you know you can get away with very little on a farm and sometimes we people especially when people like you so if you've been talking to Curtis Stone or John McCain you're gonna come to a different perspective at the beginning but a lot of people come in and right away they think I got to get I got to get a tractor maybe a cultivating tractor I can get on top of weeding that way and what I think the so you do need a way to work your soil now if you're in some kind of no-till system that you're not going to turn the soil and it's working let's spread fantastic but if you don't have something that works you will need some kind of rototiller or some kind of structure thing and it can be a BCS walking tract and that can work really well but where I think it really makes sense to invest is in your post-harvest handling and so you want to have a wash station that is sanitary also that's out of the elements so that you're not miserable like in a rainy day or windy day so that that's important and then I would say a cooler some way to cool your vegetables is really really vital and for the simple reason that when you harvest so you should probably harvest your crops as early in the morning at least the tender ones like leafy greens so because if you wait harvest them too late in the day we have a lot of field heat in them and that's once you cut them they're gonna wilt a lot quicker so if you harvest them earlier you have less field heat but in the summer there's still some heat so you want to get them out of there dunking in water too hydro cool them and then bring them out and get them into cool room and store them for like a number of hours up to like 24 hours before you're gonna market it and there are people who love to say this was freshly harvested this morning and it's getting right to you but I would argue that crops that have been well conditioned will do weight will store well much better for a client at their house than something that's just harvested quickly and sold the same day and so that in that in that cold chain keeping things in the cool room for a while it really stabilizes the crop and it's gonna really extend the storage life of your crop and and and and I would and I do know some great farmers who have minimal cold rooms but I think that's the exception and and you could just have a fridge or some of like those you know like those coke coolers or something but nowadays with this is a cool bot I don't know if you guys anybody not know about a cool bot okay so a cool bot is a little computer that you hook up to an air conditioner like so a normal air conditioner or like a heavy-duty air conditioner and it will override the control the controls so that a little lower as opposed to like tapping out at 16 or 20 degrees you can bring it down to 4 degrees and it'll it'll maintain that temperature so the cool BOTS a few hundred bucks the air conditioners a few hundred bucks you get into some kind of room that can be built pretty pretty pretty shot if you want and it's way cheaper than any professional cooling system and like when you're dealing with aberrated and compressor and you have to deal with refrigeration guy when that guy comes out it's a couple hundred bucks when there's no problem and when there's a problems that can make a thousand bucks so a cool bot that there's it's a very cheap investment for the amount of return is going to give you so that's so I would say some kind of cold room is really really a good investment another thing to really be careful about is if you choose to not go with irrigation and there are great growers not irrigating but if you're in a climate that has periodic dry spells or constant dry spells irrigation is what's gonna make your stuff germinate and is going to give you a control over the crop that you might not have even if you're like so where we know we're at Montreal above the Northeast us which is a fairly wet climate but you can have three weeks of dry weather even if it's like a flood year you suddenly have three weeks of dry weather things get warm you see salad greens they take an extra week to germinate and it's an erratic germination and then suddenly you don't have your yield that you're looking for so irrigation is another thing I would think about and then you know you have to have a way to till your soil and those three things don't have to cost a lot so and everything else you know it's just for fun and sometimes it's good and sometimes it isn't so at this point I'm gonna jump into the presentation and I'm gonna start off with sort of a bit of an introduction introducing myself and you know kind of some ideas and going to jump into a more structured crop planning approach and I'll talk about that approach when I get to that point so and I also highlight in the in the the proceedings or the the schedule the title was crop planning to kick ass that was my working title it wasn't supposed to be published when I saw that was like oh I guess I didn't correct that so I'm just going with crop planting for organic vegetable growers and if you're not certified you can still use these methods so a little disclaimer so I'll start off with what makes a great farmer and you hear that it like this person is a great farmer and sometimes like here you know this guy he grows the best specialist is the best farmer but he just can't make it work and he had to close shop and what I would argue is that you know if you can't make a living farming you're not a great farmer you might be a great grower but farming has like what are you talking about farming unless it's pure homesteading business has always been part of it and people have been making business decisions and farming for hundreds of years as far as long as I can also has been in North America and people are planning since the beginning and so it's to be a great farmer you have to wear a lot of different hats and the business side might be even more important than the growing side and so it's kind of a little thought to seed there and so over this weekend or this conference there's been you know they've had numbered examples of different successful farmers who knows Chris Thoreau who has a very small surface and a high turnover of microgreens that are there for a few weeks Curtis Stone is a third of acre doing something like 85 or $100,000 shy mouths damn foxy and I'm I had his wife model and a lush who's a really important important part of the process as he is while referring to John methane by name throughout the rest of the talk but that's kind of assumed that's you know the couple is part of that and they're at you know an acre and a half and they're doing some like $150,000 and you know I remember when John my thing was first being really successful with his model he's looked at a really a micro farm a really small farm and now in this list he's the giant and we're growing seven acres of farms a vegetable sort of like we're off of this and and these are all successful farmers I like to think we're successful I'm not going to say we're the great but and there's a lot of things that these farms haven't cut have in common and one thing is these these models are really appealing because it looks like not a ton of work and it's a good return and it's a good lifestyle and I'm not going to dispute that but what I will try to make a case of for a bit in the beginning is that there's other ways to farm that can also be really rewarding in terms of quality of life and and finances and it being ecologically sustainable and so if you see yourself straying from this model something's different especially a bad thing doesn't mean it's going to work out but it might but it can so in the case of these farms they all focus on high profit crops this is one one of their secrets is if something is not a high profit crop why grow it and Jonathan might be a little bit less than that because he's he's dealing with a CSA mess to have a broader range and I would say ourselves we are high profit crops might be like a quarter of our crops it's not the bulk of it and then these guys have all a small acreage and I've kind of addressed that they have low overhead an infrastructure we've kind of talked about what that infrastructure can kind of look like and one thing that I've been arguing with John after a weekend about is he would highlight they have no tractor and this is something that that he sees quite a bit but we have three tractors and a cultivation tractor and there's a lot of good farms that have them so I'm not going to put a big emphasis on this but there is definitely once you do have a tractor here's a tendency to get more gear for it and there's a lot of more expenses that come along with it and a tendency to scale up maybe beyond what you're able to cope with and I mean there's a reason that like Amish farms choose to not use tractors and they're using horses it's to kind of keep the scale at a community level and not have individual people getting too big and as you get too big there's a lot of I mean other than community it can be there's a lot of issues that come in of dealing with your market but I'll just scratch this from the list for the moment they tend to have low labor especially low hired labor and they're focusing on you know a few highly-skilled key individuals and and I think this in some ways is one of the secrets of these operations is that you have somebody who fully understands your system has great work ethic and is able to do stuff you know from start to finish and that means that you're not training a bunch of people who don't really know what they're doing or have a bad work ethic but this also really scares me in that what happens if that person gets really sick what after that person has a family emergency has to leave for a couple weeks or more and it this it's now there are small farms that can deal with those emergencies but it's something that you will have to deal with if you lose those people and it's something in our farm we have five farmers running the farm we have seven employees so there's a lot more resilience in not relying on individuals and and I think on the medium and long term that can help the sustainability not to say that this is gonna be the kryptonite for these guys but it's something to be aware about it's what you're betting on but the last thing this is what these farms all have in is the real secret is they have systems so we have an approach for everything they do on the farm the for each crop they know one they want to plant it they know how that process is they know when the bed prep is gonna happen they know how to deal with clients know how to do invoicing they know how to do all the crop planning which we'll be talking about and it's those systems and following those systems that's the magic in this there's a lot of farmers out there who know that you have to have good invoicing systems or know that you have to plant into nice prep soil or you know a nice seed bed but when it gets time to plant in that seed buy their beds aren't always ready and it's those systems that make it happen and that's what I'm gonna be kind of trying to talk a little bit is what some of that system looks like on the planning side I'm not going to tackle a lot the bed prep and some of those are the things but I'll be talking more that more the planning side but if you do want to have a fantastic farm its those systems that you want to invest in and sometimes it takes time to develop them but there's a lot of great models out now and I think that young farmers and new farmers and even older farmers who are established and want something different are really fortunate to have to have farmers like like these three farmers out there who are publishing their information and sharing it so so broadly and and we've when I we started farming there was a lot of information but not the same that is now and and there was you know Eliot Coleman was cropping on a small acreage but it wasn't really looked at as a MA like not everybody really believed that could happen but it's really hard to dispute these people and so it's it's a really fantastic time to have these systems already really fleshed out and you can work with them so with that I'm gonna jump into our farm so we're a la film clip of that see Tomasello trying to saw cooperative farm and turn the soul is French for sunflower and it's kind of similar to heat uh soul and it kind of means turning towards the Sun but it's also a play on words which means turning the soil and that's who we are and where a worker co-op that's made up of five members and so we're incorporated as a worker co-op and one of the consequences of that is that each person has one vote independent of any number of shares the owned in the business so it makes it something that's fairly a gala terian and dividends or profit is redistributed in function of hours worked during the season and yes we do meet a lot and we do talk a lot but we've been together for about eleven or twelve years and our systems have gotten you know we've learned how to how to communicate and so I'm gonna introduce the different farm members so one of them is is Renee she is one of we have two field managers that kind of share the job so she's one of the two field managers she also manages the greenhouse and she deals with all our organic certification there's Emily who is at the conference this week and also my wife but Emily is the harvest the farm and she's the other field manager and she also leads a dried tea production so then we have Fred who is the bookkeeper he does all the CSA administration and he does all the CS the soil fertility planning we have Reed who's in charge of all the infrastructure and machinery maintenance he manages a cover crop and our apprentice program and then there's myself and I'm in charge of the seed production and I deal with our website and our newsletter and so I'm responsible when it's not on time like it's been lately and so the five of us run the business and we also do a fair amount of field work so we are involved in planting weeding harvesting and as the business has gotten bigger were less involved in some of those tasks and the other part of the team is our apprentices and employees so we have paid apprentices and then we have employees have been with us for a few years who might potentially become new co-op members in the future and so last year we had five people hired on the farm and then this year we'll have seven so this operation that I'm explained I'm describing is 12 people in the peak of the season and through the winter it's about six or seven people we rent our land just west of Montreal so we have 18 rented acres and on that there's about 12 and a half till Baker's so the non tilled acres are like you know the access ways and fertilizers where the barn is and roads and in headlands that takes a lot of space especially when you're attracted based system of those tilled acres we have seven acres that are in cash crop three now three and a quarter acres are action seed production which you may have seen in the workshop yesterday I guess two days ago the rest is in mostly vegetables but a bit of flowers and some other crops and then we have about five and a half acres that are only like they're only in cover crop during the whole year like in our vegetable in our cash crop we do try to have a cover crop before after but in our cash crop fields it's only cash crop so it's a kind of like a four year out of seven cash crop rotation so what percentage of C do we grow ourselves so for seed that we use on farm it's somewhere between 10 and 30% and that really depends on whether you're talking about dollar value or seed count or seed weight so it's a funny metric to deal with but um but it's about 10 to 30 percent that we're using and then of the seed that we sell through our seed company we produce about 70 percent ourselves and about 20 percent we're contracting close to us and about 10 percent is coming from other climates that have better climates for specific seed seed types so about 3/4 of our revenue is comes from vegetables and we are predominantly staple growers so we grow carrot we go orange carrots we grow red tomatoes we grow or grow all kinds of potatoes but we do grow some weird stuff but it's really the staples that we focus on and about 40% of the vegetables 35 to 40 percent go through one farmers market honest on a Saturday it's about 25 minutes from us and then the rest of the vegetables mostly go through a 350 member CSA basket program and so it's someone I need like 600 families that were feeding five 600 families were feeding on a weekly basis and this has been the foundation of our business from the beginning was vegetables and but it's shrunken to only three-quarters over the year about one eighth of our production that was in garlic we sell garlic as seed stock and as table stock and we have a cadogan varieties and something that we're known for and the other eighth of our business is seeds and this is mizuna seed crop we harvest things by hand we Thresh by hand this is a high-tech screening system and winnowing system and we sell our seeds through an online store a print catalog we also have seed racks and we go to different farm markets or seed events during the winter and we sell seed to other seed companies so there's a fair allotted more diversification the seed business and they're in the vegetable business and the seat business is a part of the business that's growing at like twenty to fifty percent a year there what I find in a lot of bigger metropolitan areas is there's a lot like 10 years ago and we got into organic farming there was a lot less competition and the easy market there's more competition for not I mean people are eating vegetables and they want to eat good vegetables so there is a limitless market but it's more work to deal with with the seeds there's not the same competition so it's something that's been interesting for us to expand but we're also expanding slowly because we want to make sure that when we do expand we're not burning clients and that we can build relationships that sustain and and that's something that it's nice to have a vegetable business to be the foundation for that so just a trim some numbers so we have about 12 or 12 and a half till Dakers seven acres our cash crop we're generating about four hundred fifty thousand dollars off of that this is paying salaries for five farmer owners and we're probably making about forty thousand a year from that and then we have four employees and three paid apprentices that are being paid something like maybe eleven fifty to thirteen or fourteen bucks an hour or depending how long have they been with us and that's something that you know the problem all this apprentice with us has been with us for maybe or employees benefits throughout three years maybe four years and something that as we expand we really the wages of our of our workers is really important to be able to increase that to because we couldn't do it without them and then we have three tractors cultivating tractor and a BCS rototiller so a lot of machinery and we work about forty to forty-five hours a week and we rotate the market so there's five of us so I would go to market once every five weeks and then we have a couple of prentices who are with us or sometimes hired employees specific for that for that event and so it means that a busy week is something like fifty to fifty five hours but on average is 40 to 45 hours a week and we've been working like this since the beginning this is not at something like for us quality of life has always been an important