Permaculture Apprentice

Permaculture for Regenerative and Self-Reliant Living

Permaculture can be Profitable! Finding Buyers for your Products: Guest Post

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This is the first ever guest post here at Permaculture Apprentice, by my good friend Pete Widin. Pete is landscape architect and ecologist focusing on permaculture design for holistic farms and healing centers internationally. Here he’ll be talking about finding buyers for your products and setting yourself up for profit and success….

Jean Martin and Maude-Hélène at farmers market
Jean-Martin Fortier and his wife selling at the farmers market

What’s the point in growing something you can’t sell? And what do you do when you can’t sell what you’ve grown?

This post is all about what to do before you grow to set yourself up for profit and success, leading to growth in your business, and a positive outlook on the season that will carry you forward toward the next goal, rather than being stuck in the mud with a huge crop of who knows what while you come up with excuses to tell your friends about season 1 of My Farm Fail.. Not gonna be you!!

First off, I’m assuming if you’re on Permaculture Apprentice you understand that knowing your site is the first step to success. This post will be about the market research and connections that need to happen for your crop to transform into dough to keep your plant addiction satisfied.

Alright, what’s the first and most important thing you can do before you decide what to plant?

Talk about your dreams, the more people you share what you’re doing with and ask them if they have ideas on where and what to sell, the more idea fodder you’ll have to hone in on your ideal cash crop. You will likely end up with connections through friends or acquaintances that can give you a leg up on the trust factor when approaching potential customers.

  • Think of your favorite local restaurants, make a list of them and look up their menus online. What items or ingredients could you grow? Give them a call and see when you can get in to talk with the manager or head chef. If you happen to have a sample for them to taste, even better!
  • Go to the local farmers market and see what other people are growing; this can be used in two ways. First, you can make a list of what you see that not only grows well in your area but how well it sells. Don’t be afraid to talk to the other farmers/growers about their products and even their ideas for what else to grow. Another valuable piece of info you can get from seeing what others grow/sell is that you can select different varieties of the same plant or different plant products to grow that make You stand out to the average consumer and also to higher end bulk buyers like farm-table restaurants, hotels, college cafeterias, etc. A lot of farmers markets are also saturated with the same old type of farmer – you’re more likely to get a stall at the market if you’re offering something new and different that will attract more customers and fill a needed niche.
  • Do you use any culinary herbal or herbal medicine products – tinctures, lotions, salves, teas, etc.? A lot of these plants are grown as perennials in temperate climates, and can be easily incorporated into border plantings, understory guilds, etc. in a permaculture farm setting. There is so much coming to mind that you could grow it’s making my head spin! Talk to local health product artisans who need material, local naturopaths or holistic nutritionists, tea shops, etc. Walking around town for an afternoon with a notebook writing down all the places that may be interested in your future products, and knowing what they currently offer and especially can’t source easily is going to give you a giant leap forward. Here is a short list of some very commonly used medicinal herbs, P meaning Perennial, A for Annual:
    • P – mints, rosemary, sage, oregano, thyme, calendula, lavender, marshmallow (root), st. john’s wort (also good 4 pollinators), nettle, dandelion (it’s useful!), Chamomile, lemon balm, chives (spread like crazy)
    • A – lemon verbena, basil, cilantro/coriander, parsley, summer savory, tarragon, dill (reseeds), fennel (reseeds)

Diversity is the Key to Your Profitability

Source: http://www.harvesttotable.com
Photo Credit: http://www.harvesttotable.com

Carrots Love Tomatoes, and Roses Love Garlic are two wonderful books by my garden hero Louise Riotte.. they’re all about companion planting, and how certain plants either like or dislike one another. Plant compositions of mixed species and varieties can add a lot of value to your operation (also see Toby Hemenway’s Gaia’s Garden). Diversity not only helps your crops’ integrity in the midst of pests, disease, and variable weather, but also creates a greater wealth of offerings at any time in the season. An example could be finding companion plants that are great for certain value-added products, such as planting beans with dill. Ever had canned Dilly Beans? They sell like wildfire.

Make the Decision to Buy an Easy One, Add Value!

