[PureHarvest]

Bower, I hear what you are saying but disagree to some extent.

Running a simple hourly rate calculation is easy to do, and is maybe helpful looking at a one year scenario. However, over the long-term, to me, it doesn't tell enough of the story. No business owner I ever met thinks in terms of what they make per hour. Not to say they don't value their time or think about what they would have to pay someone for a task that they can't/won't do anymore.
The assumption is that early on you are going to put in a lot of hours in until you refine your system, reduce costs, reduce losses, and increase efficiencies etc. and be able to pay helpers to reduce your time.
Year one could be negative dollars per hour if you take on debt to get started. But the years after should bring the labor effort in line with the profit (or hourly rate if that is the goal you seek).

Eventually, if all goes well, you are making the profit you set as your goal, and you are happy with the effort it took whether it took 100 hours or 200 hours because it is what you do and fits your lifestyle goals.
Then, there are so many other benefits that come with running your own business that are not reflected in the hourly rate formula. Basically, all the things that a business gets to claim as an expense with pre-tax dolllars that a wage earner can not: land, buildings, equipment/tools, hardware, insurance, utilities, meals, travel, vehicles, and fuel to name a few.
Then there are the intangible ones like creating value for others, social capital, teaching a skill to the next generation, leaving a legacy for the kids, and self-improvement.
Basically, for me personally, I'm going to be growing something regardless of profit potential. I love growing stuff, that's who I am. There is nothing else interesting to me that is off farm as a part-time job. So I try to make money at it, even if the hours are long, with the intention that eventually they wont be. Plus I am at home, family is around, and I'm available to be there for them if I need to step away at any moment from whatever I'm working on. My kids get to see the hard work that something takes, the reward for it, and they can get involved and build work ethic. They can also learn many skills and trades, including the office/accounting side of all of this. This would never happen if I was at Home Depot at nights and weekends. Hard to put a dollar figure on all that.
Obviously the intangibles don't pay the bills. Math still bats last. However, I think you can totally evaluate if something is worth the time spent by looking only at profit at year end as your goal. If you determine you can't live off the profit, or it's cutting too close to not enough, then I guess you could run the numbers and determine that a job would be better. Or that you spent an inordinate amount of time over multiple years and are not getting anywhere.
I've done that and made changes along the way so that my efforts are in-line with my profit or profit potential. I've never even considered what I'm making per hour, just if I can hit a profit goal for what the process took.
Over the last 14 years, I've tried field scale tomatoes, pastured chicken/turkeys/eggs, cutflowers, garlic, greenhouse tomatoes, hydroponic lettuce, pole limas, 1-gallon arborvitae tree liners from cuttings, hot pepper relish, field scale rasp and blackberries.
Most were failures, took way too much time for the return, and I moved on. Sometimes you look back after a year and say, the little profit I make is not worth the effort. But I did not think, i only made $5 per hour. I re-assess and think, with the time I have available and are willing to expend, how do I net $12,000 (or whatever) next year.

All that being said, I ran the hourly rate calc for what I think the garlic enterprise will look like for next year. I'm projecting it would be about $25 per hour.