Farm Small Farm Smart

Most people don't get into farming to get rich.

Does that mean that you can't get rich farming, no it doesn't. But if you only motivation to farm is to get rich, then you better buckle up because you have rocky road ahead.

Because when it comes to amassing monetary riches the road hasn't historically been paved by good soil and a tractor.

That's not to say that there aren't rich farmers, because there are, but it's not the norm.

If are getting into farming only for the money, to get rich, then you better think about how you are going to do that, and why you are going to do that.

If money isn't your only motivator for getting into farming, then you better think about why you are getting into it, and how you are going to do it.

Either way it won't be easy. But either way can make you rich, it all comes down to, how you define rich.

Today's episode is a look beyond the bank account. It's a look at all of the other benefits and reasons to be an entrepreneur and to be farmer.

This episode is us kicking around ideas and brainstorming to broaden the idea of what being rich, truly means.

It's a definition that's different for everyone. And it's one that you need to define when you get into this. Because if you define it, it makes it a lot easier to become rich, and if you don't then it makes it a lot easier to stay poor.

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What if you are already selling at farmers markets, but you don't have enough of a diversity of products to design a CSA around? If that's the case one option might be create a collaborative CSA. The collaborative CSA allows you to expand your crop variety with competing with other farms and without diluting down your efforts on your farm. You grow what you grow best in your context, and source everything else from other farmers who are better setup to grow those specific products. It creates a win/win situation for you and the other farmers. Everyone grows what they grow best, and in theory sales go up. It's also a win for the consumer because they now have concentrated access to more local products, without having to sourcing these producing individually from each farmer. Aggregators, collaborative CSA's and food broker models, are these models perfect? No. But if they give you options. And if you are having issues moving product, then more options might be better than less options. You just need to look at everything and figure out which combination is the best fit for you and your market. In today's show we'll look at some alternative market streams for selling your vegetables, so to help you start thinking outside the box, so you can sell more boxes, of vegetables. It's currently May 2016.

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To set the stage... Curtis had a next door neighbor. That neighbor used to own Curtis's house, and he rented that house from them and farmed in the back yard. When his neighbor decided to sell the house, Curtis then purchased the house from his neighbor. Subsequently that same neighbor went on to move to another house in the neighborhood, and began renting out the house next door to Curtis. In the process a conversation began about Curtis farming his neighbor's backyard now that it was a rental. The conversation eventual led to an agreement, one where Curtis would take down the fence between his yard and his neighbors, and extend his farm into his neighbor's back yard. It's a process that was built on the back of respect and social capital, and facilitated by old fashioned conversation. Today we'll take an extended look at the transition of that back yard from lawn to production farm, and all of the challenges and successes that went with it.. It's currently May 11, 2016.

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Most of the tomatoes that Curtis grows fall into the cherry and saladette category - the smaller tomatoes. These types of tomatoes offer several advantages - they are pretty vigorous, they have a relatively short DTM, and because chef's like them. And when much of your sales are for restaurants, you grow what they want to buy. Over the years Curtis has evolved his system for tomato culture. And he now looks at them as a bit of a bonus crop given the way that he grows them. Many home gardeners dedicate full rows to tomatoes and give the plants wide spacing's. Curtis does the opposite. He interplants his tomatoes; dedicating most of his bed space to another crop, while squeezing his tomatoes into the out 2 edges of each bed. This strategy works for several reasons. It takes advantage of more of the soil strata. The tomatoes are planted deep, so their roots occupy the deeper layers of soil. While the main greens crops in the beds have shallow root systems. So while the plants are planted in the same space competition is minimized. Another reason why the competition is minimized is that the tomatoes occupy more of the vertical space. If you time the plants strategically during the year plant growth and sun angles allow you to get more plants in the same space with no shading. Overall, inter-planting has been huge for Curtis's farm. It's what's allowed him to hundreds of pounds of greens and hundreds of pounds of tomato, in same relative space. Not a bad bonus yield in a situation where most farmers would simply leave the tomatoes out. Look around your garden at the extra space and think about that next time you plant your tomatoes. It's currently May 4, 2016.