Photo Credit: https://breezybum.files.wordpress.com
Photo Credit: https://breezybum.files.wordpress.com

In what form do your customers want their plant products?
For example, are you selling whole, fresh herbs, fruits, vegetables? Or are you adding value by drying and blending herbs for culinary or tea use, creating tinctures, stewing tomatoes or drying them in the sun before sale, or making jams for a local cafe to serve at breakfast or a local store to sell? There are so many ways to present your products, and ways to add value if need be by further processing from fresh (even blanching and freezing for a winter CSA!). In the end, it’s all about what your customers are looking for, and what products really stand out to them as unique and eye-catching for the end user.

And, always remember to Stagger your Plantings!! If you plant a certain amount of, say lettuce greens every week or two, you will have a continuous harvest throughout the season vs one giant load of lettuce that you can’t get rid of. Plan ahead, the greatest success stories are created by identifying what you don’t know, or at least areas of the overall process you feel uncertain about. That way, you’re always a step ahead of yourself. Be honest, be excited, and most of all – be FRESH! Grow big out there. Pete Widin, MLA, PDC

Pete Widin is a landscape architect and ecologist focusing on permaculture design for holistic farms and healing centers internationally. He also provides business coaching to permaculture designers who want to take their design work from a passionate hobby to a full-time profession. You can email Pete with any questions or ideas at pete.widin@gmail.com, or find him on Facebook at his self-named page. He lives in Portland, OR currently with his girlfriend Em.

Here is How You Make a Living From a 4-acre Permaculture Orchard

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Want to Start a Permaculture Orchard That Makes $$ Per Acre?
(Click Here to Get Your Free Orchard Design Guide)

We are going to cover a lot of ground in this post, so I put together a free resource that will help you implement what you learn in this post. Be sure to grab it before you leave!

Your Free Guide: Discover how to design the layout of your permaculture orchard and exactly where to plant the trees so that you can maximise profits without harming the earth. Best part? You won’t have to pay for fertilisers and pest/disease control products – but still get as much yield as conventionally grown fruit trees! (click here to download).

If you are wondering how to start a food forest, you are in the correct place.

What if I told you that it is possible to make a living from a 4-acre permaculture orchard, and you can even do this with less work, more yield, and more fun?

What if I told you that the secret to doing this is already known, but the information about how to go about it has not reached you?

I wrote about Stefan previously, but his model deserves an in-depth explanation. His orchard took 22 years to establish, and to be honest, it wasn’t always rosy for Stefan.

He is a pioneer of permaculture orchards, and now he shares his knowledge, so you do not need to go through 20 years of trial and error like him. You can learn from his experiences so that you don’t make the same mistakes he did. Learning from his experiences means you can save time and money.

But before we go any further, here are a few things to consider about Stefan:

  • He bought his 5-hectare block and 4000 trees for $42000 – he had no debt, no mortgage, and no money left to do anything
  • He had a very little farming experience when he started his farm – he did, however, have a formal education that helped him
  • Stefan does not live on his farm – he actually lives in the city and commutes to his farm from home
  • He had many setbacks along the way that would make most people quit, but he persisted, and now his farm is successful.

Miracle Farms: Stefan Sobkowiak – A 4-acre Commercial Permaculture Orchard, 22 Years in the Making

permaculture orchard

Stefan Sobkowiak is an educator, biologist, and master of landscape architecture. He has taught fruit production, landscape plants and design, and the natural history of vertebrates at Montreal’s McGill University. This experience helped a lot when he decided to focus on Permaculture Design and his ‘Miracle Farms.

The farm that he bought was originally developed as a commercial monoculture apple orchard, making the transition to becoming an organic farm upon purchase in 1993, and it was certified organic in 1996. Eventually, Stefan understood the limitations of the organic model originating from monoculture. Since 2007, four acres have been converted to a permaculture-inspired “u-pick” orchard.

Miracle Farms is the largest and the most developed example of a commercial permaculture orchard in Eastern North America. Production from the farm is sold to 30-80 member families with the short-term goal of reaching 100 families.

Recently with filmmaker Olivier Asselin, Stefan released a DVD called The Permaculture Orchard: Beyond Organic. This feature-length educational film teaches how to set up your own permaculture orchard on any scale. Stefan has this to say about the film – “It will really save you 10 years at least of trial and error and thousands of dollars. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Take what I learned and build on it .”

So let’s dive in and see what you can learn from Stefan’s model.

