I posted a longer bit on people-vs-tractor on the forum I attached to this blog.

I guess the best I can do is to offer a bit in return, which is: listen to Coleman. I study economic and organizational sociology, and the number one way to throw away a great enterprise is to ignore the relationship between its size and its success. Like Coleman says, if you ask anybody to list the most successful businesses, they all list the big ones. Okay, no ranting, I promise…

Interestingly enough, look who popped up in Business Week this week: A New Push to Make Farming Profitable.

I think small farming requires EQUAL emphasis on BOTH “small” and “farming”. Tiny farming doesn’t really scale well, and that I think is the critical consideration, maybe the Secret. With small farming, your “job” is fulfilling and fun, it’s an end in itself. The bigger you get, the less personal it becomes, your quality of involvement and your baseline enjoyment reduce, and the money aspect becomes inversely more important.

Interesting American organic farmer/educator Eliot Coleman has a required reading book, The New Organic Grower: A Master’s Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener. It’s around 340 pages. The Marketing chapter is quite complete and takes up all of six pages, which seems like a crazy ratio for the entire sales/revenue side of tiny farming, but when you’re actually doing it, you realize that it’s easy to over-emphasize the “business” aspect. If you concentrate on quality and consistency in the field, the commerce seems to naturally follow!

Coleman’s final section in the six pages on Marketing is worth reproducing (I trust he’d grant permission!):

Stay Small

These days, when a business succeeds there is always the tendency to multiply the success by getting bigger. I have one word of advice—don’t. That admonition may sound heretical given the dictates of modern economics, but my experience confirms it. I have seen too many successful producers make the expansion mistake. Without exception, they have each become just another company trading on the reputation they established before expanding. If demand exceeds supply, bring the two back into line by raising prices. Income will increase just as it would by expansion, but quality will not be compromised.

It’s easy to explore the economics more in-depth. Take two acres in full production as an end target example. Check the equipment requirements chart—you can acquire the entire list for under $10,000, old truck included. From there, it’s all labor, creativity, maintaining good karma, more labor… If you start at 50 cents a square foot on 35,000 sq ft out of each acre, that’s a gross revenue of $35K. Try going down to 25 cents ($17.5K), and up to a buck ($70K). Work the crop selection, the weeks of availability, and so forth. If you grow 20 crops and have a short season of only 20 weeks, you need to sell $87.50 of each crop each week to hit the 50-cent target. Break that down and work the variables. Add weeks to the season, adjust for higher and lower priced crops, etc, etc. $87.50 is 58 bunches of radishes at $1.50/bu, or 22 400g bags of salad mix at $4, over 20 weeks. What if you managed a 26 week season? What if you grew 10 or 30 crops? Convert all that back to the square feet and map it (a crude sketch would do to start!) to get a rough field production plan—how much to grow of each crop—and don’t forget succession planting, you can get a minimum of three salad crops of the same ground in one season, and so forth…) It’s a straightforward, simple, totally fun arithmetic game!!

I think an attainable higher end goal over maybe 5-7 years is $80K/ac for 2-3 acres. You can start alone, with part-time help at critical times. To approach really full production, you’ll need at least two full time workers (farmer plus hired hand), eventually probably three or four, plus a bunch of part-timers. And you’ll find that it works out to serving maybe 200-500 regular weekly customers, whether by market, farm stand, CSA, or combination. For example, 3 ac x 80K/ac = $240K (around $2.30/sq ft at 35 sq ft/ac). Divide by 400 customers and that’s $600 per season per customer. That’s a doable rate for a 20wk CSA membership, or it works out over 20wks to $30/wk veggie spending per customer. That’d be enough veggies for 1-2 people, or a small family.

With those numbers, there seems to be room for LOTS of tiny farmers! And I drive by the land for hundreds (thousands) of tiny farms every time I make the 12 mile trip to the nearby town of 17,000.

At the bottom line, where are you after a few short years? The optimist’s view: you’re in pretty good health from doing the work and eating the superfresh produce, the initial stress has evolved into a general calm and connected feeling: you’re better educated, your lifestyle is a lot more sustainable, you’ve learned to roll with the elements, you have a truly meaningful connection with the people around you, you should be debt-free and operating essentially a cash business, with no financing worries, and you’re pulling down maybe $50K a year, after all expenses (which includes immense, value-adding reinvestment each year in the soil, in your production system, in your gear). If you like doing this stuff (it’s addictive!!!), you should be a pretty happy camper… And if our entire economic house of cards collapses, at least you’ll be eating well till the bitter end. :)

This simplifies things a lot, but I don’t think it’s a…simplistic view, just a stripped down one. Paper planning is absolutely necessary, but getting distracted by the formal business plan approach as a starting point can obscure the most important reality, which is the passion, the motivation, the satisfaction, the quality of life, all driving well-focussed, well-intentioned effort on the part of the tiny farmer. It’s not EASY, but it’s also not that complicated.

Now, lemme re-read that! BTW, in my Year 5, I’ve got a long way to go, but it’s moving along and totally fun! :)

Sorry to butt in on Mike, I’m sure he has a response too! By the way, great job with the blog Mike. Looking good.

In fact, the disparity was so huge that my brain couldn’t handle it - it left me wondering how soybean farmers were getting $264 out of each square foot for about ten seconds before I realized that that was what they got from a whole acre. You’d be getting less than a cent per square foot at that rate. That a year’s produce from a square foot of ground couldn’t even earn a dollar in revenue is kind of mind-blowing, when you think about it from a gardening perspective.

On the gear/capital costs side, here’s a really accurate and useful chart that’ll give you an idea of equipment requirements. It’s taken from ATTRA’s “Market Gardening: A Start-up Guide”, which is from my experience very practical, real-world, and on point. And online and BRIEF!

If you have more specific questions, that’d be easier! I’m happy to share my little bit of experience… :)