How To Transition Your Career to Full Time Farmer

in my greenhouse today just checking up on our Tomatoes coming along they've all popped up and I've got some cucumbers that I started here for my bed in front of me that I'm going to put in as soon as we get some more sunlight in here but that's not what I'm going to talk to you guys about today today I want to talk to you guys about a subject that is very important to me because it's something that has been very effective for people that I have consulted for over the years and this subject is actually is I write about it in my book so if you have my book if you go on to page 31 in this book and this chapter I outline a bunch of business models that I think that I've seen work for many different farmers many of them I've done myself actually but I want to talk about how you transition and how you can begin to transition from the career you're in right now to be a farmer because let's face it most people aren't going to be able to just drop their jobs and just jump into farming right away most people are going to have to transition to some degree either set themselves up with a bank of capital and then and then go for it or transition in some other way and so what I write about in this book and I'll even elaborate on on it a bit more is how you can structure your workflow right now so let's pretend you've got a nine-to-five job that you're doing maybe you've been at that job for a number of years and it's become more or less your specialty if it wasn't you could probably just you you would most likely just quit that job if you hated that job you just drop it and try to figure something else out but usually in my experience with people that I consult for they're they have a previous career in something that they're already doing and they want to transition into being a farmer and I'm going to outline how that goes so basically what a person can do in the situation you need to have a few things in place and it would be really ideal if you had a place that you could farm so let's say you are in a relationship you might have kids but you have a house that has a front and/or backyard that you can potentially use or another piece of land close to you that you could use for this and let's just say you're working Monday to Friday 9:00 to 5:00 your average full-time job I'm not going to just reiterate exactly what's in my book I'm going to kind of go on what I've seen more in recent years since I've written the book that you'll also find a ton of value and probably a bit more detail in the book because I do talk about specific production things that you can do like how many beds you plant and what you would plant and all that I won't get into that in this video I'll get more into the the contextual sort of place to start so let's say you want to start farming part-time so you've got your nine-to-five job your husband or wife is is continuing to do their job and you may you might have a couple kids and maybe if they're old enough they can get involved too and that's always fun but what you really need to do is structure or figure out where you want to sell so let's just say for the purpose of this video that we're going to go with the lowest barrier to entry type of market place to start with and that would be a farmers market a Saturday farmers market would be most ideal if you had or already working a nine-to-five job so let's just say we can start there so what you what you can essentially do is get your front and back yard into production so rototill up your your property get your beds formed out I've got dozens of videos on this exactly if you want to know how to transition your yard specifically click up on to my lawn to farm video and watch how that transition plays out so it work if we're basing our work week around a Saturday farmers market you can get away with really the start only scaling back your job one or two days ideally you know you if you had a Thursday and a Friday so if you can scale your hours back to Monday through Wednesday and you have Thursday and Friday off it would be really easy to run a small market garden that can bring up to a thousand dollars of produce a week to a farmers market for a growing season so that could be a twenty to thirty week growing season and this can easily be done on 2,000 to 4,000 square feet very easily of course you're going to have to specialize your farm a little bit you're going to have to grow higher value crops you know you're not going to be growing winter squash and potatoes and onions you're going to grow herbs leafy greens root vegetables you can have a couple rows of tomatoes you know similar stuff to what we do on our farm because that's generally a higher value crop for smaller land bases so if you were able to have a Thursday and a Friday off you should be able to do most of the work within that period so you could start doing some harvesting for your Saturday market on Thursday you could do your packing on Friday and then you would be at the farmers market on Saturday it's even possible to do this with only one day so you could if you have the flexibility in your job to taper back your hours and also increase them to get so you're getting a status quo so you could if you are working Monday to Friday 9:00 to 5:00 eight-hour days you may be you would be able to go Monday through Thursday and do 10-hour days so do 9:00 to 7:00 or 7:00 a.m. to 5:00 or something like that you've got that flexibility and then you could on evenings and mornings you could do the tiny little things that would need to happen for the maintenance of your farm so this would be things like well I got to go pull this crop out and then in the evening when I get home from work I'll do some bed prep and then you would basically be leaving Friday to be your harvest prep and and and packing day for your Saturday market but you would be able to do a lot of the other work on the morn mornings and evenings obviously in the springtime and the fall all you know your daylight hours aren't going to be as long as least here in the northern hemisphere so it's doing it that way if you only have Friday to manage the farm then you'd be you'd be working on Sunday a bit it would be ideal if you could have Thursday and Friday off that way you've got more to do because if you do if you leave it all for Friday then you've just got a ton to do in that day and then you got a farmers market on Saturday which is almost a full day event and then you're going to have to do some work on Sunday so you'll certainly have a better quality of life if you could scale it your hours at your previous job back to Monday through Wednesday and just increase your your hours so we're 10-hour shifts opposed to 8-hour shift that's the basic idea there now because this farm is relatively simple you do have to focus on market streams like farmers markets that's why I suggested selling at the farmers market because you don't have to answer a phone during the middle of the week you're not taking orders and stuff like that however there would be a possibility to get your foot in the door at a few restaurants but really simple restaurants like you wouldn't want to be going to big restaurants