Want to start a permaculture orchard that makes $$ per acre?

Good! Grab a copy of my Orchard Design Guide to take the first step and map out the orchard layout. Just click here.

Permaculture Orchard Model

1. Location and Size

map

Les Fermes Miracle Farms is about one-hour southwest of Montreal, roughly 100km away, in Cazaville, Quebec, Canada. It’s Canada’s warmest climate zone -Agriculture Canada Zone 5b: USDA zone 4. The property is 12 acres, with approximately 4 acres planted in a Permaculture-style orchard.

The location of the farm is very important. As with many models I have described before, Miracle Farm is located relatively close to the target market, in this case, close to the million-and-a-half people living in Montreal.

Although the original idea was 30 minutes away from Montreal, which is an ideal distance for a clientele membership club according to Booker T. Whatley’s Handbook on How to Make $100,000 Farming 25 Acres, after many years of searching, Stefan settled for a farm twice that distance from Montreal but still managed to make his farm a success.

What Stefan learned was this: If you are close to the city, there is not such a need to diversify but if people invest their time and visit your farm that is further away, you need to offer them something more that is worth the visit. That is exactly what Stefan did.

2. On-site Permaculture Nursery

Stefan needed a lot of trees for his new orchard. Although there were 4000 apple trees in the orchard already, in the first two years of owning the farm, he sadly lost 1000 of them. The cost of the trees accounts for more than 50% of the costs of an orchard, so to decrease his expenditure, Stefan set up a nursery project so that he could grow his own trees.

While teaching at McGill University, Stefan partnered with one of his students who wanted hands-on experience and started a tree nursery on the farm. In return for his help, Stefan agreed to split the trees they produced between them 50:50. They tilled a 12x23m area (276m squared), made 3 rows, and planted rootstock to be grafted later.

So think about it, if you want to start a permaculture orchard, you could plant a nursery ahead of time by using a 10ftx10ft (3mx3m) spot in your backyard. Plan now, gather your mother plants from which you can take cuttings or scions for grafting, contact people in your area doing similar projects, and learn from them. You could grow just below 1000 trees in that small area (If you have trees in each of the pots, you should yield 900 trees).

As Stefan said: “There is a tremendous motivating force to find a piece of property once you have a nursery full of plants that will soon need to be transplanted.”

3. Trios Design Pattern

permaculture orchard

What’s unique about Stefan’s orchard is that it is planted in Trios (originally called NAP – nitrogen fixer, apple, and plum/ pear), One nitrogen fixer, and 2 crop trees. This is very similar to David Holmgren’s European-style permaculture orchard, where he interplants with tagasaste (tree lucerne), also an N – fixer.

One characteristic of this pattern is that no fruit or nut tree is next to its own species in the row or in between the rows. Therefore, if any tree gets infested with pests, it is much less likely to pass the problem on to another tree of its kind.

Although 1/3 of the orchard aren’t fruiting trees, mixing in nitrogen-fixing trees among fruit trees is essential because it helps to create fertility and eliminates the need for external inputs of fertilisers, resulting in a circular ecosystem that virtually takes care of itself.

Amazingly, no fertilizer has been used on Stefan’s orchard since 2007, and the fruit trees keep giving as much yield as conventionally grown trees. In Stefan’s case, N- fixers are Honey Locusts, and they also act as trellising for vines, kiwi, and grapes. The primary goal is to increase diversity while providing a diversity of crops and to reduce or eliminate the use of fertilizers and pest and disease control products.

This orchard now offers over 80 cultivars of apples, in addition to several types of plums, pears, cherries, and countless other fruits and vegetables. There are also trios in shrubs: red, black currants, honeysuckle, gooseberry, raspberry, and rhubarb, as well as over 100 different types of ground cover, such as annual vegetables, herbs, and grasses.

With this hugely diverse amount of crops, trees, bushes, shrubs, and plants, you might wonder how Stefan makes sense of the countless plants growing. There is one more ingredient to this design.

4. Grocery Store Concept

permaculture orchard

While the trios (NAP) design is a 3D pattern in Stefan’s orchard, there is also the fourth dimension: Time.

In a permaculture orchard, everything is organized by following what Stefan calls a ‘grocery aisle’ concept, whereby everything in one row will be ripe and ready to harvest within a 10-day window.

