My 5 Most Profitable Crops

today I am very excited to talk to you guys about my five most profitable crops and so this is a new list at least in a slightly different order than crops I've talked about in the past and I've updated some of the yield information based on like what we're doing right now so if you're not familiar with my crop value rating system click up here and check out that video though you'll still get a ton of value out of this video basically what I'm looking for in a crop so just in summary of that what I'm looking for in a crop are five things essentially number one is popularity you want people to know what that crop is number two is days to maturity I target crops that have shorter days to maturity so sixty days or less number three is yield per foot so yield per linear foot in the bed so I do 30 inch beds next is price per pound and the fifth one is seasonality how many of the seasons can I grow this crop like can I grow it for four months of the year five months three or six months of the year so if you check out that of the video it'll kind of cover those details but let's start with number one salad mix is our number one product we move more of that than anything else it makes up for at least a quarter of the total revenues of our farm and our salad mix has a variety of things in it it's for the most part it's a mix of different lettuces so we grow a lettuce called Sal and OVA lettuce and I've done videos on this before Sala Nova lettuce we do as transplants so we do it at 6 inch centers so four rows in a bed and we get astronomical yields off this crop we get on average so all of my beds are 50 foot long I've changed that in my book I talked about 25 foot beds I now do a standard 50 foot bed except the odds shorter ones here and there but on a 50 foot bed we're averaging a hundred and twenty pounds per bed so that's usually over three cups so it's usually sort of a diminishing returns like the first cut might be fifty pounds the second cut forty pounds the third cut thirty pound but that's an average recently we've been getting our first cut at 80 pounds and our second cut at sixty pounds so I try to be conservative with my numbers just to be realistic so we're getting an average of a hundred and twenty pounds per bed over three cups so those between each cut you've got anywhere between ten to fourteen days in the in the really colder part of the season there might be you know almost twenty-one days of recovery between each cut so the crop will sit in the ground longer but so on one bed so we sell this for around eight dollars a pound we're making nine hundred and sixty dollars per crop right so in my farm I plant at least two or three more crops after this so in my high rotation areas I call them we have an average of four crops per season and this is where if you know my book and you know my work this is where these numbers when you get into crops like this kind of below a lot of those averages that I come up with out of the water because this crop is just so profitable okay my number two crops is microgreens and so I'm making sort of a broad term there for the most part my cash crops in microgreens are sunflower and pea shoots I do a ton of those I do them year-round they have a short data maturity about two days from seed to harvest and you know some of them are more profitable than others I did a video on my top three microgreens so you can check that one out here but microgreens are fantastic because they meet all the requires the the five characteristics of a profitable crop or what makes a crop valuable and I can do them year-round short data maturity high yield per square foot I don't even have they don't have to occupy land which is a huge advantage so microgreens are great for a lot of farms because they allow a farm to have a product that's not in the ground and that they can do year-round so you can make different salad mixes with microgreens you know I do all kinds of different microgreens but and I make different mixes with them but these two the pea shoots and the the sunflower shoots are my staples we do them every single week consistently year-round so that's what makes them valuable on average we we profit or not we gross profit about $20 per flat so that's a 1020 flat one inch deep and so that's gross you know it depends on the crop sometimes there's anywhere between two to five dollars in cost for soil seed and labor but that's about it so let's say on average we're netting about $15 per flat so keep in mind that's year-round this is arugula this is my number three it meets all five of my criteria it's a consistent crop we on average yield 60 pounds per bed so that could be over three cuts and that is variable and sometimes we get way more like I'm going to harvest this tomorrow morning and I wouldn't be surprised if we got 40 pounds off this one cut so it's a 50 foot bed we sell this for around $10 a pound and so so on average we make about $600 per 50 foot bed it's great it's a fast growing crop in the summertime it's 21 days from seed to harvest obviously a little bit longer on the shoulder season and I find certain varieties of arugula are kind of finicky when it comes to how well they germinate in cold weather like arugula is considered a cool other green and it certainly will you certainly can grow it in cold some varieties like the cold better than others this is my favorite varieties called Voyager and it doesn't do as well germinating in cold soil and we had some challenges of that at the beginning of our season but ruga is a fantastic crop it's an acquired taste you know people either love it or hate it for us it's really popular at restaurants and grocery stores used to be fairly popular at the farmers market but chefs would buy the most of it sometimes I'm sending 210 pound boxes to one restaurant on any given week and it we've recently discovered that it's very popular amongst grocery stores and I mean that's going