Free tool
Garlic planting labour cost calculator
Work out what planting garlic costs you this fall — by hand, and with a PL-22. Put in your own acreage, spacing, wages and, most of all, how fast your crew really plants by hand. The defaults are only a starting point.
How the answer is worked out
It comes down to what your crew does by hand
The PL-22 takes three people: two riders, each setting 600 to 800 cloves an hour, and someone driving the tractor. The machine opens the row, spaces each clove and closes the row behind them, so the riders do nothing but place.
So the fair comparison is that crew against a hand crew doing the whole job — opening the row, setting each clove root-down, and covering it. The planter comes out ahead on labour whenever a hand crew plants fewer than about 470 cloves per person per hour over a full day. That figure runs from about 400 to 530 depending on how quick your riders are.
The calculator starts hand-planting at 300 cloves per person per hour. That is Doug Gilbert’s figure from years of watching crews dig, place and cover by hand over a full day — not a fresh-crew sprint. And it compares the same three people either way: all three on their knees, or two sitting on the planter and one driving.
If your crew is quicker or slower than that, put in your own number — everything above updates as you type.
The case that doesn’t depend on the labour math
Every one of these holds regardless of what the per-rider rate turns out to be.
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It’s a crew you can actually find
The hardest part of October on most small farms is not the wage bill — it’s finding people willing to kneel in a cold field for days on end. Two of the PL-22’s crew sit down and the third drives the tractor, which is a far easier thing to ask of anyone.
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The rate holds all day
A thousand cloves an hour is a fresh-crew number. By hour six on your knees it is not. Seated operators sustain their rate, which means the estimate you plan around is the one you actually get.
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Every clove goes in the right way up
Misoriented cloves produce bent necks and undersized bulbs you pay to grade out ten months later. That cost never shows up in a planting-day labour calculation, and it is real money.
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Your crew comes back next year
Hand-planting garlic is the job people quit over. That has a cost you feel in recruiting every single season.
Tell us about your beds
Get a quote
Tell us roughly what you grow and where you are, and Doug will call you back. We will tell you exactly how we would configure a machine for your beds, and suggest a better setup if there is one.