Despite the huge diversity of species, this allows for efficient harvesting. Customers can walk down the row and easily gather the majority of the fruits and vegetables they require in one go, just like they would in the grocery store.

This also helps bring order to the high diversity madness of 100 cultivars of fruit & nut trees, dozens of small fruit shrub cultivars, and over 100 species of companion plants. Stefan also aims for a complete harvest season without any spaces when there will be nothing to harvest. Harvest dates are key to a successful ‘grocery aisle’ planting- Ideally, you need to aim for three periods of 10-day harvests per month.

While conventional orchards also use the idea of multiple harvest dates because labor is one of their biggest expenses, Stefan is able to keep his labor costs even lower. How? All the lower parts of the tree fruit picking are done by his customers! Leaving the tops of trees to be picked with ladders.

Want to start a permaculture orchard that makes $$ per acre?

Good! Grab a copy of my Orchard Design Guide to take the first step and map out the orchard layout. Just click here.

5. CSA/U-pick operation – Costco Style Membership

permaculture orchard

Over the years, Stefan has built up a customer base that is willing to come and pick the produce themselves, thus cutting down on labor costs. He said: “The greatest single cost for most fruit production is harvesting and packaging, usually 40% of the total costs. If people harvest their own in their own containers, we can pass on some of the savings and still earn a better return for our efforts.”

His business model is a members-only U-pick operation – basically the same as a Costco membership. For those living outside the USA, UK, or Australia, Costco is an American membership-only warehouse club that provides a wide selection of merchandise at low prices. Still, membership must be purchased in advance for one year.

In Stefan’s case, members pay an annual fee of $55, which entitles them to come and pick up at all of his open days. They can also attend the tours for free and order meat that Stefan produces. They also get $20 redeemable towards their purchase as part of their membership and benefit from getting fresh, beyond-organic food for up to 50% less than what they might buy in the supermarket. Non-members cannot pick any fruit or buy meat. They may be able to buy from a small roadside stand at twice the U-pick price when Stefan has extra produce.

Stefan also makes sure to use one of the most powerful words in the marketing world: NO. He often says this in response to people who would like a one-off experience on the farm. This makes his farm an experience limited to the group of people who have chosen to be members and are opting for an experience and not just passing by. This way, Stefan can provide value to his customers and better convey and inform members of what foods they have. He can tell the ongoing story about his orchard and its history and educate his members.

Stefan did not always work this way. Initially, he started selling to the public and built up a customer list of satisfied buyers. Stefan said: “A list of satisfied buyers is worth gold.” Later, he converted to the paid membership model, and many of those existing customers signed up.

6. Innovations in the Management of the Orchard

innovative

Do you know how many plants Stefan has on 1 acre of land? If we look at the figures, it is – 450 trees, a minimum of 450 shrubs, 16×450 = 7200 perennials + ground cover, 150 vines, this is a total of a minimum of 8250 plants. And this is just in 1 acre of land. Stefan has 4.

How can one man maintain this many plants, prune all of his trees and not even live on the farm? There must be a secret.

Stefan was clever and open-minded enough to embrace novel methods of caring for his trees. This enabled him to do 80% less work when it came to pruning- although it would be more accurate to say training rather than pruning.

He still prunes his trees but only the branches that actually shape the tree, i.e., doing steps to have a chimney to a tree, keeping only 12 -14 branches, and pruning or maintaining every branch he keeps. He learned a lot from various French horticulturists in the compiled book Growing Fruit Trees: Novel Concepts and Practices for Successful Care and Management.

On top of that, he uses whey to displace fungi diseases, uses insect traps containing molasses, and creates favorable habitats for his wildlife that will help protect his trees and plants..

His methods are innovative, and he innovates and experiments all the time. He does still use some conventional orchard methods for doing things, such as using plastic mulch and irrigation pipes. To have a better understanding of his whole method of Permaculture Orchard, I would encourage you to watch the film where he fully explains his methods and reasons for doing them.

Want to start a permaculture orchard that makes $$ per acre?

Good! Grab a copy of my Orchard Design Guide to take the first step and map out the orchard layout. Just click here.

7. Income from Diversification and Stacking function

stacking

Although the main crop is fruit, fruit alone would not be enough to earn Stefan a decent income. It is also important to note that in farming, you do not get to decide which year will be a good harvest.

