Grossing $350,000 on 1.5 Acres of High Intensity, No-Till Vegetable Production - Neversink Farm

today I'm coming to you live from never sink farm from Claire evil New York it's an amazing farm doing over three hundred and fifty thousand dollars of intensive vegetable production on just an acre and a half we'll find out how they're doing it why they're doing it and who's doing it in this video coming up I'm here with Michael Kilpatrick and Michael you're a farmer consultant and educator you've been on your own farming for about 15 years you ran your own farm of high intensity vegetable operation for 12 years what was that farm like yeah so that farm was a pretty big production farm so we were doing about you know 15 acres of vegetables and we doing about a half nine and sales we had about twenty employees and we're and you know depends on a year but our highest year is about 20 to 22 percent gross profit margin which in most larger farms that's a really good profit margin and the only way we were able to achieve that was we had you know excellent mentors we had excellent market and we really dialed in the business aspect you know really just pushed on what made money and really pushed on how to set up our farm for success like that and it was a great lifestyle I mean we loved what we did I'm a tractor guy will enjoy equipment and you know was that side the farm you had a fair amount of implements and tractors and stuff and we actually on the end they were actually doing some of our own R&D so we had set their own fab shop and we were actually building silver own implements which is a fun aspect as well and I know from talking to you offline that a lot of your interest is seeing innovation helping people improve their processes and farms we're at a farm it's not yours this is never saying farm and the Catskill region of New York it's an amazing farm doing about $350,000 on an acre you've seen a lot of farms you've talked to a lot of farms farmers you've ran your own farm what makes this farm special yeah so I actually first visited never sink farm last summer is I think around sometime in July middle July and I was absolutely blown away I was like this is the best farm I've seen at this scale much less you know a lot of other scales just the intensity of it and the system and so what makes I think the remember one thing that sets never sink Pharma apart from all the other farms out there is the attention to systems and attention to simplifying everything on the farm as far as far as possible so you know yesterday here's talking about we only grow two different types of cucumbers because we don't want to manage more than that and just the task tickets which you know is the kind of key as this is based around that too of being able to you know write on a sheet exactly what needs done in a crew member knowing all the parameters for that task it's just setting yourself up for success one of the huge problems we see farmers do is they don't do enough pre-planning for their products and then they're all summer long left scrambling trying to think constantly oh I got just this like I do this I got to do this where Connor has simplified things to the point that he can focus on the real big issues like oh my gosh we got a problem with our lettuce instead of the problem with our lesbian the back burner because we got to go tell the 12 crew what to do and we got to do this and we got to find a home for this extra 50 pounds for arugula which we produce because we didn't know quite where our market was Connor can instantly zoom in on that lettuce and really study that problem and figure out what's going on now granted he doesn't seem to have many of those issues just because of his attention to surround attrition the no-till aspect of his farm I'm really dying in the soil fertility but I think that's kind of an example of how this system works and allows him to profitably you know form on an acre and a half and you know one things he is saying is they'd been farming six years this year they're actually purchasing the farm right so that's amazing yeah yeah he's done amazingly well and he started from scratch started with $30,000 and never having any farming experience and he's really one thing I've been impressed here is the systemization of everything if we look at just that cucumber example of limiting to two varieties for somebody who's either an existing farm or somebody was thinking about getting into farming what's the advantage of growing just two varieties we're not trying to grow ten yes on our farm we grew five or six part of it you know I start with the marketing aspect because one of the other keys is he just focuses on his marketing too he knows the absolute heartbeat of his market and can just really dial that in but for us and marketing with six different varieties depending on what those are sometimes you want to market those individually that means you have six different baskets or six different areas for that on your table which eats of an incredible amount of room and means you have to have a massive display and with six different varieties as well that means you have to have enough production of each variety to make it worth spring on the table means you have to have enough of production to actually it'll fill those spots too but you know let's get aside back to the production side so it's really easy to you know if you have tiers to two varieties you're only buying two types of seed so you have to have less stock especially as cucumber seed can be expensive but it can be really worth it as well and then