to be a cultural and geographical thing some people won't know what arugula is in some areas but where we are people love it here's a classic spinach everybody loves spinach it's a common crop especially up here people eat it in salad people cook with it there's a variety different you can do with it but it does it is a good yield er and I can grow it pretty much every season of the year except the summer so it really wins on all five categories when we talk about the CVR the crop value rating we on average get seventy pounds per 50 foot bed and sell it at around $8 per pound so we get about five hundred sixty dollars per bed and it's a quick growing crop you know it's easy even in the in the colder spring and the fall it's ready in less than 40 days we don't grow it in the summer like my last plantings of spinach start around early June mid-june depending on the season but it's a consistent staple we get you know two three sometimes four cuts with my overwintered spinach so stuff that I plant in October and then over the winter and early spring will get sometimes six cuts off beds so you know it depends on on the season and all that but you know one thing that's really cool about spinach is you can market it in different ways so this first cut this is a premium cut it's a baby green so we'll use the the quick cut greens harvester to cut this and if you don't know what that is click the link below check out that tool it's a game changer we'll use the greens harvester on the second and third cut sometimes fourth cuts the crop gets bigger and it becomes a different product so that's the kind of product you can market to people who are going to cook with it or you know process it and use it in some different way whereas this type of green is a standalone salad green and you can sell it at a premium price so what's one thing that's interesting about that is is the yields change you know when you if you let a spinach bed get really big you'll get these huge leaves but you can't sell it at the same price as you can at the premium leaf but you get a higher yield so in a way it all equals out so profitable crop for us and it's been a consistent winner over my eight years of farming all right number five is the white salad turnip or Tokyo turnips or hacker eye whatever you want to call them I caught I commonly call them hacker eye and that's what my customers know them as I exclusively sell this crop to restaurants and it's a very profitable crop in the sense that it grows really quickly I get about 80 pounds per bed on it we cut the tops off we leave about 2 inches because that's what chefs typically like sell it at six dollars a pound so we're getting about five hundred and four dollars per bed in 36 days for the most part we harvest turnips just by pulling them out of the ground and then tearing off the greens and leaving about two inches of greens we only sell these to a select group of chefs and that's how they like them so it's a very profitable crop when you really consider that it you know is a dollar value it's not quite as profitable to say lettuce but it's out of the ground quicker so if you really factor that in it might really compete with it in that regard it's chefs love it because it's a multi you can use it in multiple ways you can bake it you can braise it you can fry it you can steam it you can use the greens the greens are edible you can steam the greens you can juice the Greens so there's multiple products you can sell out of it but one of the great things about it is that it has a lot of option allottee in the field in the sense that you don't need to sell it at the specific size like with radishes with a radish if a radish gets too big it gets pity and woody and it's no longer edible and well maybe edible but it doesn't taste good where the turnip you can have a turn up the size of a quarter or a dime and it tastes great and you grow it to the size of a baseball and it still tastes great so it gives you options in that regard but perhaps the biggest caveat to this crop is that you need to cover it with insect netting all the time all depends on the climate you're in but in my experience if I don't cover this with insect netting I can lose the entire crop and it's happened to me many times throughout the years so I've uncovered this to show you guys but just like these insect netting is behind me this crop needs to be covered from the time that it's seated until the time that it's harvested otherwise you can jeopardize the whole crop and sometimes all it takes is a small rip in your insect netting for the cabbage root maggot which is the pest that is the the biggest problem for it to get in there and it can compromise the entire crop and then you've got worm damage and all kinds of brown spots all over your turnips and they're no longer marketable so that's my number five well that is my top five crops if you guys have found that helpful hit the subscribe button right now if you're new and check out my website the urban farmer dot Co where I have links to my book my workshops my online course I've got tons of content out there for those of you who really want to consider start starting to urban farm for a career because you can certainly make a career out of doing this you know imagine how many people out there with a suburban sized yard like this that could make a living growing food in the front and backyard and maybe their neighbor's yard I'm telling you it's possible I have hundreds of people around the world doing it there's a lot of success stories out there I wish you guys luck and we'll talk to you later [Music]

Channel: Urban Farmer Curtis Stone

Views: 1,601,922

Rating: 4.901258 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, profitable crops, cash crops, make money, organic, garden, sustainability, farming, farm, farm without land, salad greens

Id: CTW0_s8YPOA

Length: 12min 6sec (726 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 06 2017