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Greens are big business for Curtis' farm. Both in terms of volume of product, and dollars generated for that product.

His customer base, which is mainly made of restaurants, buys a lot of greens. And they pay good money for them. But like many things on the farm there is a seasonality that goes along with restaurants and the products that Curtis sells to restaurants.

Typically spring is a slower time of year for restaurant sales, and thereby farm sales. Things just aren't as busy.

But this year is a bit of an anomaly, because Curtis's revenue is way up for the season.

That increase in revenue can be attributed to a couple things. First, he has picked up a few new wholesale customers outside of restaurants, and second, he is selling all of his customers more high value product, specifically greens.

More demand, means more production, so Curtis' production of greens on the farm is way up this year.

But it's not just as simple as planting more beds of greens. There's a lot of nuance involved...

When the beds were planted, how far apart the successions are, when do you harvest whole beds versus halves.

Logical considerations, but not always the simplest to wrap your head around.

That's what we will be focusing on in today's episode.

It's currently April 26, 2016.

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What would the 2000 sq.ft. farm, let's call it a micro-farm, look like?

How could you best utilize that space and take many of the techniques that Curtis uses on his current 1/2 acre urban farm, to make the micro-farm generate some decent cash flow.

How much could you make on a micro-farm of just 2000 square feet?

Really it depends on what you are growing and who you are selling it to. But grossing 20,000 on that 2000 square feet isn't crazy talk. And even half that, $10,000, is a realistic target to shoot for.

When you think about that, that's a pretty lucrative given the space involved. I think most people can get access to 2000 sq.ft. That's essentially fits well within your average American lawn.

The 2000 square foot micro-farm has a lot of things going for it. It's manageable, yet scaleable. It's big enough to matter to start you thinking and implementing a lot of these systems, yet it's not over whelming. It makes a great transition plot for someone looking to transition into farming or just get their feed wet.

Given that today will be a case study looking at the 2000 sw ft micro farm.

We'll break down what this farm might look like. How you would want to manage it. What types of crops you would want to focus on, and put some a basic framework in place that you can build off of.

As, you see, you can do a lot with 2000 square feet, and it might not be that small after all.

It's currently April 19, 2016.

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It's currently April 12, 2016.

We start off today talking about whether you should start farming with a greenhouse or not.

The conversation quickly turns into reasons why people succeed and don't succeed.

Hopefully this episode is a welcome kick in the ass for those who need it. And motivation to keep kicking ass for everyone else.

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It's currently April 5, 2016. Today's episode focuses on starting and transplanting Salanova via micro soil blocks. Curtis will talk about how he starts Salanova lettuce using the blocks and the advantages for doing so. We also run a quick time and cost analysis of starting lettuce in blocks versus cell trays to show the comparison. At the end of the episode I go over a recipe to use for the micro blocker and some basic techniques for using it.

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It's currently March 30, 2016. And over the past few months Curtis has literally been all around the world. I today's episode we'll look back at some of the places that he visited and what he took away from those visits. From the high tech innovation being done at Jean-Martin Fortier's Le Ferm de Catra Taaamp in Quebec to the low tech soil building techniques used by Jodi Roebuck to build soil in his bio-ingestive garden in New Zealand. It's not just all fun and stories, there's a lot of good information in this one such as do these techniques scale, how can you build soil, and how can you combine tarps and soil to really build soil.

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If we go back to where we left of Season One of the show, it was December and there really wasn't any crop production happening on the land itself for Green City Acres. At that time some of the land was sitting fallow waiting for future planting in the spring, and some of the land was occupied by dormant crops that had been planted a few months earlier in the fall. Let's find out how much Curtis' total farm has been quietly in production throughout the winter, with beds holding overwintered crops, and why.

This episode also covers overwintering crops, prepping beds with tarps and stale seed bedding, and dealing with the shoulder season day length changes.

Listen to past episodes at: https://www.paperpot.co/podcast

Increase farm efficiency with the Paperpot Transplanter and Other Small Farm Equipment at https://www.paperpot.co/

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