two varieties some of these different varieties they really grow differently they really trellis differently they need be harvested different sizes so less training for the crew you know you've just got this variety and this variety and it knows very quickly the difference in those those those types you know one of the other things I've been really impressed by here is the fuel they are immaculately clean there's no weeds or very few weeds compared to other farms of all the farms you visited of the farm you ran yeah how does this scale of weeds compared to what you've seen in the past yeah this is great yeah this is really really down and really really tight one of the cleanest harm that I've seen what do you think is the key to that for somebody watching this what can they do to start to mimic this in terms of young control um tighten your farm downs I see it you know the kind of the citric Alesi if someone starts growing some crop they do so it's the best way to say well I want to make more money so I'm gonna double my production well when you double your production the other half a production usually doesn't get weeded as well and so then you're fighting through the weeds for the crop and so the instead well I did pretty good on that scale but I'm still not making enough money so they double production again and then I see that happen again and again and again can they go out of business well what Connor did is he went to cook vac opposite he said well let and see we got problems with weeds let's tighten our focus just grow on just enough land and get that production and then he starts using things like tarps he starts doing things like a daily field walk so he can spot weeds the instant they're starting to come a big problem and he's worked on really not letting any seed go we'd go to seed which allows him to you know have an incredibly low seed bank and then just really focus on doing weekly cultivation for the first few weeks of the season and so that just brings that weed bank down as well so and then some really cool tools you've got some you know great different readers and flaming stuff and stuff like that just a you know help them as well to that yes the processes I think that help keep you down and like you said maintaining that weed bank there he has a finite amount of land and it's like if you look at that as a set bank of weed seeds obviously some are blowing in but if you control what's bowling in and you gradually diminish with their over time that weed pressure goes down and one of the big takeaways I've taken from them both here and from the podcast I did with them is if you see a rock in the field pick it up if you see a weed in the field pick it out and that's something anybody at home can do whether you're a garden or a farmer to try and mitigate that weed pressure because no matter what you do they're going to keep growing as you how much can you keep up with them another thing he said was he screams his greenhouses and obviously that's for bug control but that's just for weed seeds come in and so as we cuz greenhouses are clean as can be because of that very thing and they're immaculate so let's head over to one of those and we'll take a look at it and see how he's producing his tomatoes Connor we're in one of your tomato houses here and this is something you love to grow what do you think is the key to this system what made it work so well for you well it's a lot of small changes since we started you know we thought we have to increase the amount of tomatoes Chris the amount of area that we we grow tomatoes and but we've just been making these small changes that increase the production and that's just really about controlling the environment making sure we have enough water controlling the humidity controlling the key controlling the ventilation doing a better job at pruning and also adding in graphic all of the things have really just combined threw up the production this stuff anybody can do excusing the right varieties as well and one thing I love that you said is similar to your cucumbers is you limit the varieties you grow to limit this choice confusion when it comes time to grow the market a lot of people I think fall in love with Tomatoes the stories with them they want to grow all these varieties you grow just three different heirlooms or three different colors and then you grow some salad at style Tomatoes how much is that health versus if you have this wide array of tomatoes well it helps it helps on all ends it helps when you're starting them just lowers the complexity helps inspire the feed it helps when you're planting them because the final product when you're selling them you don't just don't need that complexity to to sell them someone loves Tomatoes you can always grow a few plants for yourself that you know all the varieties but on a small farm it's really about keeping it simple we keep the cherry tomatoes simple we do a lot of Reds that are early and then we just flash in some colors or mixed variety that's it you know we don't we don't go crazy with it and it's really helped in our sale the taupe and how we sell them and how we display that rather than having a big mix you can just color-block it when it comes to sales how did tomatoes rank in terms of they stay compared to green for a lot of farms greens are the big driver there's a big moneymaker where do you think Tomatoes fit into that well year-round greens are always the winner if you take if you you know take the whole year and find Pro scales and each product grief is always going to be the winner but in