer’s Office — the go-to book on farm finances, now in its second edition. Her forthcoming book, The Profitable Farmer: Strategic Business Planning for Profit, Purpose and Quality of Life, comes out in November 2026 from New Society Publishers.
She’s a QuickBooks Certified Pro-Advisor with an MBA in Entrepreneurship. Over the past 18+ years she’s worked with hundreds of farm businesses to help them get organized, get profitable, and get some breathing room. Through The Farmer’s Edge and her 1:1 coaching, she teaches farmers how to build simple systems for the parts of the business that don’t come naturally — bookkeeping, planning, and now, capturing the field knowledge that usually just lives in someone’s head.
Elizabeth Almeida spent years running her own mushroom farm — bootstrapped, hands-in-the-dirt, 365 days a year, learning every system the hard way. She now helps other small food and farm businesses get under the hood of their operations.
Testimonials
Here are some testimonials from other courses and workshops Julia has led.
While this is our first time teaching this course, here’s what people have said about our other workshops.
“Your courses are exactly what I was hoping to find. I haven’t seen anything else online other than your website that offers exactly the accounting material I was looking for.”
~Craig S.
“This program has helped me enormously with learning how to effectively use financial tools for planning, goal setting, and tracking progress.”
~ Kyle W.
“It was really well-paced. The lessons were difficult enough that they kept me engaged, but not so hard that I felt overwhelmed.”
“This course is phenomenal. I thought I knew how to manage money in my business, but The Farmer’s Edge gave me so many new skills and ways of looking at my business!”
~ Helen S.
“I have a much greater understanding of budgeting and forecasting. I feel better equipped to make decisions about acquiring debt for growth purposes.”
~ Kari B.
“This is the course to better run our business from the start instead of fixing major problems later.”
Register before September 4, 2026 and receive a 40% discount.
Use discount code EarlyField at checkout.