Tiny Farm Blog Organic micro-farming with two acres and some tools ~ a daily photo journal...

My longest post EVER…ohmygod!! :)

I've been thinking about this for a couple of days. I'm heading into Season 6, and I'm STILL working on a basic, comprehensive production planning system. It's a lot trickier than it seems!

The fairly recent conclusion I'm coming to is that planning what and how much to plant comes down to your personal farming philosophy and goals. This will of course be affected by your size and location (access to market), and then, growing conditions and your capacity to mitigate less favorable conditions (like, no rain, but you're fully irrigated). Even then, there are always many, many ways to go with a market garden, and the decisions really seem to come down to what you're after (in LIFE! :).

On one hand, saving and analyzing hard data to plan the product mix and field quantities seems pretty straightforward. You need to do a lot of quite meticulous record-keeping, especially in the first couple of years, and then, crunch the numbers! It's the approach I started with, and I've read about people doing this to the Nth degree, apparently with fantastic, predictable, profitable results.

In my original master plan, I began with an easy to track field unit: 50' beds. That way, I could track crops by row feet: a bed of, say spinach, three rows per, is 150' of spinach. As long as I recorded dates, yield, harvest/post-harvest time, and sales results, after one season, there'd be a ton of useful data, at a practical, realistic level of detail. If I got 60lbs of spinach from one bed that took 50 days from seed to harvest, and sold 50lbs of it at $4, I've pretty well got a handle on spinach performance. With the same data for the whole year's production, and for all 25+ other veggie crops, I could sit back in late fall and winter, map it all across a calendar, and have a pretty detailed idea of what performed and sold well at each point in the season!

I set up the field with easy record-keeping in mind, with 50'x50' sections, each with 10 beds. On the production map, it's a neat grid, with map-style coordinates for easy reference (letters across, numbers down). From the north end of the field, a section three down and one to the right would be 3B, and the fifth bed in there would be 3B-5. Simple and effective notation! Crops, varieties and planting dates were meticulously penned in in tiny type. For the farmer's market, every week I had a one-sheet form listing each crop on sale, usually with separate lines for varieties (for example, two types of carrot), noting starting quantity, unit size and price, and then added a tick for each sale. Harvest and packing time was (and is) pretty well limited since I don't have a cooler: everything is done the day before, so I didn't track that by individual crop, just divided it out evenly. Fantastic!

Two problems quickly became apparent. First, I plain didn't want to sit there poring over all that data after the season was over (the record-keeping itself rapidly became…painful, though I persevered for the first season). And it's a LOT of data, since I succession plant, up to five or six plantings of almost everything that's cool tolerant and 60 days or under to maturity. First season, I was tracking 160 beds, 240 the second, and 320 since then until last year, when it went to 400 (there to stay!). Second, there were still so many unaccounted-for variables affecting production, both in the season gone by and for the upcoming season, that it seemed futile to spend the time number crunching, if that was supposed to lead to the next year's plan. There's the really crazy, absolutely volatile and unpredictable weather that started my first year, 2003 (typical of the wildness, one year was cold and damp—under 40°F nights in August!—with no two consecutive days of sunshine ALL SUMMER). Combine that with relatively major production changes each season (new seedling greenhouse, improved irrigation, applying 120 tons of compost, finding that an old washing machine used as a greens spin drier could quarter my hand-washing time, etc, etc, etc) meant that the performance of particular crops could vary WILDLY from year to year, both up and down (overabundance to practically none at all). With so many crops in such small plantings, it didn't seem that these variables could be meaningfully averaged out for future planning.

NEXT, I started CSA in the second season. This put a big twist on things, a good one for variety and growing fun, but a huge complication for planning. With CSA, I could grow a much wider range of crops and varieties than I could reasonably expect to sell at our fairly conservative, rural farmers' market. With a total traffic of maybe a few hundred people per Saturday, there is only so much market for tomatillos and daikon radish… With CSA, I was able to include more…adventurous selections, they were even welcomed, whereas even the CSA members would likely have purchased no more than maybe 5-10% of those same "specialty" crops had they been shopping at the market (including, even, many of the non-red heirloom tomatoes!)… BUT, with the diversity made somewhat practical by CSA, my harvest time suddenly started to get lopsided. Even without meticulous record-keeping, I could see that CSA harvest, for a fixed weekly income, was WAY more costly than harvesting prime market sales crops. Although I tried to keep CSA share content roughly equivalent to market cost (CSA isn't a discount plan), I'd always end up putting in the basics PLUS some "specialty" stuff in the shares. It's fun. People are happy. It's what felt good and right… It was also expensive.