the middle of the summer you know from the time that we they really thought the tomatoes start producing you know they really put green you know they they really challenged the greens for how much money they bring in it especially if you do an early committee you're not a labor space basis like you figure all this tomatoes under culture this greenhouse looking cheap to put in but the labor involved in pruning the labor involved in grafting the time and the money involved in putting in the greenhouse more than justified by the sale price of these tomatoes at the end of the day over the longevity of the greener yeah absolutely and if you're if you're doing Tomatoes in the field you might have a slightly less labor pot but that labor cost to production you know the ratio can be much better in here you know you're going to produce so much more that it completely is worth it because you're going to need you know such a smaller percentage of tomatoes to produce the same amount so it is totally worth it in a house like this you can Hunter K to do it right with with the footprint of this Alice inserted by one point the 30 by 120 you could do a hundred game just Tomatoes or if you can but you have to do them really early through them really lay through them really well that can enhancer and is Michael and I were talking about Tomatoes like many things on your farm they're systematized for a farmer that's just taking a haphazard route or for somebody who's gardening and trying to do it better how would you advise them to start approaching systematizing thing to make it improve over time I think some people get overwhelmed and they want to go from messy the perfect in one step what would you say to that for me I can't do it quickly I have to do it one thing at a time slowly even if I know I have five things that I can improve on I can't do them all at once I've got to think about that one thing implement it because it's not just about writing it down or creating the system it's about having the people on the farm internalize it and that takes time so if you throw a whole bunch of stuff at people it's going to turn into chaos so it's just a little bit at a time making those changes because you also want to see how they work because we've implemented systems that don't work and we have to change them and change them before they do and that takes time and so trying to do it all to want to was never a good idea for us it took a while just like when anything on a farm you have to do it slowly in for point of attack go for the biggest bottleneck because they get headaches the biggest problem area biggest problems first what have you found when you've gotten into farming in terms of farming gospel you know we hear some of it come up during the workshop things like crop rotation how do you approach some of these things that seem to be cast in stone or seem to be known truth but maybe or maybe art especially when you're going to try and experiment improve system I like to know something's really going to work before I do it and then it's going to have a big impact and it's not that some things just don't work it's their impact may not be as big as something else that I want to do but like the environment that we grow the plants and and controlling that may be more important and have a bigger impact than on release then rotation and just for ease of on a farm switching another greenhouse to grow tomatoes then and getting it getting all the infrastructure to do it and that may be more of a pain and more costly than the benefit of that rotation but what I just trying to always think about what's going to be easy and what's going to have the biggest impact on the bottom line they can run it and I think it's a lot of it you don't get here overnight you started five six years ago you started with thirty thousand dollars from basic stuff that most people could get so I think a lot of people see a farm like this and they get intimidated thing I could never do that it's too complex I could never get there but that's not where you started this is where you have evolved to and you've arrived at yeah I would have loved to started with a lot more information and knowing what tools what I should have done how I should have designed it but I did I started with a lot of problems a lot of weed a lot of headache cattle work I think the best thing you said yesterday was at the beginning you were looking for vegetables amongst the weeds and now you're looking for weeds amongst the vegetables and there's not many weeds out there yeah and that doesn't happen overnight you know that's that's that's a long hard road to hoe the tomatoes you see here these are the closest the field tomatoes that you'll find I never think probably ever these are grown in a movable high tunnel and they're grown under culture these are a late-season variety every other tomato that they grow here at never sink as you heard Connor talk about is growing in protective culture because there's so many benefits let's call this semi protected culture the tops close over but the ends are open so the wind comes through and there's no climate control here obviously everything else is done inside in the protected culture only left for his later season varieties so one of the things that Connor does that makes his farm really successful is labor-saving tasks and tasks that make things more efficient one of those appropriate pieces of technology that makes tasks more efficient is right here it's the paper pot transplanter it's a piece of technology that makes transplanting dramatically faster