Stefan knows a lot about farming, but he is not the boss Mother Nature is, so there can be years with a low fruit tree yield, which, when it is your main crop, is a big problem.

The answer to maintaining a sustainable income in bad harvest years is like in investing. You don’t invest all your money in stocks and put all of your eggs in one basket. You must diversify and be consistent with production. When people come, have something else to offer besides your primary crops.

Making a profit on an acre is stacking functions of apples, pears, vines, and herbs, as well as keeping animals that graze in the grassy lanes. The grassy lanes are used for pasture (as Mark Shepard does). He raises chickens, turkeys, guinea fowl, ducks, and geese in these lanes. The farm is used as a continuing education lab for students in the permaculture courses, offering workshops (grafting, pruning, nursery propagation, raising small fowl, processing fowl) as well as for interns. Farm tours are also available for groups. Here is the full income breakdown.

Farm Income:

  • Sale of Produce and Products – 70%
    – Herbs, Flowers, Fruit Trees & Berries, Vegetables, Traps.
    – Meat birds.
    – Added value products: Juices from apples, dried fruit
  • Education – 20%
    – PDC, Workshops
    – DVD
  • Consultancy Service = 2%
  • Tours of the farm – 8%

Just note that the exact figures for farm income vary from year to year. As Stefan remarks: “ Last year was dismal with no tree fruit, although the best year for small fruit. So last year was a reversal with education and tours making up 70% and sales of produce and products 20% . It’s great to have a diversity of yields to balance things out from year to year.”

8. Learning-Oriented Mindset

permaculture orchard

If you came this far, you, my friend, are a keen learner; this is a lesson for you. None of the success Stefan had after 20 years of hard work would be possible without embracing a learning mentality.

With so many setbacks and mistakes, many ordinary people would quit a project like Stefan’s, as the owner from whom Stefan bought his orchard did. But, as they say in Permaculture: “There are no mistakes, only feedback” Stefan accepted that feedback and kept moving along.

He said:” I was a near total newbie respecting orchards when we bought a 4000-tree conventional apple orchard. Began the conversion to organic and immediately lost 1000 trees first 2 years. (Ouch) Learned a whole lot.”

Stefan recommends, in the beginning seeing what other people are doing, learning from their mistakes, and building upon their good designs. He recommends starting and visiting other farms and doers to see first-hand how things are done and to have a reference point for what you’re doing.

When he started, he visited Joel’s Polyface farm and others, read books, and kept trying new things and innovating on his own farm. Traveling and seeing what other farmers were doing was eye-opening and taught Stefan a lot.

Take Action! (Get Your Free “Permaculture Orchard Design” Guide)

It took 22 years for Stefan to reach the point where he is today, and his road to success was paved with many setbacks and many learning experiences. Now everything he learned is readily available. So, watch his film and read his book. Everything is there; you need to act on it.

If you want to provide a more natural environment, free from the artificiality of monoculture and welcome natural allies to do their jobs, if you want a greater yield of produce and more fun, with less work- then interplant with nitrogen fixers and increase plant diversity through different species and different cultivars.

Simply put, there are four steps to establishing a permaculture orchard – 1. trees, 2. shrubs, 3. companion plants (perennials, herbs, vines), 4. allies. But there is much more to it if you want to adopt the permaculture orchard model and adapt it to your situation.

  • Don’t reinvent the wheel. Take what Stefan learned and build on it – save yourself time and money.
  • Location is very important – the ideal location, if you have produce to sell, is 30 min from the population center and on the main road, but you can make it work if you have to be based further away.
  • Grow your own trees to help reduce costs and motivate yourself – if you can, partner up with someone with skills and split the final trees.
  • Create Trios – interplant with nitrogen fixers and increase plant diversity through different species and different cultivars.
  • Use grocery store concept – windows for harvesting, same cultivars in the same row, while the understory is growing all year.
  • Start a CSA/U-pick operation – Costco-style membership – members harvest, so you don’t have that expense. As much as 40% of conventional fruit-growing expenditure is spent on harvesting and containers.
  • Embrace novel methods of maintaining trees to save time and keep your orchard beyond organic with innovative methods of pest control.
  • You want to be consistent with production- to do that, diversify. When people come have something else to offer besides the primary crop.
  • Making a profit on an acre is stacking functions of apples, pears, vines, herbs, and animals grazing in grassy lanes.
  • Never stop learning and trying. Period!