Anyhow, I could go on, but no need! I think it's pretty clear that the amount of record-keeping only grows as you try to fit in more and more data and…revenue sources. For good measure, I will add that last year, our CSA nearly doubled to around 55 AND I had for the first time one full-time helper on a flat weekly fee, plus lots of harvest day help. While the field experience with PEOPLE was all-around GREAT, the harvest/post-production turned into a bit of a production line, banging out 80-100 units (CSA+market) of 10-15 crops every week meant stuff like those tomatillos didn't even get harvested. Nice growth on paper meant mini mass production in practice. In hindsight, that aspect I really disliked…

Of course, in this case, the logical solution is to SIMPLIFY the crop selection. Grow ONE type of carrot, two or three tomatoes, and so forth. Grow a very limited number of "unusual" offerings: okra, 40+ types of tomato, tiny purple and white eggplant, six or seven types of summer squash…stuff like that just doesn't sell around here, right?! So why grow it?! Well, because, for me, it's FUN, I don't see myself churning out relatively uniform harvests of 6 or 7 top sellers. And people at the market do gradually expand their tastes. I have nothing against a streamlined selection, that's what most of the other, much bigger veggie growers at the market do: strawberries, radishes, peas, beets, snap beans, carrots, corn, tomatoes, potatoes, winter squash, pumpkins, one variety of everything but the squash. I could see myself happily doing that as well if I changed the entire farming idea I started with, which was to be local, diverse, high quality, TINY, 100% hands-on and profitable: grow it and they will come… ;)

My VISION, still intact, is a pretty standard tiny farm dream: a beautifully balanced giant veggie GARDEN, a happy, loyal clientele (farming partners!) paying FAIR prices because they really absolutely swear by the value, measured in quality, taste, and experience. Tons of diversity, but finely tuned, so there is an abundance of delicious, tender, highly profitable baby salad greens all season, and colorful, unbelievably tasty, fragile, premium priced heirloom toms, mounds of sweet, crisp, always well-sized carrots at a proper price-per-pound, but also some okra over here, lovage and tarragon there, Jerusalem artichoke in the late summer and fall… It can definitely work, but it takes a very clear production head, and it's taking me a long time to clear out all sorts of distractions.

My latest attempt for this season is to simply the PLANNING and RECORD-KEEPING rather than the crop selection. It's a new approach that I'm still working on, but already it feels good (then again, at the start of every season, everything feels…possible!). The basics:

1. Two crop groups: an A list (must have staples, top sellers, most requested) and a B list (lower demand, trial). The A list is simply the priority, from initial planning to anticipating and dealing with weather, it's A first (I used to kind of spread effort across everything…no longer). The B list, being lower priority, gets planted in much reduced quantities (by knowing from the start that they're simply not going to get a fair share of resources, I'll plant WAY, WAY LESS so it can be maintained at high quality… Sounds obvious, but for me, it's a breakthrough :).

2. A simple revenue per bed tracking system: This year, with 2.5 acres or so, I have 400 5'x50' beds. I'll assign a total income for the year to each. Regardless of the crop, succession planting in the same area, whatever, I'll just add up the sales number for the bed. For CSA, I'll divide the number of items by the weekly income, and that's it, an arbitrary flat rate (for example, 8 items in Week 6 at $24/wk for a single share, is $3 per item).

That's about it! I think it's just enough of a quantitative, hard numbers framework to keep all the rest that's managed in my head organized. At the end of the season, I should have one simple sheet with a total per bed, and an at-a-glance reminder of where it came from. The rest is general farming overhead: divide the year's total expenses by 400 and there's the cost per bed. More detail than that, for this type of micro-farm, I really don't need! Adjustment for the next season should be simple, informed and pleasurable.

So that's what I'M trying this year!!

I do sometimes think of small farming alternatives. For three years at least, my standard "what if I wanted to make the most money from tiny farming" alternative scenario is: shrink the 2-2.5 acres down to 1 acre. Spend all of the annual improvement money on optimizing it for salad greens, and (a limited selection of) heirloom tomatoes, and grow specialty salad mixes and toms for the upscale urban market (in my case, Toronto, 75 miles away), where I can get literally 3-4x what I've been able to charge locally. Have more controlled conditions, with fixed irrigation, shade cloth, organic fertilizer. Hire for most of the field labor and spend at least half my time marketing (which I seem to be pretty good at), for example, developing restaurant and specialty retail clients. There is certainly a ton of demand for this approach, at the moment. Maybe I'll do it some time, but for now it sounds like not so much fun…it's still the more romantic field of dreams veggie garden for me!

Wow, that's really looooong, but I'm not gonna try and edit it, at least, not right now. Hope it's at all useful in some way!