yesterday in the workshop Connor says I credit the paper pot transplanter with giving us one extra day off a week that's amazing because what it does is it's able to transplant 256 plans in just minutes versus having to do each one of those by hand more on the paper pot transplanter ahead but it's one thing that Connor does a lot of he does everything on his farm with it except for microgreens and the obviously transplantable crops things like tomatoes and cucumbers and his really dense rows of salad mix like red Russian kale arugula spinach he'll use an earth way cedar or four-point pinpoint cedar but for a lot of his other crops especially as leafy greens cilantro onions he will use the paper pot for that and those beds look amazing here's what they look like every bed you see here was planted with the paper pot transplanter and it's all cell Innova lettuce high-value cut lettuce that they get to sell at the farmers market for somebody who's in the soil for somebody who's in the no-till this farm is Disneyland because it exhibits the best of both worlds all these beds here are no-till production he stakes out his beds to lie them up there's a stake at each end and he runs a line along them temporarily when he cultivates each bed with the broadfork or when he does his transplanting with the paper pot transplanter or a cedar with whatever he's using this is what got me to want to stake beds here is talking to him in the podcast and doing it because he always knows where the edge of the bed is the bed is never dancing an inch or two this way or that way the pathways stay consistent they're perfectly flat beds there's nothing raised here there might be a slight amount of loft from just preparing the beds but they're not raised up really high the pathways are all flat why isn't he raising beds well he doesn't need to he figured when he ran the map he'd have to generate an extra 30 percent of you to justify raising the bed so that raising process would have had to add 30% more product to justify all the work of maintaining the raised beds because the edges want to slough the extra water the extra cultivation all those types of things when it comes to the soil it's crazy finger straight in it feels like a potting soil like you could buy this in a bag and sell it it's only happened here over time because about 50 yards this way behind me is the never sink River in a lot of river basins flood plains what do you get a lot of rocks and the rocks vary from size is like basketball to very small when he first got in here and tried to tilt this up he was using a BCS initially tons and tons of rocks over time the rocks have been removed the BCS has been parked now it's totally no-till II just uses the tilt or the broad fork and basic hand tools to maintain this soil bed and it's amazing it's just so loose so friable beautiful soil when I'm trying to do in my place in California and a lot of it is due to no tilling because a tiller doesn't touch this property anymore here's one of the crops that they grow in the field that never sank that they do really well on this is one of their big crops it's carrots super popular why does he grow more carrots than beets it's simple more people like carrots and beets so why put a bunch of beets and turnips in the field when more people buy carrots he could sell a lot more carrots no weeds in here and that's due to his continual management what are his keys to carrot germination number one he doesn't use pellet seeds anymore he uses raw seed he does all his seeding in the four point cedar and he uses a lot of water if you don't put a lot of water on them they won't germinate all his water in the field is overhead he's only using drip in the greenhouses because he doesn't like drip out in the field he just doesn't get good germination good crops when he's using drip out here so everything is done on overhead sensing or wigglers sensing or wobblers but these are his carrots another prime crop here never sink and if you ever see his pictures on Instagram of their mounds of carrots at the farmers market they look beautiful here's where they're grown here's some of Connor's intensive pee production it's amazing little system and it's kind of doing some ingenious little things here that I want to steal for various reasons I don't grow many peas but I'm thinking I want to after seeing this he transplants all the peas you see here with the paper pot transplanter using really tight spacings he tries to get as many plants as he can per linear foot because what he wants to happen when people are picking the plants the peas is he doesn't want them searching all around for peas he just wants you to pick pick pick pick pick you're not trying to have to search around and find one pea here one pea there that's a waste of time that's a waste of labor if you plant a lot of peas densely in one area it's just pick pick pick pick pick so he doesn't really tight spacings with this paper pot transplanter using the 2 inch spaced paper pot cells and just blankets the cells with seeds to try and get a lot of pots and if you look down at the roots here I don't know how well they show up in the video but the plants are basically spaced like this they're really close together one cool thing I like that he's done here is he's put these teas on top of tea posts and when a piece of EMT your conduit some sort of piping along the length and he's used that to support is pea netting you know how he's getting sag in my tomato fence I'm now thinking what if I put a chain-link top on top of a fence or some PVC like this and