Stefan’s vision for the Permaculture Orchard is: 1000 hectares, 1000 people in 50 countries. Do you feel inspired to join his vision?

I want you to do the same thing and make a comfortable living from a small permaculture orchard without using chemicals or harming the land — so I’m giving several bonus resources to help.  

In the bonus section:

Here’s a guide that’ll help you with designing your permaculture orchard. One of the first steps in the establishment is deciding on the layout of the whole orchard because, of course, you can’t plant trees if you don’t know where to plant them.

In this guide, I’ll show you step-by-step how I’ve done it on my property when I was starting from scratch. I’ll also point you toward additional resources that will help you broaden your knowledge about starting a permaculture orchard.

To access the guide and additional resources click the link below:

Want to start a permaculture orchard that makes $$ per acre?

Good! Grab a copy of my Orchard Design Guide to take the first step and map out the orchard layout. Just click here.

How to Make a Living From a 1.5 Acre Market Garden

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Picture the scene of your market gardening operation...

You‘re awoken by the morning sun, grab yourself a hot drink, and step outside. As you take your first sip, you watch the sun rising and enjoy the serene sound of birdsong.

Everything’s tranquil as you stroll around your market garden, making a list of today’s tasks. There is a lot to do, but you enjoy the tasks and can’t wait to begin.

Can you imagine this life for yourself? Do you think it’s possible for you to enjoy this kind of lifestyle and actually make a decent living from it?

I’ll let you in on a secret. The biggest challenge in life is YOU and your beliefs.

When it comes to commercial vegetable growing, the idea of a profitable micro-farm is frequently met with skepticism. Some cynics will try to discourage you from starting a market garden, declaring that production simply won’t be enough to make your family’s ends meet.

Time and time again, we have to remind ourselves that it is possible because, as Allan Nation, pioneer of the grass-fed movement, states: “If somebody has done it, it can be done.”

So, today I want to introduce you to Jean-Martin Fortier (JM) and his wife Maude-Helene, Market Gardeners. JM and his wife make $140000 from 1.5 acres, and live a life that other people only dream of. They challenge the belief that a small family-run farm cannot stay afloat in today’s economy.

Let’s learn more about their operation.

Want to make $100,000 farming 1 acre or less?

Great! I’ve put together a free email course about the ins and outs of setting up a profitable market gardening operation (Click here to get the free course).

Les Jardins de La Grelinette: Market Gardening Operation in Quebec, Canada – 1.5 acres of raised beds – 10 years of establishment

Jean-Martin Fortier and his wife Maude-Helene

Founded by Jean-Martin Fortier and his wife, Les Jardins de LaGrelinette, is an internationally recognized 10-acre micro-farm.

Only 1.5 acres are cultivated in permanent beds using bio-intensive growing methods. In the last decade, the focus at LaGrelinette has been to grow better, not bigger.

To optimize the cropping system, they use low-tech solutions and place heavy emphasis on intelligent farm design, appropriate technologies, and harnessing the power of soil biology as their key components to successful farming. You can find more about their methods in Jean-Martin Fortier’s book, The Market Gardener.

The market farm grosses more than $100 000 per acre, with operating margins of about 50%, enough to financially sustain the family. Every week, the market garden produces enough vegetables to feed over 200 families.

The low-tech strategy kept start-up costs to a minimum and overhead expenses low. The farm became profitable after only a few years, and he claims they have never felt the pinch of financial pressure.

So, let’s do the math.

Farm Income

For the last decade, the Fortiers have had no other income than from their 1.5-acre micro-farm.

When I asked JMF about this income, he replied: “Our economics are not complicated. We sell around 150k of veggie produce on-site. Our cost of production (including two salaries for employees that are around 6 months) makes up about 50 % of that amount. The other half is the net profit that my wife and I share. Our salaries, if you want.”