part and being a co-op it kind of incited us to maybe work less because having one or two people working twice as much as everyone else it's hard to kind of have a balance or than that so we've kind of just you know it took a while to get going but once we got a schedule set down it's been pretty easy to maintain that and so of the five co-op members there's two couples in there and so generous so we take a vacations during the week and during the summer and usually couples will leave together and so all of the farmers are taking probably about two weeks of vacation during the season maybe one whole week and then I can number of like long weekends and that's something that we've been doing fairly since fairly early in our operation - yeah any questions about it's probably something like probably something like forty five percent profit margin and that profit margin is going into salaries for the five farmers so that's kind of that's what's what's paying us but that doesn't include our paid staff which is probably like I don't have to be like $80,000 in sorry largest single expense it are you know what I call our profit margin I said it's forty five percent that doesn't include the pay staff it's just the five farmers so yeah yeah yeah yes the first yes so there's a question the question was we say we split profits through the farmers and is there any year that we wind up having no dividends and and yes there have been some years the first five or six years we know we plan very conservatively and we do so much better in some years it was amazing how much better we did and that was like that for five years or so and then suddenly we started having not the same like recruitment wasn't as easy for the CSA the market sales weren't going up the same rate and so we had two or three years whereas kind of we were making what we were projecting and so there wasn't a dividend to to redistribute at this point we're kind of getting out of that and it's you know you kind of figure out what the different problems are and how you had to expand out of that but we you plan around us having salaries and so that's we've always been drawing a salary and so when I say a profit or a dividend that's above and beyond that okay so what is crop planning it's what you guys here to learn crop planning is trying to figure out how much to grow what you want to grow and when to plant it and you want to do this before the season begins and this is pretty important because otherwise we call it crisis management and and you know if you can't make your farm work on paper it's really hard to make your farm work in the field so uh what I'm gonna be talking about is we wrote a book and Bayman designate called crop planning for organic vegetable growers I read it with rotor with micro farmer Fred mostly based on our systems but a little bit separate too because once you start writing stuff out you know you realize that what you're doing is very intuitive so we have to kind of create a system that kind of worked on its own so this this book does go through all the steps I'm going to talk about in much bigger detail then I'm gonna go through some of those steps and what I'm gonna try to do is talk about things that aren't specifically addressed in here or that have changed a bit since we first wrote this and if you do want to get the nitty gritty I mean we also only have a couple hours you guys can go and find this book and and and read away and plan away and so the the process that we've broken it down into is an 11 step process that kind of starts with where you want to be and works backwards so the first thing you want to figure out is what you're trying to get out of this farm and in the case I'm gonna talk mainly about the sales but we'll talk a little about quality of life too and once you know how much you need to make from your farm figuring out what a marketing plan that would that would meet that financial need and then once you have your marketing plan then it's a matter of figuring out when you want to grow those crops and how much to grow to meet it and then what you have to start in the greenhouse or a nursery so you're able to plant it on time and going back to how much seed you need to have on hand to plant in the greenhouse and then in the field and that's kind of the crop plant itself is your field planting schedules your greenhouse schedules in your seed order those kind of the three pieces of your crop plan and so the next part of the process is kind of how you carry out the plan and then how you'll adapt it and then analyzing profitability and some of this fun to look at profitability first but we'll look at it a little bit later I don't make reference to it and then the last thing you want to do is once you've gone through a season is you plan for the next year and so I'm gonna focus more on the first couple steps and the later steps and I'm gonna kind of breeze over three through seven just showing some of the some of the math but yeah and I would say before you start farming and before you start crawl planning your own farm it's also you know a lot of us want to jump into it to a new cura or lifestyle but it's really having prior experience will increase your success even once you start you're fond of so many things you don't know and so if you are thinking about farming and you haven't started I might recommend or I would recommend that you go out and maybe take another year off or two years off before starting farming to go work on a farm and it could be a paid apprenticeship or an unpaid apprenticeship or just an employee but working on a farm that works is really a great way to learn the skills and because there's a lot of stuff that's not intuitive and once you start farming like harvest speed and efficiency these are things that are much easier to be shown than to figure out on your own and they're much easier to be shown than to learn from a book or a YouTube video though those can help for sure and I'm so III can't highlight enough the amount of importance of going and getting training of some sort is I mean if you want it to start up you know a car shop and be a mechanic you wouldn't just open a shop and I get people start bringing cars to you and you take your wrenches you know maybe if you've been fixing cars for 15 years on your own you feel hopeful do that but you have that training you know and it's the same thing with farming and farming you know you have so much growing skills so many business skills there's also some mechanical skills and all those things need to be a fairly high level for everything to work really well and once you start farming sometimes it's hard to keep learning because you're dealing with the crisises as they come along and I would sometimes if you are having a really hard time on your farm and not making it work it might be worth maybe taking a season off and working for somebody else or finding a farm that that you respect closeby and going to work one or two days a week through a part of the season to kind of see how it's happening there and and sometimes once you've farmed you know what the real questions are you should have asked in your training so that's that's that's a really important step so when we start our goals we all choose to farm for a lot of reasons and there's a big reason probably if you guys are choosing to farm that are based and you you know there's a certain environment and ecology that you want to be part of and you want to see and you want to be encouraging the natural healthy things in the world as opposed to to hindering them or at least standing by so you know the plant life the flowers and all that are part of what motivates us there's also you know it's fun to work outdoors it's fun to be your own boss and so there's that part is really great you also probably want to be able to enjoy your life a little bit not work all the time and you probably also want to grow good food you know and you know ferment and pickle and put up food so the eating part is really important too and then you know if you have employees and stuff on your farm you want to have a good social life with them this is our annual employee apprentice appreciation lunch at the end of every fit every the last Friday of every month we have a barbecue at the farm we break off an hour earlier and have a barbecue friends and family come other farmers come really challenging events and this this this aspect is really at the core of why we farm and I am barely going to touch on any of this what I'm going to talk about is money and and if you can't make enough financially to meet your needs it's really hard to appreciate all these other things and it can put a lot of strain on your family relationships with your your partner with your kids and it can put strain on business partners if you have them or and friends so I'll talk a lot of money but really what I'm the money is important because of this quality of life that we're striving for and there's a couple principles I'm going to address that come from the holistic management systems and so holistic management is a system developed by Allan savory has a really huge book that's a bit dense to read but that focuses on setting your holistic management goal that involves its focuses around quality of life and there is finance as a part of it but if you want to get really into that it's great to go read the book but even better it's great to go and follow a course because sometimes when you're reading a book we focuses on the wrong things whereas if you're taking a three or three or six day workshop on holistic management you will leave knowing what the things are you supposed to focus on and so we'll bring this to setting financial goals so if you are in your first year of farming and you're just launching how much would you guys like to make in your pocket that year anybody want throw a number out ten grand 20 grand 4045 loan numbers so let's say you wanted to make 10 grand in year one maybe down the line in year four you want to make 40 grand this number here is a personal number and it's based on what your living expenses are you know if you have a mortgage you have kids and all that kind of stuff and you know in the long term if you only making ten thousand a year there's a lot of people in our society who couldn't make that who can survive on that some people can so this is personal to yourself what this is also you know you might have an off farm job that's deriving enough of an income to support most of your needs or maybe your partner has an off farm job and it's you know we we enter farming wanting to do it fully and wanting to work full-time and me think that's a great thing and it can be a great thing but sometimes it's easier financially to be farming part-time and that's a choice that you know you don't want to farm full-time and burn yourself out maybe it's better to have a miserable job and have some happiness in the farm or you have a good job and have happiness in farm - uh-huh but but you don't have to bank everything that you're doing on these systems so the first and this so what I'm gonna go through the financial goals this comes specifically from holistic holistic management financial planning tools is the first thing you do is figure out how much you want to have in your pocket next you figure out what farm income is going to generate that and a target number that they like to look at is about 50% of your gross sales for farm income should be your profit or your salary that's that's going into your pocket and so if you follow that number you could double it and then what's left is your expenses and this is a fairly simple math here so if you want to make $10,000 if you can make $20,000 and only spend $10,000 you'll have 10 $10,000 profit no in this case expenses is money that's not going in your pocket so this here and that's why I call it salary as opposed to just profit because it's money that you're paying yourself to run your farm and whether you think of it as an hourly wage or you think it is a lump sum it's still something that that's what you're taking out and that's in some ways the most important part of your operation is what you get out of that because that's what you're working for you know if you're out there hand weeding on your knees and you're working 80 hours a week it's because you're expecting to get something out of here you know it's not hand weeding for 25 hours in a week that's gonna make you know nature and the world a better place but it's because you expect that you can have a better income coming out of that and and that's really important too to think that way and we'll come back to that in a second so yes and I'm yes that's farm expenses so just just to clarify that this expenses is the operating expenses of your farm so it's your seed cost your fertility costs marketing costs it's not your lunches or beer or and well and it's not necessarily even your internet bill and well I'll touch base on that in a second well so it so how do taxes get figured in and that depends on how you're set up but generally if you're like generally you will be getting some taxes at the expense level well so I guess it depends if you're sole proprietor or if you're just declaring it on your own income taxes or if you're running as an incorporation or as a worker co-op so in the case of where we're a worker co-op there the business itself pays taxes to the government and that's a business expense we make an income that we declare on our personal income tax and then we get taxed on that also and that's a personal expense and so when you're looking at how much you need to make a living you have to be aware of what your taxes are going to be you only make that mistake once and hopefully yeah so a couple guidelines and these are starting to be a bit out of date but you know a new farmer who doesn't have a lot of experience can expect to make you know five to ten thousand dollars of gross farms gross sales sort of per person starting out now if you've been working for five years this you might be able to do on another farm you might have to do much better than that but if you're really new to it this number here might seem low but it's possibly a good realistic approach there's been a lot of analysis of different farms that are generating quite a bit of revenue depending on acreage and and other another parameters and it looks like on a lot of those farms it's about forty thousand dollars of gross sales per person that you can expect but when I'm looking at numbers like from Curtis and John math Tang I think that those numbers there might be higher numbers that are possible now if you have good running farms and it's really fantastic to aim for that but until you're there you probably should plan more conservatively and once you've gone through your first year you'll have a better idea what's more realistic in subsequent years and you know it's great to have a great first year but it's also you know you don't want to have to if you don't do well that first year you don't want that to compromise your existence so you need to make a budget to keep your expenses on track yeah yes and okay so the question was do I mean when I say gross sales per person is someone who works full-time on the farm and I would say yes and that is probably looking at like a nine month season or you know maybe seven or eight months season working full-time not necessarily year-round like in our climate we do work year-round but in the winter it's a lot of planning and machinery maintenance and that's not directly generating sales it's the stuff that you're doing in the summer that's directly generating the sales unless you have like a winter production yeah yeah okay so I'm just going to try to illustrate what you're talking about so if we want to make $40,000 as individuals okay so if we're five people that want to make $40,000 that means our profit is twenty five two hundred thousand so by the rule that I'm showing we would need to make four hundred thousand dollars of sales to generate this income for us and then we'd have about two hundred thousand dollars for expenses does that clear us up to here so this this is the math that would happen and we're close to that we're about 450 so it's not that far from that now if I use this number here $40,000 gross sales per person that's here so if I'm doing 400,000 divided by $40,000 I would need about 10 people which includes the five of us to run this operation and this is an important thing to see it's not that the top farmers have been farming for twenty years on a farm make this and then the new apprentices make that it's rather when you have good managers who are managing a system everybody's making this kind of money and so in our case if we're we're we're so we were we were ten people last year and we were about let's say four hundred thousand so this is actually quite accurate on our farm and I haven't looked at it this way recently so I'm really happy that my math works out I'm not saying the opposite yeah so - and now the thing is you have to not spend more than this expound expense number if you want to make that income you know you want to make those sales you don't want to spend more than this and that's how you make that and so you got to make a budget and I don't have a lot of tools that I'm sharing right now with budgeting there's you know I think Jonathan Curtis his books our book all have different sample budgets and there's no one budget for a farm but there are two elements that I want to highlight that that you have to be aware of when you're budgeting one is the difference between cash flow and a profit and loss statement and so when you're looking at your annual budget if you're buying a $20,000 greenhouse that mites and you only gonna make $20,000 that $20,000 greenhouse might seem to just cancel out all the profit and the thing is that greenhouse is gonna last for at least 10 years so in terms of accounting you want to depreciate that or amortize it over a number of years and it depends on what kind of item it is but so you would say that that $20,000 greenhouse over 10 years is $2,000 a year so that when you have your expect your budget it's just a depreciation that shows up you do have to pay for the greenhouse though and so that's where you might need to have savings that you already have or take a loan or have been more profitable in a future year and so that's something that when I talk about expenses I'm talking about annual operating expenses so it's the things that you're spending in that specific year and and another thing is so on a farm like ours where there's five people running it and we're registered as a worker co-op there's a clear distinction with our personal life and what's what's a farm business but if you are running your farm and running off your own personal income tax return there's a lot of expenses that you can hide or that get melded in to your to your business and I'm not going to comment on the appropriateness of that or not but I think it's important to be aware of what expenses are going in because if you look and eighty-five percent of your revenue is going to expenses and you're complaining about that but all your rent all your you know all your travel supplies food and other things are also being covered in there then it's not actually 85% of your business as business expenses so that's something that you should make a strong distinction of when you're budgeting so the important thing with the budget is that you're paying yourself and this is the thing that you want to do is want to pay yourself first and it's really easy