When planning your ginseng business, you have to plan for expenditures of both time and money. Money is spent at startup, and time is spend during the maintenance phase. When it comes to harvest time, you have a choice.

You can spend your own time and maximize your profit, or you can hire contract harvest labor and pay them either a percentage of what they dig or in cash money according to some metric of work-for-money. If you hire family or neighbors, use your best judgement. Hopefully, you know these people well enough that you can work out an equitable agreement that everyone is happy with.

I advise you to pay them in cash- not in ginseng. You do not want lots of ginseng floating around the neighborhood that came from your farm... for many reasons.

If You Use Independent Contract Labor

These are probably going to be Hispanic laborers, many of whom are migrants of one variety or another. Don't pay your labor an hourly wage for this type of work. It rewards sloth and there is no reward for the worker who wants to get better pay for a better job. (Many of the Hispanic laborers will want to be paid piecework because they intend to work harder than most Americans would ever consider working.)

Solution: Pay piecework.

When it comes to paying piecework, I advise paying workers either by the pound of root dug, or by the number of roots dug. You might experiment with paying by the row or section, assuming that your rows or sections are fairly uniform. If you use my method of dividing each acre up into 50 foot by 50 foot sections (16 of them), then you could simply declare an amount each section is worth and let the workers decide how to go about it.

The advantage of doing it this way is that they will be motivated to develop the most efficient method of getting it out of the ground.

You should have a washing station set up to wash the root at the end of the day. As the workers fill boxes of roots, have them deliver full boxes to you, and seal them with the workers name on the outside. Keep each workers boxes segregated. Wash each workers' roots individually, and examine them for breakage and other damage. This way, you're looking at the aggregate of their daily work.

Cheating on weight or numbers (stealing) should result in immediate discharge.

The best solution would be to pay a fixed amount per root, but only if you don't have to count the roots. Depending on how hard the worker works, they will end up with an average number of roots dug per hour that will be pretty consistent. Soil conditions change, weather conditions change, but on average the'll find their own rythm to the job.

Cheating on weight or numbers (stealing) should result in immediate discharge.

Have a procedure in place to handle this. If you have a big crew and can't get any trustworthy help, consider hiring an off-duty sheriff's deputy or police officer to assist you with labor management. They shouldn't swagger or strut, but their badge, radio and pistol will definitely be appreciated if it's needed. The presence of law enforcement is also helpful from a security point of view.

The time required to dig ginseng depends in large part on the condition of the soil it is grown in. If you have an average of 24,000 plants on an acre, and it takes you an average of 2 minutes to dig each root, harvesting an acre will take 800 man hours. Using a partner the amount of time required to dig the roots goes down substantially, and the propensity of roots to grow in clumps both helps and hinders the process.

...set your piecework rate to a level that allows a really hard worker to make $150 to $200 each day.

In my area, a similar job is cutting tobacco. The tobacco stalks are cut and placed on sticks to dry, and growers pay 15 cents a stick. A hard worker can cut 1000 sticks in a day... at least, I know Mexican workers who routinely make $150 a day cutting tobacco. Most of the American teens I know of who cut tobacco don't even make half of that: 500 to 600 sticks is normal for the kids.

My advice is to set your piecework rate to a level that allows a really hard worker to make $150 to $200 each day.

An easy way to finance the contract labor is to spend a few weeks in early season digging some root yourself, dry it and sell it. Turn around and use that money to pay your labor for the main portion of the harvest. If you have a 10 man crew, and they're each working like maniacs and getting paid $150 to $200 per day, you'll need $7,500 to $10,000 for a week of work. In order to afford this, you'll have had to dig about a hundred pounds of green root, which will dry to about 30 pounds of root, which you'll be able to sell for about $12,000. This is also a good way to get a large buyer interested in your product. Tell them that this is just the pre-season harvest that will pay for the labor for the in-season harvest.

Some people might object to paying that much money to laborers. I've known business owners who were religious about paying labor the absolute minimum possible. "Bare minimum and not one penny more!" is the operating philosophy at more places than I'd like to believe. They may have a point, when it comes to a regular employee, and especially when one considers their particular business and the job descriptions involved. But, that isn't what I'm talking about.

The digging season only lasts for a few months, and if you're going to attempt a cash-out and dig 10 to 20 acres... you'll need those workers much worse than they need you.

Remember that you get what you pay for, and this is short-term contract labor. You want loyal, hardworking labor that will work diligently and efficiently to get your root out of the ground safely. They will be working in hot, humid, bugridden forest conditions, for long hours, at a boring job. Tell them to chew on a root occasionally to keep their energy up, keep plenty of water available for drinking, and pay them well at the end of each day... in cash.

[note: checks drawn on a local bank are usually acceptable as well, and are considered cash]

The Scriptures say: "the worker is worthy of his hire" and "thou shall not muzzle the ox that treads the grain" and even "The stall is clean where there is no ox, but much increase comes from the labor of the ox."

If you have continued to put money into your Roth IRA and have had the payments from the seed sales over the years going into the business to compound tax free, and you didn't take it out in salary... then you should have plenty of money to pay contract labor for harvest.

Of course, your seed sales from just one year could pay for most of your harvest labor. Selling 500 pounds of seed for $50 per pound will generate $25,000, which will pay for the harvest of at least 3 or 4 acres.

Pay your labor a bonus ($25?) for every man-root in undamaged condition that they bring in. These are worth anywhere from $200 to $400 or more, each. Paying the bonus for man-roots will motivate the labor to dig carefully and avoid damaging the roots.

The condition of the neck is critical to the sale of the ginseng. Especially if you're going to market it as being truly wild. The neck is the only way to prove the age of the root, and a broken neck will lower the value of the roots.

Work with the diggers, show them what you want- making allowances for training time, and fire any digger who consistently brings you too many damaged roots. If you spend a week of experimental digging (full days) before hiring any labor you'll be capable of teaching them and you'll know what an acceptable level of damage to the roots is.

Some people want dry soil to dig in, some prefer to dig the roots from moist soil. I prefer to set up a sprinkler system and give the growing beds a good soaking every day for a week prior to digging. It makes the ground softer and (I think) speeds up the digging while lowering the level of root damage.

It also makes digging the root much messier, and on a steep slope, more dangerous. Your call, your milage may vary.

With that, we will close part 1 of harvest labor. We will continue this series in Part II.