Business Case · The Farming Year

Can one person actually run this?

The plan rests on a founder who sells well. This page asks the question that decides whether that founder has any time left to sell: what does the year actually contain — which weeks are statutory, which are livestock, which are forage, which are customers — and how many hours does it add up to? The answer is that the farming is the smaller half of the job.

The short answer. At 50 animals a year the work comes to roughly 1,500 hours — about 0.8 of a full-time year. One person can do it. But the split matters more than the total: only about 620 hours is livestock and land. The other 880 hours is cutting, packing, delivering and selling — the direct-sales channel is the bigger job, and it is the half that cannot be postponed to next week when it rains.

That is a validation of the operating model rather than a contradiction of it: its own labour line already assumes ~10 hours per animal carried plus 22 hours per animal sold direct. The published Swedish figure for the on-farm half — 9 hours per animal for a 22-month organic naturbete steer — lands within a hour of the model's assumption. What the plan has never shown is when those hours fall, which is what the calendar below is for.

The labour calculator

Defaults follow the operating model's own labour assumptions and the published Swedish per-animal figures. A full-time farming year is taken as 1,800 hours.

Where the hours fall through the year

Monthly hours by kind of work. The annual totals are calculated from the sliders above; the month-by-month distribution is modelled, not measured — it reflects the Swedish grazing calendar, a two-cut silage year, and a direct-sales business whose peak is Christmas. Treat the shape as a planning aid and the totals as the number.

Livestock — daily care, moving, handling

Forage, fencing & land

Cutting, packing, delivery & selling

Admin & compliance

The shape is the finding, not the total. Three peaks collide with three different deadlines. April is the SAM application and turnout in the same weeks. June–August is silage while the animals are out and the REKO season is running. November–December is housing or winter feeding, the main slaughter batch, and the Christmas box peak all at once — the single hardest month in the year, and also the one that earns the most revenue.

Everything that can be moved should be moved out of those three windows. Fencing, machinery repair, buying calves, and website or brand work belong in February and September, which are the two genuinely quiet months.

Hours against herd size — and where a second pair of hands becomes unavoidable

Total hours and the two halves of the job as the herd grows. The dashed line is a full-time year at 1,800 hours.

Total hours

Livestock, land & admin

Sales, cutting & delivery

1,800 h — one full-time person

The year, month by month

Statutory dates are marked STATUTORY and are the ones that carry a penalty. Everything else is operational sequencing for a buy-and-finish herd near Stockholm, following the published Swedish grazing calendar.

The dates that carry a penalty

SAM-ansökan — 9 April 2026. Every area and animal payment in the plan flows from this one application. Late costs 1% of the support per working day. See the grants page for what each hectare pays.
CDB reporting — 7 days. Every arrival, departure, death and birth must reach the cattle register within seven days of the event. Calves must be tagged within 20 days of birth and reported within 7 days of tagging. Late reporting means deductions on your subsidies.
Grazing — 90 days. In Stockholm county cattle must be out at least 90 days between 1 April and 31 October, of which at least 60 fall between 1 May and 15 September. This is a legal minimum, not a grazing plan.
A stable journal must exist for the animals on the holding — although reporting everything electronically through CDB Internet can replace it.

What the calendar cannot tell you

Abattoir lead times. How far ahead a small Stockholm-region abattoir must be booked is not published anywhere I could verify. It is the single most schedule-critical unknown in this page — an animal that is finished has to go when it is ready. Ask Lövsta and the archipelago abattoir directly, and ask for their December lead time specifically.
Contractor availability. If you hire silage cutting rather than owning machinery, your harvest window is the contractor's queue, not the weather. That queue is at its longest in exactly the week the crop is ready.
Your own weekends. Livestock hours are daily, not weekly — a fortnight's holiday needs a stand-in who can handle cattle, and that person has to be found before you need them, not after.

Where the hour figures come from

Published labour benchmarks

Swedish per-animal labour figures, and how this plan's assumption compares.

Why the sales half is so much bigger than the farming half. Nine hours of stockmanship covers an animal for fifteen months. The same animal then produces about 224 kg of meat that has to be cut into boxes, packed, stored frozen, matched to orders, driven to a car park in Täby on a Tuesday evening and handed to forty different households. The REKO page counts three or four evenings a fortnight for the pickup rounds alone.

This is the plan working as designed — the margin exists because you do the selling — but it should be costed as the main job. At the operating model's 230 SEK/hour, 1,500 hours is about 345,000 SEK of owner labour standing behind the headline profit. The ROI dashboard's "charge your own labour" toggle is the honest way to look at that.

Sources

What is modelled rather than sourced. The monthly distribution of hours is my allocation, built to match the Swedish grazing calendar and a Christmas-peaked direct-sales year — no Swedish source publishes a month-by-month labour profile for beef. The annual per-animal figures are published; how they land across twelve months is not. The sales-side hours (22 per animal sold direct) come from this plan's own operating model, not from an external benchmark — no published Swedish figure for direct-sales labour was found, which is a real gap given it is the larger half of the workload. The 1,800-hour full-time year is a convention, not a legal or statistical standard. And the published 9-hour benchmark is for a housed deep-litter system on the farm that bred the animal; a buy-and-finish operation wintering outdoors will differ in both directions — less bedding work, more handling of bought-in animals.

Open questions

The calendar's shape is modelled; these are the dates and rates only other people can give you.

Question	Why it matters	Where the answer comes from
What lead time does the abattoir need, and what is it in December?Blocking	A finished animal must go when it is ready, and December is simultaneously the slaughter batch and the sales peak. This is the least-known scheduling risk in the plan.	Lövsta Kött and Skärgårdsslakteriet — ask for the December lead time explicitly, and book the year in March.
How long is the contractor's queue at first cut?Important	If you hire silage cutting, your harvest window is the contractor's queue rather than the weather — and the queue is longest exactly when the crop is ready.	Two contractors, now, and ask where you would sit in their order.
Is the 22 hours per animal of sales labour real?Important	It is the larger half of the workload and comes from this plan's own model, with no external Swedish benchmark to check it against.	Time yourself for one full cycle in season one: cutting coordination, packing, order handling and delivery rounds.
Who covers the daily stock check when you are away?Important	Livestock hours are daily, not weekly. A fortnight's holiday needs a competent stand-in arranged in advance.	A neighbouring farmer or a relief service, agreed before the first animals arrive.

Prepared August 2026 as a planning aid. Per-animal labour benchmarks are from Hushållningssällskapet's 2021 organic production-branch calculations and an SLU time study; the monthly profile is modelled. Statutory dates are those applying to the 2026 application year in Stockholm county and are re-set annually — confirm each against Jordbruksverket before relying on it. Hourly cost figures use the operating model's 230 SEK/hour; the published calculations use 246 SEK/hour at 2021 prices. Not financial advice.