when you're running a business to have expenses that pop up and you just pay them and as you do that the money disappears and you have less and less that you're saving so one thing you can do is have a separate bank account for your business than for yourself and on a monthly basis transfer money over as if you were paying yourself a wage so it's not just at the end of the year that you're taking a lump sum out and not having that money in the bank account means that you can't accidentally spend it because something breaks or you have a knife something strikes your fancy and so yeah and so so there so just coming back at this the salary is what you want and so you're trying to make sure you're getting it you want to control your expenses if your farm income is better you should think of that you should try to maintain your expenses that with theory before because that extra goes into your pocket you don't want to be working a lot of extra just so you can buy new things that you're going to be using up now if you make extra and that means you can afford a better tool or something's going to last in a while then that can be investment but again it kind of converts back into the depreciation I was mentioning but if you just wind up spending ten thousand dollars extra on compost because you made ten thousand dollars more though that's good for the soil you know it's it's just it's you're hurting your business and so if you've been farming for five years or ten years you should ask yourself are you where you want to be and that where you want to be often comes down to two things it's you know how much are you making and how much are you working and if you're not making very much and you're working way too much you have to think yourself to yourself you know why or why not am i there and often going back to the basics of looking at this is the starting point before you've even looked at what your crop makes is you know as how much money do I need to make if I'm grossing an eighty thousand thousand and spending seventy thousand and expenses well I might be able to make ten thousand twenty thousand so making a smaller business will have maybe less labor costs less cost across the board and it's less work to do it and that is the really important step and because if you've been working hard for five or ten years at something and the system hasn't evolved much from what it was in your first year what to make you think it's going to evolve in the next five to ten years and so you have to go down and you have to look at the numbers and this is the first number to look at so from here so what you come out of with this is how much money you want to make during the year and this is the basis of your marketing plan and your marketing plan has four pieces it's the methods that you're gonna sell or distribute your product your vegetable list your crop list what the prices are gonna be and then what you're planning on harvesting on a weekly basis so there's a lot of different distribution methods one that a lot of people know about is Community Supported Agriculture CSAs and that's a formula where folks pay in the beginning of season or commit to meeting this season and they might pay a few times over the year and then they come to the farm or to a drop-off point and they pick up a set basket of vegetables and they get that over the season so a farmer with a community-supported agriculture system knows upfront how many folks is growing for and he has a chunk of the money or maybe all the money before the season begins and this is fantastic in terms of covering early expenses and being able to pay yourself it's also knowing the number is really fantastic in terms of planning but having this money paid upfront is stressful and because you have to deliver and even when you've been farming for 10 or 15 years there's still a stress to deliver and when you have a tough year you're thinking of the people who have committed to you and when you only farming a couple years you really feel that especially if it's all your friend your closest friends and family who have signed up with you so this is a are also a few pictures of our drop-off we have a drop-off on the farm we have a drop-off well it's no longer it was for a while I was at a church it's moved over because there wasn't enough space anymore and in our system it's called the market style where the vegetables are out like at a farmers market and then folks line up give their name there's a board with what's in the basket some of its in English some of the English on this is French but some of its individual items some of its you know choices and then folks go down and then they fill their own basket or bag or box and and make make that make their basket some people have pre-made baskets that they deliver we like this system because it reduces the amount of packaging work beforehand but it increases them at a time at the drop-off but more time spent at the drop-off is more time that you can talk to your clients and better build that relationship and we have stuff that's you know bunched as items but then there's also stuff that's bulk and you can deal with weight but we found that dealing with volume is a lot easier people can kind of just scoop and put things in a bag so we'll do potatoes by volume will do tomatoes by volume we'll have salad mix and green beans and green peas by volume and even as certain times the season will start to move carrots by volume and what's nice about by volume is we could have carrots and beets and turnips and people can mix and match how they want in that volume but one challenge with the volume system is that there's some people who will put like half of it in you know and they're trying to be there they're they're they're more conservative about it and then other people really pack it in and and so the average might be what you're planning on giving out but you don't want to be and if it were everyone is happy that works but you don't want to be shortchanging clients who who would like to have more especially they feel didn't get enough but it's because they didn't put enough in the bin dealing with you have it scale it can get around that but you have to have good logistics if you have a lot of people to keep the flow for that skip around that scale and then we also have an exchange basket so we have extra items that we'll put in the basket sometimes it might be stuff that's left over from market I mean that salad greens but like carrots or beets and then people can come in and they can if they're something they don't like or allergic to already have in their fridge they might put that in the basket and take something out and then we'll try to restock a part way through the season so it's not only like one item that week and that's how we give a certain mount of flexibility without having tailor-made vegetables that and like some choices in the basket so these numbers are based on an easter north eastern climate or northern climate so they might be different if you're farming and somewhere like San Diego or California but the the types of things you need to know so you need to know how many weeks you're targeting for and if you are in a climate where winter is serious you probably want to be dealing with sixteen to twenty weeks um and if you're new to CSA you might be wanting to deal with less and it's the spring can be really tough because you don't know sometimes when spring is actually going to start and also really cold Springs and really wet Springs can really slow production down and really make those first baskets tough to fill and then the fall can be tough because at a certain point you need to harvest crop that you're storing to distribute later and that's where having good storage systems really makes a difference and sometimes that's not top-notch so it's not that full 20 weeks that you might be able to easily do and if you're thinking 26 or 30 or 35 weeks you know that's even more commitment that you have so if you're newer to CSA or a new CSA I would say start less weeks if you have a great season then you can extend weeks and you can just have a longer season you need to know what the value is per basket and here I'm highlighting 15 to 45 dollars if you do the math and you have more weeks at a higher value it's just more money and that's nice math but a big basket is much harder to fill in a satisfying way than a smaller basket is one kind of complaint you don't want from your members after getting too much stuff and having to compost it or give it away that leads to dissatisfaction so maybe having baskets somewhere in the twenty five to thirty dollar range might be easier to fill with the reasonable number of vegetables I'll get to that yeah and then so if you're a new font a new CSA farmer you could probably regenerate about five to twenty shares per person experienced farmers are generating anywhere from thirty to seventy five shares per person and it can depend on other kinds of Mount market outlets they have so this is not really that prescriptive with such a broad range so shares is so with CSAs part of the languages you're buying a share of the harvest so each each member is a share it's a good question though so our farm the way that we work is we have you can pick up every week or every two weeks we've chosen not to have a big and a small size that's every week and having one size that you pick up every week every two weeks is easier to fill because if you have a big size in the small size it's hard to make them both fair relate in relation to one to the other and if your small shares are too generous people will downsize over time and if your big shares are too generous and or the small stores aren't generous enough people might just bail out so we have we the way we deal with weeklies and by weeklies is that let's say we have a hundred people that sign up to be by weeklies we divide into two groups of fifty and fifty two come one week and fifty come another week so it's a static number that we have across the board so when I say we're dealing with three hundred and fifty members a week it's probably about two hundred that our weekly and then be a hundred and fiftieth at our bi-weekly so it's actually three hundred families that are bi-weekly but only getting half a week and so if you do the math of your delivery fee times your cost you have what the value of the vegetables in the next thing that ki taraf e does not apply to anyone here this is a in Quebec there's a network that coordinates CSAs and it funded by CSA's that are part of them giving a share of their business so I'm not going to discuss that one thing we do though is if we'd rather people sign up weekly you know it's it's just less people to deal with and it's easier you know you get a bigger check at the beginning or bigger checks let's people chase after for payment so we take off a dollar a week for those people who commit to every week so it's twenty two dollars for twenty two weeks so that's the total that's how we that's how we price our vegetables and then when we're action that's how we price our share we're actually aiming to put fifteen to twenty percent more value than they've paid for on this line as as vegetables that they get and we base that price on our market price and because we sell at a farmers market we have of we have that price list so off of twenty nine fifty that might be something like 35 or 36 dollars we're trying to put on average in a share and sometimes it's a little lower and sometimes it's a little higher so so yeah we'll come back to some of the differences um farmers markets you go to the market you have your stuff people come they buy what they want what they don't buy you can swap or eat for compost or feed to the pigs in some cases you can store it like if it's onions or potatoes or up a little store for the future some people will sell stuff from that like I treat if you have a lot of greens that are wilting they might sell at a reduced rate to a restaurant or something it's going to be processed or give it to a food shelter diversity of crops we're not gonna go farmers working as much but with the farmers market what you want to think about is how much you want to make over the whole season knowing how many weeks you're going and what that looks like on an average week now you probably ideally you could have that average week every week through the season and that spreads the work out but it might be that you're making 300 at one point and a thousand another point and then less at the end again and that's something that's going to come in with each with differently with each with each operation but with farmer's market there's a certain amount of unpredictability that comes into it however the longer you're in the same market the more you can see trends and if you can sell a hundred bunches of carrots one week you're likely to sell roughly a hundred the next week maybe 90 maybe 110 but it would be very exceptional you can sell 300 the next week or that you'd only sell 10 bunches the next week there can be markets that are based in you know certain types of touristic areas that do have a big fluctuation of people that can be like that but most markets first get standard and they might have a low period in the spring or a high period like it might change by type of season but it rarely changes from week to week every week and another way you can sell this sort of in a wholesale or a semi wholesale way through restaurants and stores and this is the part that I don't have a lot of experience with so don't have any pictures and this is something that going back to kurtosis decadence is really fantastic this these restaurants on stores you're generally going to be getting a lower price than you're getting if you're doing direct market to a groceries to it to direct to a farmer's market or CSA but you can often have a higher volume that's offset and it can also be you know at a farmers market if I'm there from 7:00 in the morning to 3 p.m. that's a lot of time spent marketing and if I hire people to work there's a lot of time whereas you could maybe make the same span of sales to a client like this in a shorter period of time so you're making less money but you have less marketing expenses and that can really make a difference and there's a tendency to not like wholesale in the small farm world but wholesale can be profitable if it's run white right you know and then so that's a lot of things one thing is we are in a golden age a vegetable growing but not necessarily in a golden age of developing clients and a lot of places have a ton of CSA's now a lot of places had some great farmers markets but every neighborhood now is a farmers market so some of the farmers that were making a certain amount in one market now have to go to two or three markets the same week the same of money and it means that you know we're targeting the same demographic and dividing up into the pie into smaller pieces and there's but there's all the people are eating you know and so finding ways to tap into new markets is really one way to go really great you know having great product will sell itself but finding new ways to market it will sell itself will also create a revenue so in our case we've diversified with seeds you know so that's something that's agricultural product we use the same kind of crop planning but by going with seeds it's given us a different kind of stability and we're in a marketplace that's easier to develop we have a print catalog sometimes people talk about value added and value added people often thinking about making tomato sauce or jam or something else in a can with a nice label the thing about what I found a value added is if I if you want to have a good value at like a good Jam or other processed product you want to start with good product if you're starting with your worst stuff that wasn't harvested it's hard to have a top-notch product and if you're putting top-notch product in a jar are you getting more for it than if you just sold it at a farmers market and so it's not an it's not this easy source of money to just generate extra revenue now if you can produce top-notch product and you're in an area that can't meet that demand converting it into a value-added product that you can get a good price for is really great because a value-added product often is non-perishable the same way that something goes the farmers market is you can travel further afield with it and if you don't sell it you can bring it back home but if you have a fantastic market that is happy to pay good prices for fresh vegetables well you're nuts you don't have to process them and spend time in the kitchen and all the other marketing expenses and sometimes value-added can mean different things like in the case of this garlic we bunch it put a little label on it and then we can sell it for five bucks more because it's an abrade so with twenty dollars of garlic goes twenty-five bucks and there is work that goes into it but if you can do it quick enough the work pays for itself so you're adding value because now it's a beautiful thing as an ornamental thing it's a great gift so value means different things to different people and a last part of the world these days is it is web stores and this is something that you can meet you can find people much broader than just your farmers market a lot of people are doing online shopping and there are so many platforms that you can use to work with this kind of thing so it's something that is worth thinking about how you might be able to do to just to sell that way shipping can be an issue but not always it depends on you know it could be that people order this way and it come and pick it up or they come and pick up a central spot so figuring out how you're going to distribute is very key in whether you'll be able to sell it so if you have a CSA you have to probably have more staples you can't just do salad greens in cilantro you're probably talking about at least 20 crops maybe more if you start selling at farmer's market there is an there is definitely an appeal to have a broad range of crops and to meet every client stem every demand but there's also an interest in specializing you can be a salads mean person you can do the garlic guy and people come to you for that specific product in the short term it's probably more gross sales to have a diversity but down the line if you do build your reputation and your brand that specialization can be very crazy how much you can sell through it when you talk about restaurants and stores you can deal with with diversity but probably want to go for for specialization you know less things but sell more of it so from your and a key part in all of this is that it's going to get better over time and it's based on the relationships you build and people keep repeating this and it's true you know you have to take the time to meet people and you have to take the time to listen to their complaints and build on that so once you know your outlet you figure out how much you're gonna make per outlet 12,000 for the CS ten thousands of farmers market in this example one thing to think about is if you have a lot of different outlets you want to you know you want to treat them right and it can be difficult like if you have a CSA and you're going to farmers market and you're putting extending a good product the farmers market people can start complaining and thinking that you're not treating the CSA well and it's usually good to know what your key market your key outlet is and know what the rest is kind of like the padding and over time your apples a balance everything