Here is a brief summary of the numbers from their 1.5-acre operation for 2013:

  • Revenue: $140,000
  • Customer sales breakdown:

CSA operations (140 members): 60%
Farmer’s markets (2): 30%
Restaurants/grocery stores: 10%

  • Staff: 2 paid employees plus the Fortiers
  • 2013 Expenses: $75,000
  • 2013 Profit: $65,000 (~45% profit margin)

Ok, so this proves that it is possible to have a career in market gardening. In fact, one can envisage making a pretty decent livelihood.

Their initial start-up costs were in the $40,000 range. They did, however, receive financial aid in the form of a government grant of $30,000 because of their sound business plan. With this additional support, the chances of market gardening success improve greatly.

But grants or not, one fact remains: keeping costs low when starting a business reduces financial risk and ensures profitability over the short term.

This, in itself, is a winning business model. So, let’s elaborate…

The Market Gardening Model

The features that characterize their market gardening operation are: high productivity on a small plot of land, intensive production methods, season extension techniques, and selling directly to public markets.

However, that is only one part of the equation. To start an operation like this you must first reduce start-up costs, avoiding mechanization and machinery-related costs (purchase, fuel, maintenance, etc.) and, most importantly, limit dependence on outside labor.

Let’s start from the beginning.

1. Location and size

Les Jardins de La Grelinette: Market Gardening Operation
Les Jardins de La Grelinette

Les Jardins de la Grelinette is a 10-acre farm located in Quebec, Canada. This is a cold climate and a zone 5 plant hardiness area. The family cultivates 1½ acres (including one greenhouse and two hoop houses), and JMF considers this the optimal land base for tractorless farming.

The farm is conveniently located close to their main market, being just one hour away from Montreal, although they sell 40% of our products locally at the grocery store, restaurants, and a farmers’ market.

JMF emphasizes that finding the right site to grow vegetables is the most important initial stage for establishing a successful market garden.

Each site has unique characteristics, and there is no such thing as a ‘perfect’ site. It is very important to understand and prioritize factors like soil fertility, climate, topography, water access, and infrastructure before investing in a site.

2. Farm design

The Farm
The farm

When interviewed, JMF said that Permaculture had been one of his biggest influences. This is reflected in the way he looks at the farm as a system. To explain:

When designing the farm, his aim was to organize different working spaces so that the workflow would be as efficient, practical, and ergonomic as possible. All fixed elements needed in a market garden (storage facilities, water reservoirs, greenhouses, windbreaks, etc.) are placed according to a well-thought-out plan for conserving energy and improving efficiency.

The farm also has a standardised garden layout – several smaller-sized plots called ‘field blocks’ with uniformly sized raised beds. Due to standardized size of plots and beds and, he can use materials cut to standardized interchangeable lengths, a system that offers great versatility.

3. Low start-up costs

Use of low cost appropriate technology in market gardening
Low-cost appropriate technology

The start-up costs (cost of equipment) total $39,000. This might sound like a lot of money to pay upfront, but if we do the math, it’s well worth the investment. Here’s what I mean:

JMF claims that a well-established, smoothly running market garden with good sales outlets can generate $60,000 to $100,000 annually per acre in diverse vegetable crops. That’s a profit margin of over 40%.

A bank loan of $39,000 spread over 5 years at 8% interest means an annual investment of around $9,500, which is reasonable when compared to the potential revenue a market garden offers.

However, this doesn’t factor in the mortgage and other business expenses such as the delivery vehicle and other variable costs (inputs, administration fees, supplies, etc.)

Even so, the initial costs are still relatively small, especially in comparison to the costs of equipment used in mechanized vegetable growing. Furthermore, some items can be purchased second-hand or over time.

4. Low operating costs

Most of the labour is done by owners
Most of the labour is done by the owners

Reducing start-up costs is a good first step. Avoiding mechanization and machinery-related costs (purchase, fuel, maintenance, etc.) is another.

But the most important one of all is limiting dependence on outside labor, which generally accounts for 50% of the production costs of a diversified market farm.

In his case, Lion’s share is done by the owner-operators with the help of either one or two seasonal workers, depending on the area under cultivation and the number of greenhouses. The major operating costs are therefore reduced to inputs (amendments, seeds, plant protection products), which are generally fairly minimal.

5. Productive farming method

Biologically intensive beds on a market garden farm
Biologically intensive indeed

JMF book serves as a manual for his growing method, and please refer to the book for more detail. Here, however, is a quick summary.