ran some EMT along the top of it would that sag less than a rope and I think it might so this might be a solution I may take to apply for tomatoes and he's also using this unique clipper system and its greenhouse that's really cool and I'm kind of thinking of stealing that using that for my tomatoes next year too because I think it's going to be easier than winding them up with the roller hooks but amazing stuff happened and here a lot of innovation it never sink farm here we are in one of Conners treehouses it's one of the things that he specializes in and does really well and here are the cucumbers that reference so Michael what do you see here that he's doing very specialized one of the things he's doing is he is focused on frolicking well and cleaning there's 200 so most people throw cucumbers on the field is going to go hot arby's every single cucumber plant is its own strength everything with suitable pain gets pruned until they're about knee higher waist high so that means that that plan is pushing all energy into the ground and doing a great root system before trying to fruit and that will increase production later in the season but most people don't do that you know one tiny thing that takes 30 seconds to plant and you know doubles or triples of production I mean look at me I really never could grew those cucumbers like this but Conor successfully yeah I'm a dude they're like Daniel be tall and coming back to town is what's coming right back down so and one thing I really like about him is you know you said he that is a girl filled cucumbers anymore he's only growing them under culture here the water makes them sweet he gets better product at the end as a and better product and usually better money and more sales right yeah and here I mean you're not having to pump pressure you're not having the and you can water very easily every single day so that's another key long production just cycling on them with succession of cross so a beautiful system working out really well the tool rack it never sink like everything else here it's beautiful it's all well organized everything has its place this is just how he does it to keep things organized to keep things nice to get jobs done effectively on time tools need to be where they should be at all times so when you need to do the job the tools are ready this system of organization of having all the tools lined up in the field is one way he does that there's a couple of these staggered throughout the farm so nobody has to traipse 50 yards that way to get a tool and then come all the way back if they're working in this section of the farm the tools right here there you have it Connor Creek more farmer of never seeing farm one of his beautiful in the fields movable high tunnels and Michael Kilpatrick is in the field consultants I've been here at this two-day workshop I'd never sink farm it's been an amazing experience and I'm somebody who is interviewed a lot of farmers so I get a lot of what's out there in farming and I think what Connors doing here it never sink is truly special when it comes to systems organization we control amazing like top-notch one the 99th percentile type things here truly amazing if you again here's another example of that amazing weed control this is a field type hoop house so it slides down the field that way on tracks there's no weeds in here and if we turn this thing around and we look the other way there's some blackberry bushes here but right beyond it is a field of about four foot high grass and meadow with all sorts of wildflowers and big deer fence so there's a lot of greenery that grows around here the wind is growing this way all sorts of things are coming in potentially into the field it's not like this is in a dome so he's got a lot of weed pressure potentially coming in but when we go back and look at the when we go back and look at the fields themselves they're perfectly clean and that's only due to his management in the systems he has in place I hope you enjoyed this one stay tuned for more ahead would never sink to learn more about Conor visit his farm online at never saying farm comm and you can listen to the two podcasts that I've done with Conor or links to those below that's all for this one coming to you live from the Catskill region in New York it's Diego thanks for watching until next time be nice be thankful and do the work you

Channel: Diego Footer

Views: 2,351,535

Keywords: market gardening, farming, paperpot, paperpot transplanter, neversink farm, farm small farm smart, diego footer, organic farming, small scale agriculture, tomatoes, tomato growing, no-till farming

Id: u5IE6lYKXRw

Length: 26min 37sec (1597 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Monco123]

So they grossed $350k in revenue but what's their net profit? Gross profit (revenue) doesn't mean anything until you deduct your expenses. Any business owner that goes out of their way to emphasize the term "gross profit" while promoting their company is knowingly attempting to distract focus from their real profit numbers.

[u/LetterToMySO]

Didn't watch the whole thing, but I do have to say that I have a great appreciation for how he keeps his workers in mind when simplifying and slowing down the pace at which he implements new ideas and techniques. Having worked on a farm where any time owner gets a new idea they immediately try to implement and pass off the task to an employee can be overwhelming.

[u/KainX]

Jesus Christ! cover you soil with Mulch! Aaaaaarrrrrgh! It makes me so mad to see exposed soil. Because of this, I am always mad!