really well but at the beginning nowhere you really want to have the best results and and if you're doing a CSA I tend to think that that should be where you put the most love because it's the word of mouth that's spreading out that's gonna have more clients and you want to have a low retention rate and a high recruitment rate if you're going to grow its fresh or the farmer's market you want to have love there too but the farmer's market there's a little bit more variable that's explained expected okay so the question what is the difference of someone going to CSA and getting a basket versus what to get from the farmers market or why they would do it so as far as prices so we at CSA we give people fifteen to twenty percent more than they paid so if they were to buy the same vegetables at this market that they got at CSA they would get 35 or 36 bucks whereas if they buy it through the CSA to get $30 so markets like $36 the CSA would be $30 and at first glance you're like well what so that's nice to have that savings but also maybe you don't want to have cilantro this week or maybe you don't there's also certain on things that you're getting that you might not be your first choice and people tend to like farmers markets because of the choice what's nice about CSA is that we do come at the beginning at the end you're going to get something and you don't have to all come you know and farmers markets tend to be a cluster of people early on because they want to get stuff before it sells out whereas the farmers market you can take your time so we've definitely found that there's people who don't want to go to farmers market those people who don't want to go to CSA and the folks who don't want either they're probably not the client you're looking for or maybe they go to a restaurant yes there is on our farm we don't have a work so there's a lot of different variations in the CSA world and so the question is what are our variations I guess you know do we have a work requirement do we have barter do we have you know we what you see is what we have there's a couple people that we've bartered for you know like for certain products but over most of it is is that the numbers I was showing earlier being able to customize your CSA to different situations there's a really great way to get new clients and it can also be a really really great creator to different clients food accessibility is an issue and there are some CSA is that there's once they say that I know that their share might be $30 but you can only pay 20 or 40 for it you can't pay 30 and so the people who are paying 40 there's 10 bucks of that that's offsetting the people who are paying 20 and and that's part of the social mission of that of that of that farm and it's also being run by a registered charity so that ten dollars that the 40 people are paying can actually be claimed as as a charitable receipt so there's different different structures you can do there's their CSA is now that have using online platforms you can really customize what goes into your basket and that's a great way to meet your your client's needs it becomes more like a buying club and there are some CSA purists who don't call that as CSA but I think the CSA world is more and more inclusive of that because some of the people were the most hardline about it haven't been multipe their business running and in the end you know there's a community of people that are eating organic food that's supporting a farmer and I actually sometimes don't like to use the word CSA because are these farmers markets supporting any less their community agriculture we have people who've been you know buying more vegetables every week than a CSA member gets for ten weeks 30 or 40 weeks of the year will mean that 40 about 30 weeks of the year and these people are no less supporting us than the others so so catering something that meets people's needs you shouldn't get hung up in what CSA should be but you should be transparent in explaining what it is for you when you're dealing with your clients and if you have something that's very different market it because that could be a good leverage to get more people so the comment is one farmer in the crowd has a market share or a market card at the market call the market share and so they have they pay a certain amount and then on a weekly basis they can get what they need and that's just a dejected from from their tab and this works really well for certain demographics specifically the older women is that what you said who might not need as many vegetables are in a vet as in a CSA share or normal CSA share and that this is out selling their CSA so that's fantastic you need to know what your set what you're growing and how you're going to package it and we're not going about talk much about crop choice but I would highlight formatting and thinking about it beforehand because when it comes time to go to market or CSA if you're just figuring out then that you need elastics or you need a pint or a quart you're stuck also formats can really change how you sell stuff when we first started farming we had a hard time selling individual peppers we started putting them in these courts you know for peppers it could be for really nice red ones but it can also be a mix of different peppers and we could sell words before we were selling 20 individual peppers suddenly were selling 35 quarts with like four Peppers each and that did really well and so this formatting can change about three years ago the course quit selling and now we're selling a lot of individual peppers again so it changes but but playing with that can make a difference be well being dynamic through your marketing is part of the lesson but also thinking about how you're the format is the other part that's important pricing is important and we'll talk about when we talk about profitability later we'll see the direct relationship between pricing and profits what I would say is you do not want to be charging more than you are ethically comfortable charging two people but you should also reflect that many of us who get into farming tend to be on the frugal side and tend to be thinking about vegetable prices from our perspective but you might be in a market that when they're buying something at the grocery store it might be twice what you there comes we'll think twice what you're comfortable selling it for and so that can be fantastic if you can sell cheap stuff and you're running a profit but it's also a place that you can be generating more more revenue I would highlight that beautiful delicious fresh local organic produce that stores well sells itself and people come back for it and so having the great product is what guarantees your success being a decent you know person talking is not bad you don't want to be a real jerk but the product is what sells and and one thing I see is that the farms that the most expensive prices in a lot of farmers markets tend to have the longest liens so going cheap doesn't guarantee more sales and often there's a kind of a prestige that might come with the price or an assumption that things are better than the other farmer if the are better that's even better but you yeah so and then the last part of your marketing system or your market plan is a projection and you want to have figure out you know all the different props that you're growing and then every week how much you're planning on bringing of each thing and you want to do a projection for all the markets or CSAs or other that you're going to and I'm not going to get too much into the details of those but you say you want to so for a CSA share it's pretty easy to kind of plot out the season because you know you know you have 20 people this is what you'd like to bring to them and you want to make sure looking at the math you want to make sure the math works out for a market even if it's a new market that you're dealing with it's really worth doing this because if you know you need to make five hundred dollars a week doing this on paper will show you what five hundred dollars look like and if your planet and if you realize that what you're planning on growing is only two hundred dollars you're not going to do it it's possible that amount is a lot bigger than you think I would love to have everything at five bucks but but what we work at least everything's an it ends in 50 cents we would do that so that's 250 350 450 we the way our market works is we have like a bask at the beginning people packed they pick up the basket and they walk down the line filling items up and they get to the end and there's a table with two or three people who can cash those individuals out and we used to work in a system where we'd hold it in an individual's bag and we fill the stuff and tallied up as we get along and you know we got to we were like three people and often a fourth would come in for a couple hours and it just it was getting overwhelming and people are just waiting and you see people leaving and by shifting to a system where there was a lineup people were able to you know you'll have one or two people working in the crowd you know just talking and responding to questions but at the cash the main process is putting things in a bag taking money and leaving so it's a turnover people who want to get out quicker and so that's worked well for us and for where we were need to be at least four almost five people at some points we're down to three people to manage the crowd and yeah so we don't have to worry as much with having like a really easy math number two easy number to add for that but it is good thing about your pricing and how it's gonna do it have enough to change on hand so this adding up all your stuff that you need each week becomes your harvest projection so what you need to harvest each week which is going to be what you're going to want to to work backward from in the next step which is the crop planning so I'm gonna kind of rush through this part which is in some ways the most important part after the money and the marketing plan and this but there's just there's no time to tackle it all so I'm just going to show some of the key parts but what a crop plan includes is your field planning schedule your field maps of where things are going to be your operation schedules of when you're going to be doing type of ground prep to get your beds ready your scheduling your nursery or your greenhouse and your seed order so this is the five things that I would call the crop plan and so one part of it the first thing too is how do you lay out your fields so these are our fields we have broken them up into big blocks that are all the same size and each block has 14 beds that's 300 foot long and five foot wide and that five foot wide is from the middle of one path to the next path and it's designed around a tractor and we so each of those blocks is half an acre and we have 17 blocks like that on our farm and by having blocks that are the same size we know that fit what fits in one block fits in another block so we can have uniform row cover uniform sprinklers uniform drip tape and not have to be scrounging for different bits now 300 foot long beds work really great with a tractor if you're working in a system based on a VCS or no-till this is really overkill so you want to be designing and function of what of the technology that you're using and all the technology that you're weeding with but if we were you some tractors and we were designing around 50 or 100 foot beds the turning at the headlands would be happening all the time they have that extra too many headlands and just all that extra turning would reduce the tractor efficiency so there's no one right size and that's that's going to come through is which I talked about a few other parts of the farm and a piece of language I'm going to use I'm talk about bed feet and row feet and I just want it clear what that is so here is a bed of lettuce if you take a strip like this that's 1 foot long there's three lettuce heads in it so one bed foot would have three lettuce heads now each of these is a row and if take a 1 foot part of the row that's a row foot so in the case of lettuce where we're growing with 3 bros per bed that's 3 it's one bed foot is equal to three row foot if we had a row of tomatoes down the middle and it was just one row of tomatoes well then one bed food equal to one row foot I'm not going to talk about row foot tongues talk about bed foot a lot does that kind of clear to everybody so some of the maths that you want to know is when do you plant well you'd have to know when you're harvesting subtract the days to maturity that gives you your plant date so DTM is days to maturity this is a lot of seed catalogue it's how many days the crop is expected to go from the planting to the heart the maturity when it's harvested and what's important in this is that you should know whether the cattle seed catalogue lists days to maturity from seeding or from transplanting so you could have a green ìletĂs that's going for as you know it's being spent for weeks in a greenhouse and then it's gonna spend seven or eight weeks to get to a full-size or you could have a lettuce that's directly seated on the ground and then takes five weeks to get to a baby green so those numbers change and it's as simple as sliced with radishes you want to have her some on June 30th 28 days to maturity you count backwards on a catalog or you plug it into an Excel spreadsheet into the math and you know you have to plant on June 2nd and this is what it works mathematically days to maturity is often set for specific geographic regions where they've been determined and a specific times of year so what a days to maturity for broccoli and the spring might be when you get to the heat of the summer it's like half this half fat and in the fall might be a lot longer but it's the best we have when you start stuck when you when you start and it's really valuable when you start talking about multiple varieties of the same crop so if you have a broccoli that has like 50 days to maturity and one that has at 65 days to maturity you can expect that one's gonna be more early than the other whether it's actually two weeks earlier is something different but you can expect it to be earlier than the other another equation that you want happening to work with is how much do you plant and so you start and so in these equations there's a number of sf' that were you or SF which is a safety factor and it's because when you plant out I say it's a you need a hundred lettuce and you plant out 100 lettuce how many of you are actually going to harvest a hundred lettuce some of them bolt some of them get eaten by groundhogs by deer other things might happen to them so you want 50 heads of lettuce and as a general rule I would use about a 30% safety factor so that's 1.3 with experience that starts to change you might only have a 10% safety factor on kale or chard and you might have a 50% safety factor on lettuce which might at the peak of the season when it's not holding as well but it's kind of takes more space the bigger the safety factor so you know 50 heads times 1.3 divided by this density of how or how many hedging expect for Reelfoot divided by the rows for been and gives you 22 bad feet and so you have to do this math for every crop that you're planting throughout the season for every week that it's going to be harvested and you can do it by hand but it's a lot easier with spreadsheets and we'll touch very briefly on that in a moment and so similar in the greenhouse when do you want to plant it if you want lettuce in the field on June 2nd it's in the field it's in the greenhouse for a certain number of days say for 4 weeks need to plant it on May 5th to have it ready and then figuring out how much you want to plant in your greenhouse you start off the cell you want 15 bed feet of lettuce three rows per bed divided by the spacing times by a safety factor again divided by the number of cells per tray you need point eight trays I would probably seed one whole tray with that but so again you have to work through all of this to know how much you have to seed every point of the season and then from this this how many seeds do you need so if it's a direct seeded crop you got to add up all the bed length that you have over the seasons so let's say it's a beet hundred and sixty five bed feet times how many rows per bed and then how many seeds you're seeding per row and then another safety factor to make sure you have enough seed when you need it and then you have a certain amount of seed so ten thousand seeds and then this ten thousand seeds by knowing how many seeds per gram or grams per ounces or ounces per pound you can figure out how many grams ounces or pounds you need of that and this is important because not all seed catalogs sell by seed count and some seed catalogue Excel by metric units or imperial units so if you're going to be shopping through different catalog to get the best deal or to see what's comparable you should know what the different values are and so again this can be set up in a spreadsheet so you have for Road side by side and so this math takes a lot of time but with the computer the math itself happens pretty automatic it's the thought process you're going through as you're building a sheet is what's really important and seeing where the numbers are funny and working from there so what we use and this is something that's different if you've read our crop planning book this part is not in the plat crop timing book and I am working on a series of blog posts to talk about this because this is what's revolutionized our next step and it's kind of what comes back to how to get these six spreadsheets into one and it's a function that's in most spreadsheet systems called pivot tables and so I'm gonna get out of here and I'm gonna go look at what a pivot table looks like I'm gonna kind of just so how many of you guys use spreadsheets for your crop planning or for your planning okay who uses Excel who uses open Open Office anybody use Google Google whatever sheets or whatever they call it so my example here uses OpenOffice the same stuff as possible to excel there's the formatting is a little bit different there's actually more peril in Excel than what we have in OpenOffice for the pivot tables so it's not gonna happen to have the same way but you know it's a similar kind of thing so what we have here is each row in a sheet is essentially one planting is that right one planting at one point in the season and what we have on the same on the same row is you know the crop the variety whether it's transplant or direct seeded I'm making both actually I'm just gonna reach Ange my so and then as it goes down you know whether it's transplanted Rex seated and one thing that we've now uses weeks of like without a field week as opposed to the date so that's the twenty first week of the season starting from January first you don't have to use field weeks you can use dates if you want and then how many bed feet we plan on using what block its gonna go into what bed the location I won't talk about how many rows per bed the spacing and then a number of things that relate it to the greenhouse so it's cuz they spend four weeks in the greenhouse there's one seed we're gonna put per cell we want to thin it to one which you don't thin it at all in this case it's going to be seated the 17th week of the year in the greenhouse at one point three safety factor the tray size and then how many trays it mathematically calculates and how many trays we actually on our plant and then the same thing for potting up so what this has is