My 3 Most Profitable Microgreens

today I want to talk to you guys about my three favorite microgreens to grow the ones I grow the most of and of the most profitable that's kind of next on the urban farmer I've grown a lot of different microgreens over the years from bulls blood beats to purple opal basil to cilantro to even micro green carrots there's all kinds of microgreens out there but I find there are three at least for myself that are the most common and I can grow the most of and sell the most and that's what's important to me this is a way of making a profit and making an income especially during the winter and cooler months and so this time of year it's the 2nd of September today we're approaching we're going into the fall and we're going Gehring up for the winter and microgreens are a very important crop for us on the farm because they allow us to keep revenue going all winter long when there's not very much other stuff coming off the field so there's three I want to talk about and I'll actually approach them in their order of importance and based on how much I grow of all of them so I know there's different ones out there that people do but these are the three that I do the most of so sunflower is number one this is the crop I do the most of I plant the most flats of this every week I find it's the highest yielding and it's the one that's more in demand than anything else a close second to that is pea shoots so these are all ready to harvest and will will show in the video harvesting them so P is a close second I plant almost the same amount of P as I do sunflower sometimes a little bit more and both of these crops the P and the sunflower they're both really popular in the health community so people juice them they make smooth smoothies with them they go in wraps and salads they're a crop that can be used in many different ways and you know they can also be used like traditional microgreens in the sense of putting a garnish on a plate or decorating as a finishing touch in high-end culinary cuisine but they are really popular with the health community so people buy a lot of them and you know for those of us who eat a seasonal diet like myself during the winter months especially the really cold winter months like December in January for us this is what I'm eating for salad all winter I'm you know making salads with shredded root vegetables sprouts and shoots like these and they're very nutritionally dense so the third one is radish and radish isn't super popular with the health community it's more of a crop that's used in restaurants and I do sell quite a few of them at the farmers market but they're definitely more important for restaurants they have a really pungent flavor they're spicy like a radish they have a beautiful appearance because they'll have a pink stem with a green cotyledon and that makes them popular with the the restaurants so what makes these crops profitable is that they sell at a relative high price per pound but they don't sell crazy high I know some microgreen growers that you know sell smaller units and they end up getting $60 a pound for things I don't get anywhere near that I sell these at a relatively low price like around $15 a pound but for customers that buy a ton of them I can actually even get them down to $10 a pound and they're still profitable the key is is the density of your flat so let's look at a sunflower Street plot here you know we've got really good germination here a thick robust harvest a lot of the seed halls have already fallen off so like this is ready to harvest right now and I will yield about one and a half pounds on this flat my my sunflower yield is anywhere between one to one and a half pounds I find that in the winter time I actually get a higher yield or at least on the shoulder seasons then I do in the summer in the summer it's hard to it we get a pound but not much more than that but that's okay because we produce a lot less in the summer anyways so I get a pound and a half off that flat even at ten dollars a pound that's $15 per flat my seed cost on sunflower is around $1 and labor to plant it is around 50 cents so all around I've got about a dollar 50 of cost the soil is a is a small cost it's about 20 cents so let's just say I've got two dollars of total cost on this you know even to make fifteen dollars so that's 13 net profit it's not so bad and I'll show you harvesting is done really quickly so you know if you can think about the space these are 10 by 20 flats so 10 inches this way 20 inches this way they're called germination flats and they're just an open flat like this and we just put soil in them flatten them out there's a previous video I did on that showing Jody Roebuck how to do them but it's simple enough and it's a high yielding crop and on average they're 10 days to maturity so I'll show you three different stages of sunflower shoots so I plant sunflowers shoots every Monday and Thursday so these two here [Music] those are essentially four days apart and then I've got some here that are just germinating and I can uncover them so these ones were planted on Monday so it's Friday today these were planted on Monday they're ready to uncover right now and this is what they look like when they're under uncovered [Music] so this was planted Monday this would have been planted last Thursday and then this was planted last Monday so it's what from last Monday to Friday that's that's mature so this is what happens in four days from here to here and then a little bit less in another four days so about two days to get to there so that's what they kind of look like in transition so I don't plant P or radish as often as sunflower but I will show you what a pshew looks like once it's uncovered so these ones these were planted on Monday so it's Friday I'm uncovering them now so that's what two shoots one week apart look like they go from this to this in one week peas grow incredibly incredibly fast I find once I'm in the winter and it's cooled down a little bit sunflower shoots go to theirs they're about a 14 day crop but pea shoots can pretty much consistently stay as a 10 day crop in a heated greenhouse throughout the winter with low light conditions so this is you know at our winter solstice we get down to eight hours of light for that period I might substitute light a little bit with with lights like