or high-end kitchens I'm talking things like coffee shops that might use greens for sandwiches juice bars that might use spinach and kale for their juice or you could even grow a few flaps of Go pea shoots and and microgreens for on a weekly basis those things would be relatively easy to do and I wouldn't recommend approaching those restaurants right away I would I would set this up with the intention of just focusing on doing a weekly farmers market every week and then maybe what once you're into like 2 1 or 2 maybe 3 months of production and you feel more confident about your production then go to some restaurant some small ones like I said for Fairleigh restaurants that would pay cash on delivery like small orders like $50 orders hundred-dollar orders and start with that and then build that as you go so the whole idea here is that if you have an entire year where you can do that and you can find the workflow and the work-life balance with how you manage this by the next season going in I feel like you would be ready to leave your job and go for it it all depends on how company you are how well your marketing season goes and your growing season goes as well as the growth and demand for your product but if you can do a year of that and it might be a bit of a grind you know it might be you're going to work and then you got to do the farm like it's not easy right but so in my experience when I've done this with with clients it's because they had their sort of traditional family unit if you will to two parents or a couple and if they have kids they have kids as they don't it doesn't matter but that traditional family unit that's support of the two people is really foundational in doing this and that's not to say that it can't be done without because I've certainly seen this done without it but it does make it a lot easier because that person who's running the farm that year is going to be under a lot more pressure to make it happen because they have to do it in a lot less time now here's the other thing if you are a in a relationship where one of you is a homemaker and that person is going to be the person working on the farm then you've got like a match made in heaven that is that is a really really good scenario to be in so if one of the members in the partnership is at home with kids for most of the week then bundling in to starting a farm in that scenario is going to be a lot easier because you're already home you know getting the kids to come out and pull weeds with you and plants and stuff and harvest stuff is going to be a fun thing to do anyways so it's it would really lend itself well to that and I mean I love that idea that's the whole I love the idea of bringing back the family farm and I try to encourage people to do that as often as they can because I really think there's a lot of synergistic benefits to being a family on a farm and urban farmers can do this too you just have to customize what you're growing right and in my book I talk about that specifically if you guys watch a lot of my videos you're going to see a lot of the videos I do on crop so I have a series called crop focus and I'll put that link up here where I talk about specific crops that I grow these are the types of crops that I would recommend to grow if you're going to start in this way if you're talking about a suburban home with 2,000 and 4,000 or more square feet of usable land then these are the kinds of crops you want to focus on because they're just simply higher value and another way to look at this whole transition period is maybe you don't have to have the longest season maybe you can just target a 20-week season so it's like May through the end of September something like that or really focus season and just go for it that way you know you've got lots of daylight hours or you're not really going to have to worry about season extension and making the farm too complicated just go for the low-hanging fruit just go for the really easy stuff that you can do to get your feet wet build up your confidence with growing and then getting that product or customers just just do this to get started and nothing that's really what this is all about guys is if you want to start farming and you want to you want to be a farmer you just got to start you just got to get some production going don't worry about all the details don't worry about having to have all the answers just get some stuff going nature is an incredible teacher when you get some when you get your hands in the soil and you start planting stuff you learn really quickly because nature is the ultimate teacher it's going to show you so quickly Oh radishes didn't like to be planted at that time or spinach didn't like to be planted at that time tomatoes loved it at this time you know there's all these lessons that we learn and we we really only learn them by doing them and because they're so specific to the bio region and the climate that you live in everybody is gone it is in a different place in the planet and you're going to have a different experience with certain crops and so the only way to really learn that is to do it yourself you know you can you can get a lot of local knowledge by talking to other farmers and people and your gardeners in your area but you're going to have to ultimately try it yourself and see how it goes so hope that was some ideas that you guys find useful I hope that can inspire you to to start thinking about how you might transition to be a farmer yourself and if you guys have more questions the comments please leave them below and if you want to learn from me on my farm I'm going to be teaching five days here three five day workshops here in Kelowna in July August oh sorry June July and August love to see up here tickets are still on sale early bird tickets are still available and those will end March June and July okay let me start that part again so hope you guys have found that helpful please leave your questions and comments below subscribe to the channel if you want to see more stuff like this and like and share these videos with your friends if you want to come up to my farm this summer and learn from me on the farm I'm hosting three five day workshops in June July and August tickets are on sale now just go to the show notes below the video here and follow the links to those videos those tickets are on sale now and they have early bird tickets that run for each one ending March April and May for the June July and August workshops alright guys hope to see you soon [Music]

Channel: Urban Farmer Curtis Stone

Views: 109,561

Rating: 4.9484534 out of 5

Keywords: gardening, how to, growing, urban farming, spin farming, vegetables, greens, growing better, high yield crops, get started, sustainable, fertilizer, soil, local, permaculture, off grid, homestead, kelowna, curtis stone, curtis, green city acres, profitable farming, the urban farmer, suburban farming, convert lawn to garden, bc, canada, urban agriculture, market gardening, start farming, garden, organic, farming, farm, sustainability, food, agriculture, make money, grow, green, farm without land

Id: cVQ5kCG7Y78

Length: 14min 48sec (888 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 23 2017