integrates all the fieldwork and greenhouse work and you can also have your harvest needs how much need to harvest and kind of work backward into one row and so it makes it can make it pretty burdensome when you're talking about 30 crops and 40 varieties or whatever but what happens next is so you can highlight the whole field usually in the data section there's a part that's called pivot table you push one that says create and then and this is at this point is where excels a bit different but it's the same process so what I want is just to go to another sheet and then each of these blocks corresponds to a row and so I can say I want to look at certain crops and the variety of those crops and I want to look at what weeks in the greenhouse they are as a cop so that's the rows the columns and then I can look at let's say the actual trays that are summed during the season and this is what's going to math is going to happen and then I push okay and it displays for all you know so I only have cucumbers in the sheet but for the cucumbers what varieties what weeks how many things you need to eat to do and so these are my calendars that I'm actually bringing out to the field and planning with so on week 17 I know I need to do this and you can have all your crops coming into this and then we so we have a sheet that's pivoting what's going in the field so you know and block want bed block one at 102 which bed and then what each week how much we're planning on planting you have another pivot that's in the greenhouse which you just looked at and they can do another pivot that mads up actually I didn't look at the end of those rows or maybe I'll do that before I do this at the end of those rows there's some math there's a seed safety factor and then there's the seeds and it does it adds it multiplies everything up depending whether it's transplanted direct seeded so I know how much so I guess just to kind of see what's happening okay these are know is the most convenient for sharing with a lot of people I'm just gonna hide these two things so there's a lot of the same varieties that repeat because they're planted at different times or maybe they're planted at different spacings and each of those varieties you know it adds up if all these varieties are plant so each right has a different date is gonna pop up in a table like this at different spots but in a table like with the seeds where this it's not sorted by dates in the column all the seed numbers get added together does that make sense is anybody using pivot tables for their planning so this is a real simple run-through and it's hard to there's a lot of power that comes with this and this summon that I am hoping to write I have a couple blog posts work done and they'll come out in the next two months to one year I don't know but it's um it really you know you there are a lot of crop planning software's out there but with well-developed tables you can replicate a lot of Stephanie a lot more flexibility the staffers might lock you into and so this is in the case of crop planning but you can also use this with your sales data you can also use this with all kinds of other information and the challenge and this is what's in the crop planning book doesn't have the pivot tables has a lot of different other things on how you build them and the challenge with having a lot of different things is that you update something but you forget to update somewhere else and so with this you're only updating one place and it Cascades everywhere else and I'll get you in a second one other thing is now in our case where we're growing 60 or 70 crops and in some cases we grow five to ten varieties so these sheets can be ridiculous and I do have sheets that have three to four hundred rows in them but what we tend to work with is individual sheets brace there understand block so this is a Brassica abrasca block or cauliflower and broccoli and stuff will be in there this is a salad green block there'll be other stuff or maybe all the salad greens are in there and it covers two or three blocks so we kind of type tend to put things together sometimes that can be funny when it comes to a seed order because at the end you have to compile seeds from a few different places but that's not kind of one per year type thing and that you can work with that but having yeah so there's different ways that you can work with it maybe there's one best way but we haven't found it yet so you have a comment or a question okay so do we have a separate sheet first field map well that's where we have over here there's a column called location so our beds if it's 100 foot bed maybe at bet at foot zero curanto starts at in in bed one and in bed one at 50 foot market more starts so you can use that it's a little easy way for me to just set that up if I just edit the layout I could put so in this case so this is not specifically what you might be thinking of as a field map but it does this is a kind of field map where in one block the first bed the first 50 feet is corinto the next 50 or from 0 to 50 its market more from 50 to the end is 0 to 50 as Corinne tale from 50 to the end is market more and you could add another column that has the bed feet like you can add whatever information you want to have the rows per bed so you can take this out and you can know where things are now once all our planning is done we do create visual maps that have our block laid out and we we we write things in and then when we actually plant something we hand right so we have a map and we're working towards something that you know having all our seventeen blocks on one sheet on the wall where there's one sheet that has everything that's planned and then once you that's actually there but that's not as directly entered that that visual correlation and does that refer to is that answer yeah yeah yeah and the field map is good is really good for employees knowing where stuff is so what's my next slide or it's not a sentence this is not a slide so I'm gonna break get out of the spreadsheet program in a second if there's any other questions about this now would be the time to touch base on it okay so there's your you work with Google Docs you said right we're Google sheets okay so Google's a little bit different but with Excel and OpenOffice there's when you take right click there's a button called refresh and any information you've changed when you refresh will update it with Google in the Google sheets or whatever they call their their spreadsheet whatever you change updates automatically so it's you don't have to accidentally print something that hasn't been refreshed you can update the pivot table you update the core thing so it's a one-way one-way system and there are some interesting things so just a last thing so here or because this sees pivot tables have a lot of interesting functions like if I double click on this it creates a new sheet and shows all the the rows that are correlated with that blocks that I found so you can actually generate other sheets out of that I don't as a rule do that but there is potential for that but where all the work that you're doing is in your original master sheet and so you want to lay it out in a way that's easy for you to navigate what you what you're doing and so sorting and doing all kinds of other data information can find that stuff I mean there's one last thing maybe I'll just show if you guys aren't familiar with it in data and it's also an in excel there's something called Auto filter that if you install it you can highlight and I just want to see the h19 little Leafs and those will pop up or the the market Morse and those will pop up and so if you did have a 600 row sheet this is a really good way to navigate it and avoid using sorting options to get the stuff no it's it's not a plug-in it's just it's just a command it's um it's a it's under data and it's a filters Auto filter this works fantastic in excel in OpenOffice it's really buggy so it can work but I've moved away from it because I find it buggy and I finally can do a lot of some of the pivot tables that I would use this with but with excel it works very well and with the pivot tables there are so many more options with the latest versions of Excel than are in OpenOffice or even Google okay so I'm gonna I lost where I was thanking you guys all so yes so with all that you can build your crop plan that's a lot of work on your part and carry it out and so the next steps are what you do with your crop plan and I've kind of merged two one is you're carrying out your crop plan you're following it from week to week you know you printed out your sheets you know what you have to do each week you do it and you're also recording crops and sales data now what okay let me just get this up here what you're what you're hoping for there's a lot of nice straight rows with no weeds full of beautiful crops that are coming out at the right time and then you get years where you have a foot and a half of water in your greenhouse even though the greenhouse was built on the higher spot that's not part of the greenhouse plan and we weren't planning on accessing the greenhouse this way and in this specific year in the summer we never have flood problems in here like we know that you build a greenhouse high this year you can see how much snow we have the ground was frozen and it got really warm at a certain point and what we discovered is our farm is the lowest point in the whole area so and all the ditches that would evacuate the water were full so by the afternoon the city came out with backhoes and they were breaking it up and it evacuated so quick but there was a period where we weren't so impressed you know and we had to turn off electrical and you know it took it took about a week to deal with the furnace and all that stuff we had some propane heaters running and it worked out well and made for a great picture in a newsletter but but that's not what we wanted to be doing and this kind of stuff happens all the time on the farm sometimes more dramatic than others and this is where we're not about planning planning is a 20 four letter word and this is comes from listing management and planning is your planning your monitoring your controlling and your replanting and you're doing this all the time and sometimes I get comments when people say well you can have this kind of thing so why would you ever plan out your season if it can rain six inches suddenly and you can flood or you have a hailstorm that knocks things out or suddenly a market day is bad why how could you like would you plan it and it's you know if you don't plan it every week's can kind of be like that but when you're planning it's what you're hoping it's not what is going to happen and you have to be on top of things to see when things change so the first part of the process is you plan and we've done that and the next part is you monitor and this is something you have to take really seriously and so one thing is as weather forecasts you know we're always looking at the seven-day forecast you know maybe if you think with a grain of salt but if there's four days of rain that are called for four inches of rain I'm gonna probably do some stuff a little bit quicker then if it looks like it's seven days drying regular field walks and regular probably means weekly to most parts of the field to see how things are going you want to track when stuff is planted where things are planted and also what's selling well or what's not selling well any client feedback you get you know if the tomatoes don't taste good suddenly are there certain bugs and the the brockett's and you're getting a lot of comments that that these are part of things that you're monitoring and then also looking at like historical data is all these things over the last few years so if you plan a certain way and you keep getting hit at a certain point with I don't know your sales drop off or something if you can see that's been done for six years that same part you should really like that's not something you're you're replanting that's the part of your planning that you should be you should be recognizing it so you're monitoring all these things and then you have to control and the control is doing something to remedy the problem in the short-term and fix things and there's no one answer to that but you have to do it right away and then you jump in to replan and how drastic replan is changes on what happens if we plant out our cucumbers on May 5th May 15th and were you expecting we usually don't have frost after about May 5th but we get a frost on May 25th we and it hits our cucumbers and we lose 3/4 or cucumbers we've got to do something so as part of the control what we might do is go and look to see if we have extra are you trying to get my attention err I'll get okay we'll go and see if we have extra plants that were left over from that 1.3 safety factor and we'll plug them in the holes but then what replan is well so with loste cucumbers we're expecting to have cucumbers as of probably like the first or second week of July and we sometimes will have seven cucumbers in the CSA share at the end of July early August for one or two weeks you know it's a three or four dollar value in 300 shares that's $12,000 that we're not going to have and if it's just one crop well because of all the other safety factors we might not care as much but if we also lost zucchini and we had a wet period and the it was toast cold and the carrots turn germinate and were down three or four crops we've got to think about what we're going to do and so and when if it's June first when this is happening we can't seed more cucumbers we can see more cucumbers or and get them three weeks later and they're gonna be we're going to be growing more cucumbers anyway in another wave so those cucumbers won't catch up so we have to think do we want to grow more radishes do we want to do some microgreens do we want to do something else to hold to fill that hole and sometimes what you might also think is sometimes what we can I do is do you want to grow more storage crops to have more stuff in the fall to give to people but what we've discovered is trying to pad the end doesn't always work because you can have tough times in the fall too or you can have a bumper crop and you have so many carrots and beets that you can't harvest them and you're having to sell them at a discount to other farmers which you know is great to help out the community great to sell them but if you had just grown less less carrots or beets you wouldn't have to be removing those so that replanting is kind of gauging how serious it is and figuring out how it works what to do with it and this process is also in a case like on our farm we're a lot of crops like if you grow celery root you know we plant it in the spring we're harvesting it in end of September early October there's not a lot of replanting that if we have killer sales the celery root in the fall and we sell out we're just going to grow more than next year maybe or maybe we'll grow the same we're just happy we sold it all but if it turns out that at market or if we're selling to a restaurant and they're able to take twice as many radishes or bunches of arugula or coriander then we've been planning for we can sow more to meet that demand and that's a question that we should we have to ask ourselves is do we want to meet that demand it's not just meet that demand and if Mart if dealing with restaurants is your third marketing outlet that supposed to be five percent of your sales and you have more CSA number members than usual maybe you don't care about that demand because it's going well but let's say you had a battery if you had a bad recruitment program and you're down 10 percent your CSA members maybe you want to milk those restaurant sales and do better so that's what that plan monitor control replant is not just in cases of bad things it's in cases of good things to is you want to always be where you're at so that your plan is it is updating and after the season you do look at what your plan was and what your actual was and see how the discrepancies were and whether there's something you can expect to happen regular or whether there's something that you could have done a little bit different earlier on to to mitigate it it's possible having some heavy row cover getting over the over the cucumbers would have done it and we actually did put recover it but it was so cold that we lost a lot of those cucumbers and ultimately it's your next year there's another planet-- time to start fresh but again there'll be things you're not expecting so you had a question yeah it seems like that's where spreadsheets give a huge edge over papers nestled because you make your play in you want to be able to plug in numbers right yeah especially in a case where you might have a more volatile market than CSA yes yes I think so I recognize that people coming into organic farming or ecological farming have a lot of different values and some people are not interested in technology or computers and stuff and you can do a lot of stuff with computers with without with paper and you can be very precise with it but I think to run a top-notch business computers are a fantastic tool that can process a lot of information respond so I think that using spreadsheets gives you a better edge to replan and rebalance numbers and change things and save older versions that you can go back to is that correlate to what you're saying okay I'll go to you and I see your hand up after [Music] yeah is there only was it just you or is it just one person I was doing spring building a spreadsheet well um okay so and I'll just clarify the question so the question are you asking how much time do we spread managing with spreadsheets during the growing season or how much time do we spend setting up spreadsheets in the winter okay so you have a happy yeah okay and then you also had a question like how many who's doing this planning and so our I'll answer for our farm quickly but also kind of address a bit broader on our farm we've separated out crops different people who manage different crops and they'll do some of the planning with the spreadsheets that are individual and we're starting to centralize a little bit as our farm devolves I think sort of the part of when to plan and went to replan I think you do need to have a certain point where you stop and take stock of your business and you make you review what's happened in the past year and you make plans for the next year and in the case of us where we have a winter that time is October November that we're going to go back and do all that stuff and then it pays to place our seed orders at the end of December so we're getting them in January and that that and then that's awesome to have winter for that in the case where you're cropping year-round I guess I would wonder is there a time that is crazier than other times and what is that time okay so it's slower yours on your farm it's slower in August September and January oh okay it was seducin August in January so you I would probably choose one of those two times and it might also be related to when your financial year end is and that might be a way to set your financial year end to to choose one of those places where you tear apart your business and you maybe meet once a week with you know if you have a foreign partner or employees or whoever the management team is meet once a week to tear apart different stuff and then have maybe somebody rebuilding it this planning it's kind of like you have to go away do the thinking you know have the realization come back and carry