this that I've put on my shelves in the past last year we barely did it at all and kept our production going so what I prefer to do with with growing in the winter is just expect longer cycles so I just instead of putting the energy inputs into light extra light I just anticipate a longer growth cycle which means I need more space to grow because I'm going to have more real estate occupied for that but I've set up for that I can I can fit over a hundred flats in here at once actually I think about a hundred and forty four calculated last so you know I just plan on doing that so that just means all push my planting days back to expect maybe a three week crop maybe around the two weeks on the shoulder of the winter solstice I will expect to plant crops knowing that they'll take three weeks to harvest so you make these adjustments as you go okay so for radish here is a radish crop that we just looked at and then I will uncover the ones that I just planted on Monday so the radish isn't quite ready to uncover but I'll show it to you anyways just to give you an idea of how it looks when they germinate so what happened here is I got a little my edges dried out a little bit and that happened because the the flats are starting to lean over but this actually this one here is a better example so fairly good germination on that one with radish I yield about 1 pound for flat but I can sell radish at $20 a pound it's more of a culinary thing it's a lower yield and the seed gets sprinkled on dry here whereas the sunflower and the pea I soak that seed and then plant it on wet like you've seen in the last video but so these ones aren't quite done yet I'll leave them for another day or two to germinate better okay those are my three main microgreens again my number one is the Sun shoots the sunflower number two is P and my number three is radish there are dozens of other microgreens out there but these are the three that I focus most of my energy on and actually have a pretty good economic impact on our farm so now I'm going to show you guys harvesting them in fact I've done a video on this before if you're curious about that go check that out but I'll show you the slight nuances of harvesting all three of these crops for harvesting I use a deadly sharp Japanese chef's knife it's a two hundred dollar knife and I keep it very sharp with my sharpening tool and this is this is what I use a lot of people use scissors I don't use scissors I don't think that's very time efficient or safe for your hand if you do a lot of repeated cutting with scissors you can get your hand can cramp up and I've struggled with carpal tunnel syndrome and tendonitis from my previous work as a tree planter and so I've tried this is a route doesn't work the knife is fast I can harvest a flat of microgreens in less than a minute and I'll show you guys exactly that okay so again super sharp knife and what I do is I like to use my hand to sort of push back where I'm grabbing and I'm also going to grab chunks of it at a time as I cut I'll have a bin next to me and this is how we do it so I'm cutting very low to the flat I'm almost getting right down to the soil level key is you want to be grabbing chunks out of time in a way I think about the flat is two rows and I just cut both rows at the same one at a time so notice how much I'm grabbing in each in each hand movement okay there's a flat of radish less than a minute okay let's harvest our pea shoots so pea shoots are even easier to harvest because they're so easy to grab [Music] simple not even half a minute to do a flat apiece shoes let's do a flat of sunflower shoots sunflower is almost just as easy as pea greens grabbing big amounts and this is why it's so important to have a sharp blade because it just it just makes it effortlessly for the knife to cut through it doesn't require a lot of force it can pretty much just guide itself done so less than a half a minute there and yeah you know you got little debris here if you want to take the time to grab that stuff you can I don't really care it's a it's a minor amount it's sort of the Pareto principle thing that I follow it's like where's the sweet spot for me 80% is good enough of any harvest so I mean obviously I'm getting more than 80 percent to spend the time to pick off all these little things and go back and cut it it's probably not even worth the effort but again that's for you guys to decide so hope you guys have found that helpful if you want to see more stuff like this hit the subscribe button right now like and share these videos with your friends and in my online course I have a lot more information like this on microgreens in fact we've made other videos about it I even write about it in my book you can check that out at the urban farmer Co and my court my online course at profitable urban farming com and if you guys would like to make a donation to the show it's much appreciated and always welcome and it's been those donations that have really allowed me to keep making these videos because YouTube revenues aren't really that big of a thing they're pretty much non-existent because I don't really make viral videos with kittens and fails and stuff like that so thank you to those of you that donate to the show because it really allows me to continue making this content because my goal with this stuff is to help people build the confidence and the skill set to get out there and do this and crush it I'm not trying to make a million dollars off YouTube I want to do this to make impact having said that I do need to make an income from this work because if I don't how do I justify the time I am a business person at the end of the day I have to run a farm that makes money so that I can pay to live and have a nice quality of life so again thank you to those of you that make donations to the show and they are really helpful so if you want to do that you can do that at the urban farmer coat slash support alright guys thanks for watching you

Channel: Urban Farmer Curtis Stone

Views: 771,284

Rating: 4.9531693 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, microgreens, cash crops, profitable crops, garden, gardening tips, urban agriculture, make money, organic, farm, sustainability, farming, grow, green, food

Id: KO-OuqbR3EE

Length: 15min 36sec (936 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 07 2016