it out because this planning is what controls everything else and it's possible that in a case where if you really have a very slow August in a very slow January maybe you have two types of planning one of those times is the really big picture where you're looking at everything and that includes planning for the next six months or the next eight months or whatever and then the next time you're not looking at everything but you do do a replanting based on last the last round of trends what's happening and I think that the time that you spend and I think that Curtis is spot speaking about crunching numbers this afternoon so that's one reason they're not going too much into spreadsheets but I think the time that you spend analyzing your data no so not so Korea the data is very important but the time you spend analyzing and understanding your data is the most valuable time on your farm because if you can discover that you don't need to do a certain thing to generate revenue or that smiths unprofitable makes so much more money than going out and hand weeding carrots that have gone out of control and so that analysis is is the linchpin of your farm and that if you can find a way to do one to two hours of looking at numbers a week it's going to make everything easier it's the same way as if you can enter your your receipts and you do your bookkeeping on a weekly basis as opposed to waiting you know every three months it's just easier to process analyzing the data and for CSA at my what kind of marketing do you do right now project impact which is about when I was really heavily doing a lot of spreadsheet work those 1408 and how was it marketed did some of the demand change a lot or was it right okay so in this in this in this I'm repeating for the for the camera so in this context you were working on a farm that had quite a large acreage and had a lot of different ways that are selling including market including restaurant but they were just producing volume and then selling what they could as opposed to knowing what the demand is and then growing for that yeah and and for some stuff like if you're doing lot long ceasing crops that's kind of a way that you're kind of stuck a bit you can't start those long stays and crops on the short term list it's a baby long susan crop but something like like like lettuce or carrots or beets and it's like microgreens and lettuce you can respond salad greens you can respond much quicker and if you have a csa and you've been running for a bit you generally know what people like so you don't have to be on top of the same way but if you have if you're dealing with with wholesale clients i think you really it's great to be on top and that's where that regular analysis really makes a difference and the farmers market is somewhere in between it is good to know what your trends are but you can probably count on a little bit more normal miss so there's another question here [Music] on this sunny say treats your use of water we have we have we have a system that's the plan and a system that's actual when we're actually planting something it'll be a different sheet that we update we want to keep those two sheets separate something like compost application we have in a separate sheet that that we're taking care of that so not everything is in one place but not everything has to be in one place because for when we what we actually plant we do want to be able to go back and look at and have a correlation for a yield information when we plant compost when plant come but when we spread compost we generally want to have that for accountability like you're the certifier and it's just good to know when you've done things but you're not looking at that ten times a year you're looking at that once maybe all right every time you fill it out okay so the next step up after you've gone through you know your crop planning it's and you have some data you want to analyze crop profitability so what makes a crop profitable you guys want to tell me what makes a crop profitable being able to sell it so demand anything else so the cost is less than the price I guess days to maturity anything else make it profitable what's that okay they yield yeah the amount of producers so they yield yeah okay yes so these are all part of it ultimately you need to make a crop budget and it's sort of this part here you know the income or the expense of the income minus the expenses creates your profit and to really know the cost of production of an item you have to keep track of all the ways you're generating revenue from it and then subtract all the associated expenses perhaps including labor maybe your labor or others and you get a profit from that and that gives you a total like a real vet idea whether that crop is profitable or not and you in rent and overhead will be just a portion of that in the expenses and if you have the systems and the time to do this this tool is invaluable and there's some great farms book great books that deal with that Richard wish walls the organic farmers business handbook has some great tools for that and he has all his crop budgets and there's fearless farm finances it also has some stuff with that but also a lot of the QuickBooks and so they're great tools and this is not what I'm going to show you so and we do do some and I'll talk about that in a moment but most farmers don't have the patience or the systems to really get down to nitty-gritty for all their crops and there's two benchmarks that we use to see what's profitable we look at the space that takes to grow and the time it takes to harvest and post-harvest so this so in the case of a space we want to set a target out that our yield and then compare that with the target to see what the profitability is so again I'm not gonna explain it again with the bed foot in the row foot so we start off by you know to know your target you have to know how much you want to generate so this goes back to that goal and step one that growth sales goal so if you want to make twenty two thousand dollars and you have five six seven acres that's in cropped so this is what's actually in vegetable it's not including a cover cropped or or your path so your green greenhouse but you need to make about $26,000 an acre which is not so bad and the papayas based on the numbers you've been here in the last couple days this is on the low end if down the line you want to make $80,000 and you decide you even increase your acreage you won't have two acres you need to make $40,000 in acre now maybe you say I'm just gonna use the same space so you need to make sixty-five thousand dollars an acre or you say I've been really inspired by all these talks and I'm gonna get smaller so I'm gonna make more money from less land so in this case you need to make 320 thousand dollars an acre what's really important here is the gross sales is the same in all three of these it's just how much space you're using to do that and so it means that if you have a lot of acreage you don't have to be focusing on crops that are like making like making a lot of money sure a hundred acres at this sounds fantastic but this couldn't be a lot of work but if you have a low acreage and it was just about ten thousand dollars an acre you're just never going to be able to make this so one of the takeaways from this is that your scale dictates what crops are profitable for you and so you have to be careful when you're talking about a system being not profitable or profitable because it really depends on all these variables and this number here is a ratio is what you need to be working with and in this case this is the total dollars per acre generated off of an area in a year so there's not a lot of crops that generate this with one harvest this might have to be four crops of $80,000 in acre to do it there's quite a bit that you can do four thousand dollars an acre and so it might mean that in a system where you're doing more acreage you don't have to do a lot of succession planting you can grow more extensively but in a lower system SiC succession planting will be a key component for it where am I going with that next now it's really hard to think about dollars per acre when you're growing five feet of cilantro or something you know so we'll convert this by this is how much dollars break we're looking for the bed width so this is again from one path middle one pass another vanilla path divided by the number of square feet per acre means that this is about three dollars a bed foot so if you can get three dollars out of a bed foot you're hitting that target and so this converts here to on a five foot bed width $60,000 is about 750 $40,000 about five dollar $20,000 about 250 a bed foot so they're quick benchmarks I would be happy to okay okay change so any questions about kind of this process okay so this is sort of benchmarks and it's really important member this is on a five foot bed width in the case of John Afghan we're just talking with yesterday with 30 inches and I think twelve inch paths that's like that's like a three and a half foot bed width so the numbers would not correlate the same way so to calculate your yield you got to look at how much you harvest it so it stays 476 lettuce heads out of a certain number of bed feet gives you a yield and you can project what you're gonna do if you know that I have so many lettuce heads and I'm multi-cell at this I can get something but you can also work with what you actually harvested in salt and so from here taking the yield multiplied by the price gives you the bed feet so this yield here gives you almost for almost five dollars a bed foot so this is just shy of forty thousand dollars an acre so this kind of crop here on the acreage you were talking about could generate twenty two thousand dollars that makes sense in the case of a three hundred and twenty thousand dollar acre you looking for you need like eight more crops like this to get to it now with this you can change your price and sell more crop and generally once your system is well setup your yield is harder to improve and the price is what has a bigger impact on your system and as we're getting price right really makes a difference but so here we have three rows per bed this is how we crop in our field and it's so that we can get through the cultivating tractor and weed the beds if you saw Jonathan's pictures they didn't look like this yesterday in our greenhouse for head lettuce we tend to have it about four rows per bed we're working with hand tools this is our salad greens kind of silent oven some other stuff but there's seven rows per bed and in some cases those form nice heads and what Jonathan was talking about yesterday about not getting disease in this we get disease in this so we do not crop our head lettuce I like this we're cropping smaller stuff that's cutting regulators there's a lot more ventilation but let's say you can get seven rows per bed in there and you don't have disease that's a much higher potential yield then we're looking at three beds and so when you get to the numbers if you can get five heads per bed so maybe there's seven rows but you're gonna lose a couple if you get on average five heads per bed at two bucks of bed two bucks the head you're at ten dollars a bed foot this is way more interesting than the first set and so that's $80,000 an acre we need for crops like that to get where you're going you can also reduce increase the price and it's going to be even more profitable but you can also reduce the price and so here dropping to 150 a head if you gain these five heads per bed feet you're still higher than what this value is and it can make you more appealing to selling in wholesale or restaurants or even farmers markets maybe not so popular in farmers markets where you're undercutting everybody but but you know it is a free market now the difference between this and this is you have to have good weed control here from the start you might do some cultivation with with the hoe but you're not getting there with the tractor probably you also have to have low disease incidence so these are different systems and those end results sure look nicer here but it has to work for them to go there and in these cases this probably would work if it's working well these are the kind of cases you want in a system that you're looking for $320,000 in acre which is very high very profitable impossible but very profitable so if you look at this three crops here sugar snap peas broccoli cilantro total amount harvested from a certain bed feet and these are sort of accurate numbers so if you divide the harvest by the bed feet you get point three five pounds per bed foot if you multiply by a price let's say five dollars a bed a pound maybe seeing them seven eight bucks a pan let's say when the sled is when was five bucks a pound that gives you 175 of bed foot this is less than 20,000 dollars an acre this is not gonna get you a lot far on a low acreage now if you have 20 acres this might make sense but on a low acreage doesn't give it very far and that comes out to 15 K an acre broccoli you know three dollars a head coming at 25k an acre cilantro 48 bunches out of twelve feet that's coming at 67,000 dollars an acre and that's at 2 bucks a bunch right below and I don't think that's a crazy yield so you can see there's a diversity here now this is not the only three crops that we have out there but that it is a broad range how much cilantro can you sell it's harder to know but arugula thyme oregano a lot of crops can work like this and if you can have a bit broad range of crops that you can sell at these prices you need a lot less space it's also important well let's just see what my next slightest so as a general rule the most profitable crops in space are bunch a beeees and greens you know things that you can cut and then they regrow somewhat profit little spaces bunched roofs like carrots or beets lettuce heads these are things that take the take up a small space but they don't regrow the less profitable in space beans peas broccoli just takes a lot of space potatoes can take a lot of space but a key part of mrs. price if you're selling potatoes at $1 a pound you might be making something like $15,000 an anchor if you can sell them at $4 a pound you might be at 40 at 50,000 an acre and so that might be you just have a market that's dying for potatoes these kind of but you know fresh organic potatoes taste so much better than what you get in the grocery store so there might be a potential there if you have fingerlings or different color potatoes that yield well it can make sense and about making sense it's again low acreage you need this high acreage you're probably in this like or large acreage you're probably in this so um did we already look at this yeah we did okay and I would just kind of come in to top of double cropping Curtis talks about is buying high rotation crops and in his talks is those value stack so if you have fifteen thousand dollars an acre coming out of peas but then you follow it with six seven thousand dollars an acre of cilantro you're looking at eighty thousand dollars in acre so that can be a way to justify having peas a lot of people claim that peas are good to have early in the season when you have a lot of other stuff people have to come to them but if you're not making money you're not making money so you got to be careful that where you're not making money is really reduced to where it doesn't hurt you but understand that reducing it further is gonna make more money for you elsewhere so the other part is time that's the other thing that we're lacking on the farm and again you want to set targets calculate profitability and so this is based on a set of assumptions which may or may not be accurate depending on what farm you are on but what I see in a lot of small farms about twenty percent of time is spent establishing a crop so that may be in the greenhouse that's planting about twenty percent is maintaining the crop so that would be weeding trellising all that kind of stuff about twenty percent is in your harvest in your post harvest about twenty percent is actually selling it and twenty percent is like all that crop planning we're talking about machinery maintenance and and other things and in this example this is the only place you make money is when you sell the crop so 20 percent of your 100 percent of your revenue has to be generated in this twenty percent of your time and you can only sell what you harvest unless you're doing resale but that's a different thing but so you have to harvest a hundred percent of your sales and 20 percent of your time now for sure these numbers might be different but if it's to fit through scent its you to harvesting a hundred percent revenue and future cent of your time this here when you're averaging out over a growing season if you think about when you on an and this isn't even not true in a farm where you're doing a lot of four-week crop for week days to maturity crops that are being real quick rotation but if you're growing 20 or 30 crops and your marketing season is starting and kind of mid-june running until October this is very true because you spend so much time establishing before you actually harvest and then there's a lot of time that's spent taking down at the end so as a farmer full-time farmer you might be working 2,000 hours over the season so 20% of your time would be about 400 harvest hours and that's where you have to generate the revenue so if you want to make twenty two thousand dollars a year and you're two people and you have eight hundred harvest hours you have to be picking and washing at at least twenty seven fifty an hour and that's not very high but you're also not making that much money if you are making $60,000 a year you've got to go up to $75,000 $75 an hour and if you're making a lot more and this is it the same harvest time so to see what that looks like okay so if you can harvest fifty four carrot bunches and a total and you're getting 250 a carrot bunch and that takes three hours so might be three hours for one person or one and a half hours for two people that comes about 45 dollars an hour which meets that first goal but not the second goal and if all your crops are like this you will not be able to generate enough revenue unless you can increase the harvest time that you put into and that would mean reducing your weeding and reducing something else now you can raise the price like we did before you can have $2 a bunch and it raises it somewhat but not a huge amount you can also increase how quick you harvest and wash so if you're able to drop it to two hours that has a much bigger impact on your your profitability another screen yeah and then if you can raise your price and reduce your time you're doing better so in this specific case it's come to 81 dollars an hour and so you know price that's what the market can bear this here is technique and skill and that's where I find if you've worked on a good market market farm you can harvest two to three to four times faster than someone who's never worked on a market farm unless they're like amazingly intuitive and that's where spending a season harvesting different vegetables really pays off that you can read get much more for the same amount of harvest time as somebody who's who's struggling essentially to get there so yeah so to improve harvest efficiency other than spending couple seasons on a farm keep weeds under control if you have to fight with weeds to get to the crop you're harvesting it's gonna slow you down bring everything you need to the field if you have to go back because you need more rubber bands that walking time if increases your time you break your harvest tasks as the steps you know don't be kind of like if you're doing carrots maybe you pull them out one person put one person forks them one person pulls them put some time down in a bunch another person picks them up and puts them elastic on them into a pile and another person puts them in a bin and maybe those four people are one people doing it one after the other you know you fork everything you pull everything you a bunch everything you pack up everything but it could also be a couple people that are that are rotating for those tasks fill your hands before returning them to your bin so if you're doing beans and you pick one bean and put in your bin and another being and put in your bin the numbers I'm gonna show for beans are way too high but if you're able to get you know fill up your whole hand before you put in a bin you could be doing better and that's true for like tomatoes also you know you don't want it like you want to have two tomatoes in each hand when you're putting your bin if they're big Tomatoes if it's cherry tomatoes maybe more than that that you want to have in your hand before you put up your bin and sharpen your harvest tools regularly a sharp knife cuts so much more fast or so much faster than a dull knife and and with this kind of approach it's night and day what you can achieve and that's really important to increase this area because this is what's generating the revenue and the more time that you can spend well the more time you spend harvesting the more you generate but also the more efficient you are in your harvest you more generate so if you can increase both the amount of harvest and the amount of efficiency then you're doing great so just looking at these same three crops and them at a time it might take to harvest them and the math that goes through it so some like sugar snap peas maybe you're harvesting at $40 an hour broccoli maybe 120 and our cilantro 192 an hour these two are totally in what's reasonable this can be reasonable but it tends to be in a low pit when you have low paid weight labor and low paid it might just be minimum wage which might be happy for some people but it might also be lower than that where this kind of stuff makes sense and yeah so crops that are really profitable in time are often herbs greens where you can kind of cut something throw an elastic around it and just get it to market like chard or kale lettuce heads you know a cut put into a bin something like salad greens might more be in the middle because you're cutting it you're bringing it somewhere there might be washing there might be another bag up step and that's what the profitable intime some of these crops they do generate a lot you can handle it but so just a number of times you handle is what's lowering that profitability and then the least profit on time tends to be beans in peace and this is just it just takes a lot I have known some bean pickers and some people who can pick it so that they're above this but that is the exception it's very few people that can pick that fast and there's very few tricks that I can give you to pick that fast so is there a question well volunteers can be a way to do it but you can have volunteers picking stuff like this maybe instead you know it's but yeah yeah so some CSAs do have a pick-your-own for beans and peas and sometimes they also have cherry tomatoes there and maybe raspberries and strawberries things that I mean and cherry tomatoes are definitely in this area here but if you don't have to harvest them it's great but kind of go back you know something like sugar snap peas they're low profitably in time so replacing that that's one thing but a low profitability acre acreage also and beans and peas are hard to justify in a small acreage unless it's just you need to have them to hit certain markets but you want to reduce the amount of time that you're spending with them and the amount of acreage that you're growing them to just what you need because you're essentially losing money and you're wasting time that could be spent on something that's generating more money so and I do think Jacques thing and motherland grow a certain amount of sugar snap peas but they do have a CSA I don't think these are high for Curtis Stone unless you're talking about a micro green with something different so just there are crops that are profitable in time and space some are more profitable in space or time and some are profitable and neither and the more you have down here the less money you're making and it really is worth thinking through whether these need to be part of your farm operation if you can have a profitable farm that does include them but they're not where you're making your money so coming back to crop budgets so these are benchmarks they talked about so far and you know you're not talking about weeding I'll talk about harvest I'm not talking about duration of time in the field and these are things that Curtis mentioned yesterday I think you might mention again this afternoon and those all come in but this is just these two benchmarks of looking at and I find that they're a really good way and they line up with a lot of other information and so this is fantastic to do these crop budgets and I have friends within a lot of them and when we look at them most of the time if I use these other other benchmarks I come to the same results that's what they're doing now one we've begun to do more of these and so we sell a lot of garlic we sell about 1/8 of our sales as garlic we spend a lot of time on garlic so we started - two years ago we started tracking everything that we did in the garlic and we made a crop budget and it came out profitable what you were happy to see but one of the things that we saw was where we were spending spending labor and you know we kind of thought this was where a lot of work was happening but we realized we spend as much time harvesting as hanging garlic on the wall and this blew me away and so what a crop budget does it shows you where you're doing things and it shows you where you can improve stuff and I mean ultimately if you can cut everything out other than plant and harvest you can be more profitable and that's that's fantastic but it's hard to get there but not impossible and you know when you deal with a lot of quick turnover crops that's what you're striving for is just plant and harvest but if you have a lot of other steps the crop budget helps highlight where you're doing them so we don't quite have a so we've we've we've already reduced the harvest that the hanging time for garlic there's more we're planning on reducing this to this coming summer but you can't modify things you can't improve things if you don't know it's a problem and you can't really know it's a problem if you don't measure it and sometimes you can be really surprised how well something is doing but in this case I would say focus on the crops that you're making the most money off of or the crops you're spending the most time on and I hope to the same crops because improving those things if you can improve something that's of your sales or half of your sales by 10% that's a much bigger return then improve something that's only 10 percent of your sales so yeah cleaning garlic with a toothbrush something you also do and I've seen a big difference in well I'm gonna get into that there's another it's back on the crop budgets or just how you value of crop so we sell the the caliber of garlic that goes in our garlic braids or garlic bunches it's about two two dollars a bulb we put 10 in a bunch so that comes to twenty dollars a braid of garlic will make a garlic braid like this we add five bucks to it to comment it could be the price to the price and the braiding and the speed we braid its profitable for us because we can do about 20 or more braids that raise an hour however we've been running we've been selling out of all of our garlic and we don't have a ton of time even if its profitable time not time to do it so we decided last year or maybe two years ago is this right yeah to start selling the garlic not in a bunch I'm still long stem but on in a bunch and at first we thought okay we'll just dump two dollars a bunch and we decided no we're gonna sell them so by not selling selling them in a bunch you know make a little bit less money but you're saving the work but then we decided some at the same price whether they're in a bunch or not and we sold them off so we managed to save a lot of Labor and still our garlic at the same amount and so those are things to look at how you can cut certain steps of what you're doing and if you have a crop if you if you can't keep up with supply or demand if you can't keep up with demand you have many more options than if your supply is over abundant so and this brings us to the end of the cycle when you start to plan for next year and what do I have here yes so all the steps you should do again but as you do a second year of crop planning you have the first year to compare with and that can give you a much more educated guess and you know until you've gone through one crop planning cycle it's still relatively a rough draft takes a few years to get something that works well it's still worth doing the effort to kind of think through the prob think through it and eliminate early problems well you can also start to find as you do more crop planning that you might be able to crop plan a little bit less at certain times of the year and certain like you might want to focus where there's it's tougher there's not enough labor or just as less produce available but you might start to get to some kind of default systems that work for you without doing two or three weeks of number crunching in the winter though the analysis is still pretty important and so this brings us to the conclusion which is what we're trying to do when we crop plan is they want a farm that provides a good quality of life we want to provide a living age to the owners and I would I would really stress the workers because once you start relying on labor you cannot hit the same targets if you didn't have that labor and it's and you know your labor is gonna stay with you if you treat them well and you pay them well and you're gonna build to work better and then the last thing is you're also trying to maintain and improve the agro-ecological system so these are the things that we're hoping that we get out of our crop plan it's not that we want to know it's not the 20 bunches of carrots that we want on week 7 or that that's the goal though it's part of the process this is the goal and you're trying to figure out where you can reduce work so that you're able to hit your targets and your financial targets and and also not work too hard so on that I would say thank you for getting through this two and a half hours with no bathroom break if you want to find out more about our website or about us we have a website film tomislav QC CA this is in english and in french so you guys don't have to worry about not being able to read it unless unless you speak French also or I guess unless you don't speak English or French and then we have our blow-up this is my blog going to see WordPress comm which is English I write predominately about sea but also about small farming and I am working towards publishing a series of articles on pivottables so that's where you'll find that information and yeah so I think I guess thank you and we have half an hour now where maybe we could do a quick return first on these questions and then we can answer new questions that may have come up about anything does that sound good so how much seed to order I would love to it doesn't it's I might just escape so this side here or the there's also this slide here okay so this slide here is just how to convert yeah so I'll just check this one off does that work for you okay the six spreadsheets with the pivot tables that's kind of the tool is it is this do you think it'll like I know you said yeah you said you're already doing pivot tables what six spreadsheets are you dealing with yep yep that's so it's one sheet that has all those needs yeah okay yeah okay yes so there's a spreadsheet that's based around the market needs so farmers markets CSA or all the different orders another spreadsheet is based around crop planning and seed order okay yeah so then the third one is field maps are there more were six kind of like a just a general number thrown out yeah so that's your record-keeping is the other part that's some more sheets then yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and it might be that some so it sounds like you already have a pretty good integrated system here because usually it's here that people have a hard time integrating so you seem to art integrated there with the location numbers I was showing it's a certain way that you can integrate here but it doesn't quite give you the same visual as it as a total field map you know from here to here you there's a couple things that you can do if you really want to integrate them is there's like some if functions is are you familiar with that so that's and I'm not going to tell a lot of folks a lot of functions but just some if it's like this and then you know there's stuff in it I think it's you know what the I'm not sure it basically what it does is if you have a spreadsheet with you know different crops here and different things here and you have another spreadsheet with one crop here what this um if does is it looks at I think the first variable is what this value is and then it looks at everything in this row to find out what those are and then it sums up all the ones that correlate in this row to this so it's one way that you can have information coming from one place to another and you can you could reference another sheet with it going so this going linking these guys together in a case where you have a lot of horses and crops isn't as important linking these guys together is really important when you've a lot of high turnover crops so that Crysta row is talking about with yes like I don't know like a two or three week crop cycle and people are changing numbers and there's I don't know 30 or 40 accounts this has to be dynamic this information a lot of the other information doesn't have to be dynamic now on the record-keeping side tracking like having some of the information follow your sheets can help it so that you have to go back and integrate it so if you know that a specific block if you save 300 feet of a specific cucumber variety maybe that in your sheets that have the cucumber you know has a consumer name the bed feet and then when you're entering the harvest data and the date you already have the bed feet there so you're so it's like maybe you export something this way and this is what you're going to be using later on to do your analysis you're not trying to merge a lot of stuff together does that make sense okay we could talk about it more but yeah any other comments about sort of linking spreadsheets or concerns or desires that people have so that would be nice in my binders later so in this format you go from developing your sales projections and then to the fields yes my mind kind of works the opposite where weird at the field and then figure out the successions I can get into bed and then figure out from that yeah and they're there in reality there kind of is a little bit of back and forth that happens but but if you don't have your sales driving the rest of it you're growing crop that you're trying to find a way to sell so the back and forth that's really important is if you start off with this and you figure out your crop plan and you have an acre and a half in your crop plan but you only have half an acre you've got to figure out how to make that work and it might be that you can stack more more more succession cropping but it's probably also that maybe you shouldn't be growing certain crops and maybe you should be changing your mix a bit and so whereas if you start the other way you start with what you'd like to grow on the space that you have you figure something out and then it's how am I going to sell that and there is a bit of value to that like if you're only doing CSA you might only want to have full beds of onions so you and you know that I want a full block of onions it's going to create this honest onions so if we can give two pounds of onions every week it works out and that might work well for a rotation but for the most part starting with your sales projection and going backward will get the tightest and yeah is that or start like if you can already have an idea of where you can take stuff like say you basically have a limitless farmers market yep hypothetically obviously then if you plan like when you plant stuff then you can see like what your maximum yields can be and then figure out well if you have a limitless farmers market the first thing is limit lists for what is it for all crops so and then if you have a limitless farmers market for the highest profit crops you probably want to kind of tweak towards there and there's a little bit of building up but in the end it's there's nothing that's limitless and and and I think that that's a lot of what someone like Curtis and Chris Thoreau have done is figuring out what the best profitable stuff is and it's a little bit of a different kind of crop planning because they might be crop planning and Chris mentions this he's doing weekly crop planning so whereas if you're dealing with CSA and farmers market for most crops annual crop planning works out or in some cases if you do have a year-round season twice a year crop planning might work out in some of these crops your weekly crop planning is what you want to do because you don't want to get stuck with four beds of arugula when somebody only you can only sell one and you could have sold three beds of something else so it is a good thought experiment to go through but when you get down to the planning you really want the market to be driving what you're growing unless you want to develop a market for something and you know like this is what I'm gonna do and I'm gonna sell it but I think if you're dealing with microgreens or quick growing stuff you're gonna just have a lot of waste yeah so I'm gonna move along so succession cropping of what follows what I think this was in a Mexican context so what follows what depends how long things take and how much residue a crop leaves in the ground so when I talk about residue is if you have arugula that you're harvesting at a baby stage and then you cut it down you can almost plan straight into that maybe I want to turn the soil a little bit but there's not a lot of residue if you have corn that has six foot tall stalks and you go through and mow it you have the residue from the plant and then you have the root balls that are still in there and so you can't just simply go indirect seed arugula through that or carrots you're gonna have to turn the soil and so and if you really want it to direct see something you have to do a deep plow to get all that residue low but if you just wrote a till it in if you put some like broccoli after which could transplant in that decomposing corn matter is going to lock up a lot of the nitrogen so that's is that is that people follow that so the two things that you're looking at is residue this is the right thing and I'd say time to maturity or maybe DTM and you have to have enough time for the crop to mature and in your off seasons it takes longer for the crop to mature so you should account for that and then you also might I guess additional fertility is a consideration if you have a system where you can keep adding fertility then you don't have to worry about having high fertility things following each other but if you don't have a good source of fertility and you Lim putting it once a year you might want to have more stuff that's the lower or medium fertility and the systems where this works the best is stuff that's like carrots lettuce salad greens maybe carrots maybe like bush beans but some like I guess something like broccoli could follow some of these crops but you probably want to put broccoli beforehand because it has a lot of residue also yeah do you have a more specific question that comes out of that or is that okay so how to plan your crops in a developing market so I guess the first thing what I've stated so far is it's good to do the mental exercise kind of like you do exercise of starting from your field up it's also in the middle size of what your market would look like if you could sell the things that you want to sell in it or the things that you expect can be there and so to get those numbers you could just make them up but if you solve for another farmer in a similar type of market you might know that this kind of market can handle a hundred bunches of carrots a week so you might start with some educated guesses sometimes you can ask established growers maybe they'll tell you maybe they won't so that's kind of one place to do it but what it comes down to is you only know what you can sell based on bringing it and people buying it and there's part of there's there's sort of two approaches to go in a market one is you don't want to come back with unsold product because it correlates to extra labor that those wasted the other thing is you also want to leave money on the table and so if you sold everything out that means you could have maybe sold more so coming back with five or 10% means that you've reached that potential more and you can kind of see where that potential is so the balance of that and I think if you have 40 crops and you're coming back with 10% of each you've got a problem but if you're coming back with five or ten of them at 10% and most of the stuff is selling out and that's ok and so what happens is you kind of start with a plan and you grow it out and then you when you're your first couple markets if if you haven't been to this market and you're not experienced with markets your first couple markets are you just guessing you know and they're probably not going to be the kind of story where you come home with 3000 bucks and this is the best thing ever it's probably gonna be table the pile of box show.i and lettuce and you've sold a hundred bucks and you stood a long time and then maybe at the end you trade it for some bread you know and and most farmers have stories like that and hopefully it's just one or two weeks and it's not 25 weeks but so you kind of have to do a little bit of time we're in the farmers market contest yet to do a little at a time where you might not be selling stuff and you're you are until you're like and you are building the market in a CSA and in wholesale is different because wholesale you know you shouldn't be harvesting to your order you shouldn't be harvesting and then try to sell it with CSA you know how many people you've planned for so if you plan for 20 people and you get 20 people you got to just make sure your plan is on track if you plan for 20 people and you sell 42 for it 40 40 shares well then you should probably grow more stuff while you're asking for trouble so it's really the farmers market case where you have to be willing to put a bit of time in to start getting the feel of it and this is really where top-notch quality good branding and like a good personality can go a long way to develop quickly but my experience in farmers markets is that unless you start off at like a killer amount right away usually every week is better than the week before and then sometimes the autumn will drop down a bit and the next year often you're starting off earlier you're starting off better than you were finishing and you keep going and it tends to be that way for two three years until you start to plateau and and that's kind of part of it is you're learning because you might have your plan but you can't actually get everything to market you know so it takes you a few years to start to consistently have the stuff you want and to maintain the supply of the things that you want to sell it takes you time to be able to establish relationships with people and for people to start to have you be their go-to person when you're new to a market people have their favorite vendors but if their favorite vendors have long lines they might dabble with the other products but if you're consistently great and you're a fun person to deal with you become their favorite vendor and the and so it's a nice to be to build relationships - ed to make money but to build relationships as the underdog and over time you can build yourself up and then you'll start to see it as people taking your clients away and so it's a little bit patience and good product does that correlate - or is it is there something more specific you'd like to ask about that is what you're saying as simple as especially for a more volatile market like a farmers market where your your sales will probably grow over time it takes time to develop that are you basically saying make your good projection and analyze your past sales and I guess I'm sort of saying that and what I would add in is if you're only selling at farmer's market maybe make sure you have a bit of savings and it's and this is where your crop choice is if you're growing a lot of long season crops then you're really banking on something if you're growing a lot of quick returned crops you start a certain way and you adjust if things are going worse than you think you grow less if things are going or you do more more do more work if to sell and if they're growing better you grow more so that's kind of that correlation but like and I guess I would stress the eye you know so you've hear you've heard numbers this weekend of you know making a hundred thousand dollars off of a third of an acre that's awesome but I don't think that you should strive for that in year one and I think that year one it's really what you're striving for is learning how to grow and building relationships and if you can make money that's awesome and the more time that you can afford to invest in building your knowledge capital and your social capital the better it's going to be when things take off and and and I can't stress that enough you know the farmers who are doing the best that I know have had a period of apprenticeship and then a period of development of their business and then a period where now I'm going to do this is the best way to do it and I'm going develop my whole system around this and and you can't jump into that third period without going through the first and you think maybe you might think that you can and maybe it looks like you're doing opposed the worst thing that can happen is they have a great first year because then you start to do more of the same but it was not the best thing to do and you dig yourself a hole that takes you five or six years to admit that you were just lucky at the beginning so and and this comes back a lot too you know that those first slides about how much you need to put in your pocket and if you need $10,000 to put in your pocket don't grow $80,000 a crop grow $20,000 a crop you know and and so if you want to start start small figure it out and do better the worst thing to do is I want to have a hundred CSA shares mathematically it fits on an acre I'm growing two acres of crop because two acres of crop have to be plant started planted weeded if you lose control your harvest yup numbers are going to be lower than if you just had an acre of crop so so start small figure out how it happens if you want to scale up know why you're scaling up and make that decision don't scale up by accident and if you want to stay small well then just do it better you know and so it's really that time to build in and I guess I would bring an analogy back to our seed business there's a great market for seeds we've been in it for about ten years the last two or three years is where it's starting to really have an impact on our on our number has always been profitable but we've never really been pushing it and we've all been very afraid to push it because so you need have quality crop or a quality product and that's important and if you don't have quality product you probably shouldn't be selling it but you also have to have custom great customer service and great customer service can be hard to maintain when Syst when orders go crazy and when your systems crashing so we've just grown it as a function of the need we ran and we're not doing a lot of promotion and we can afford to do that because we have a vegetable business that works well and I mean most of us worked three to five years now they're vegetable farms and ran other vegetable farms before we started our farm together so when we started in we did a hundred and ten shares our first year in two farmers markets and I would not recommend that to anybody but we did very well and the toughest part for us was being friendly to one another and when you're five people working together it's any you're running a business it's it's so easy to snap at each other and it's tough on social relationships so but we had and we had the agricultural experience we took off we're doing so much better both in terms of community and in terms of business at this point and we're still friends we're better friends and then we were at that point so yeah so that that take the time to build yeah so how to decide what crops to grow whose question was that are they still here okay how would you guys decide what crops to grow after we've gone through this and you guys have seen other presentations by other people what do you like to grow that that can't be stressed enough if you hate working in a greenhouse and all your crops are transplanted it should work in a greenhouse a lot you know that that really what you like to grow if you love growing potatoes maybe starting a micro green operation is not the way to do it so so that that's totally true what are other things yes what I'll grow in your climate and that is something that like so at a permaculture convent and you know we talk about context all the time and context is important for for your crop choice and you know across the States and across Canada you have climates that rain tons in the summer and some that don't rain at all some that might be in the the high under the low hundreds and some of that might barely get it's like 85 or 90 degrees in the summer and so that really has an impact and if you can crop year-round you might want to have a lower sales volume but have a longer season as opposed to trying to maintain a big sales volume and then lower one small one so there's that that's really true are there things demand in your area and that is that's a tricky one because when you know there's a demand for something it's probably because people are asking for it and it's possible there's people there who are meeting part of that demand and so when you jump into that kind of context you're jumping in with competition it's really great to meet unmet demands and unmet demands that you can do better than people who aren't doing it or you're the only person to do it and that's something to really look at because if you're competing with people it's going to reduce for everybody and and it is fantastic to come in as the first of something in a market and get your name then everybody else can be a copy of you but but but but but but if you can't sell something it's not always you're not always to be proud to be the first you guys tried anything that maybe people wasn't like I know recently there's a guy near me that just started growing a lot of ginger yeah because apparently that you can sell ginger for quite a bit they say market researchers yeah though the production costs are higher than people sometimes realize I mean in our case one of the things that we have is we grow garlic as I was mentioning and this came out of a personal interest of mine and had a dozen varieties we were growing them early on we started a Garlic Festival at a farmers market and we just kept selling out so we just kept raising our prices and growing more and at this point you know up like we are the we are the key stall at this Garlic Festival and we have the most diversity and when we go to other garlic festivals to you know people have one or two crops it's hard for them to compete with us we have you know twelve different strains we have nice packaging and then we have promotional material of educational material so I mean garlic is not that weird it's supposed to like ginger but it's something that came out of an interest and it's the diversity and the education that really strengthened that and so just a couple other things as looking at that crop profitability you know is a good way to choose crops and it's in function the crop affiliate bursa is based on what you can sell is really important and then the kind of technology that you have if you love taking apart tractors and rebuilding them and that's why you're farming you want to grow crops that grow well with tractors and maybe microgreens is not what you're doing but if you don't have that penchant then you choose something and function of what you want to do yeah so how do they improvise a well structured crop plan and we talked about that a bit with the crop planning the plan monitor control replan farming is all about improvising it's what you're doing all the time and improvising the best improvising comes from mastering your craft and knowing what you can do and then when things happen you can change and adapt to them improvising doesn't mean come in with no plant plans throw seeds on the ground maybe have tools on hand and try to do something I mean that's that's a lot of improvising but it's that's kind of just it's a mess and so like really good improvising comes from being a master of your craft and a master of your plan and recognizing that your plans going to be wrong that's the first thing is your plan will be wrong hopefully not all wrong and being able to assess when it's wrong and change it and it's kind of as simple as that and in some ways the way to have another way to answer this question is how to make your crop plan succeed the most so awful talk about improvise is trying to deal where it's going wrong but how can you make it the most precise and a lot of that is to come down to really good systems is to understand how long it takes for them to mature recognize that maybe broccoli takes and that's not a really good example but maybe something like radishes you can get in 3 weeks in the middle of summer but in the spring it's four or five weeks that it's taking and then the late fall the same kind of thing and if you understand that you start to plan around it if you don't know that yet you have to improvise because you planned around three weeks and you thought you'd have a bad get in mid-may and you have nothing so it's figuring out your systems so they're reliable and knowing when you have to plant stuff and getting your weeds under control and those are the big things the biggest thing that provides with that you can't deal with is probably weather and that's something too the longer if you if you are a seller react farmer or something or rutabaga farmer and you grow things early and you have them in the field Allah out summer and then you have a thinking at the end and you have a horrible a crazy hail or something and it destroys the plants and get disease and die you're just not gonna have so that your improvisation is gonna be changing your kind of crop but if you have stuff that's in the ground for five or six weeks then if you lose something in like a worst-case scenario you lose all your crop but it's all five week days to maturity you got some good relationship building opportunity there but you can just plant and five weeks later you're back in business so that's part of the whole the whole system and that's why having a diversity of markets and our diversity of crops can can be it kind of reinforces itself yeah and do certain crops lend themselves to small farms and low infrastructure I would say that these two things are not the same thing and I kind of highlighted it this like we talked about if you don't have a cold room a small being a very small farm is going to be tough because the crops that are best on a small farm are your salad greens your herbs bunched creams which all benefit tremendously from from from cold storage now if you were a medium or large farm and you're doing a lot of potatoes and carrots and beets if you're harvesting later in the season maybe you can get them into an area that's a bit cooler and that you can work through it or maybe you can deliver them the next day like but that's but I would say that these two low infrastructure it depends with infrastructure is and you gotta be appropriate infrastructure for a small farm and I and we talked about that the beginning what that would that might be so we're hitting almost noon maybe if there was one or two pressing questions we could wrap that up okay and then and then finish and go have lunch that please I mean garlic with the toothbrush yes is that the comment or that the question yes so we are we do clean garlic with the toothbrush we have a sandy loam soil and so this is garlic that's been that's been cured before we're gonna clean from the toothbrush and where we started a cleaning from the toothbrush is after reading growing great garlic by what's-his-name run England I think from fillory farm we clean the garlic with toothbrush so we started doing it and and you need stuff fantastic looking but there's kind of a balance of if stuff is dry enough a few good flicks gets it fairly clean and what we're looking for is clean enough we're not looking for shiny pristine and if you can get it clean enough that's good and part of it is if you have a heavy clay soil this might not work for you but most soil types it could work the other thing is sometimes if you don't hear your garlic long enough and you bring it into an area it's a little bit humid you start to have black mold that forms on it that's really hard to clean up with a toothbrush you start having to take an extra layer off so it's kind of getting to a good dry point that'll let that let that work a last question well any other last foot comments it's be the last question then yeah and I'll just draw a picture to take us out with when we talk about our beds so we have the growing space and then we have the walking space and the way we measure is from the middle of one walking space to the middle of the other walking space and in our case we have a tractor so the wheels go here and that's what sets our space a 5-foot because it's 5 foot from center of tractor wheel center of tractor wheel and it's about 30 feet growing space on the top very similar what Jonathan has so our farm looks a lot like his except not as dense and bigger bigger paths but the growing space is kind of similar and if you were designing around humans this space can be shorter and that's how you'd have it more narrow but if you wanted to have certain wheelbarrows come down make sure that they fit in whatever space you have so on that thank you very much and Bon Appetit you
This guy likes pivot tables.