Les Jardins de la Grelinette contains 180 standardized raised beds, with 40-50 vegetable crops in cultivation. These are grown using a biologically intensive approach (intensive spacing and encouragement of biologically rich soils).

To cultivate the beds, they adopt minimum tillage but use appropriate machinery, including a two-wheel tractor, broadfork, and tarps. The biology of the soil is of paramount importance, and soils are fertilized organically using good compost, poultry manure, and green manure crops.

The growing season is extended by using floating row covers and low tunnels, caterpillar tunnels, and hoop houses. This protects crops from cold and frost in both early spring and late fall and has a market advantage of offering ‘out of season’ crops.

Want to make $100,000 farming 1 acre or less?

Great! I’ve put together a free email course about the ins and outs of setting up a profitable market gardening operation (Click here to get the free course).

6. Direct marketing and selling

Jean Martin and Maude-Hélène at farmers market
Jean Martin and Maude-Hélène at farmers market

Their sales method is a direct exchange between producers and consumers, CSA (community-supported agriculture). To summarize, the consumer buys a share in the farm’s production at the beginning of the season. In exchange, the farm commits to providing quality produce, usually harvested the previous, or even the same, day.

In their case, although they sell at two farmers’ markets, CSA has always been the preferred option since it guarantees sales and simplifies their production plan.

For new market gardeners, JMF recommends CSA because of the many advantages and its tailor-made sales outlet. When starting, adopting CSA provides backing and security because customers are paying up front. Therefore, there is guaranteed income.

CSA or not, the point of direct selling is to build a loyal customer base and forge interdependent relationships. People want to build a relationship with those who grow their food, and CSA facilitates this. However, when it comes to customer loyalty, JMF emphasizes that the quality and presentation of products are key to success.

7. Planning and management

Market Gardening Crop planning
Crop planning

At Les Jardins de la Grelinette, nothing is left to chance, everything is planned in minute detail. During winter months, a cropping calendar is prepared, and decisions are made as to what exactly they are going to plant and precisely when and where they are going to plant it.

Crop planning is fundamental to profitable market gardening. Once you develop your crop calendar and garden plan, running a complex production system becomes much more straightforward, and planning removes the anxiety from those hot summer months.

They also keep records throughout the growing season, making notes of what works and what doesn’t. These are important when preparing crop plans for the following season. Record keeping is also highly significant in determining customer preference, allowing them to prioritize producing the most profitable crops.

This kind of planning and management leads to improvements, and when they talk about profits using big numbers like 150k a year, one must understand that these profits are a result of fine-tuning production.

Summary and JMF’s Remarks about Market Gardening

It is clear from this model that willpower and hard work do not, by themselves, make a successful market gardener. Farm design, good managing practices, the use of appropriate technologies, and careful planning are all critical components in developing a successful market gardening system.

While this system uses permaculture principles, there is a difference between production farming and permaculture. In response to my email regarding his income JMF states: “Our goal was not to set up a system that is low maintenance, but quite the contrary. Intensive, in our scheme, means high production due to high labor input and attention. What we have done is used our intelligence to make our work truly productive on a human scale.”

Here are some crucial points to consider if you are interested in starting a market gardening operation:

  • Only 1.5 acres of permanent beds can bring in revenue of $140,000. At a 45% profit margin, this equates to a $65,000 profit.
  • The goal is to grow productively in a small area and limit the use of heavy machinery and dependence on outside labor.
  • Cheap start-up costs, economical portable infrastructure, and appropriate low technologies keep expenses down.
  • When setting up a market garden, the farm design will determine how efficiently many day-to-day chores will be carried out.
  • High production is achieved using a combination of biologically intensive methods of cultivation, productive growing techniques, and a standardized garden layout and standardized tools.
  • Market gardening is as much about selling as it is about growing. Having the farm close to the market is crucial.
  • CSA guarantees sales and simplifies production – making it easier to plan and produce what customers want
  • Everything is planned in detail during the off-season – things get too complex during the summer.

To conclude, I’ll quote JMF on the future of farming: “The challenge of our lifetime is to reinvent the profession of farming and to feed people locally, with demise of cheap oil comes an era of resilient biological agriculture. There is a bright future in farming!”

As you can see, it is totally possible to make a living from commercial vegetable growing!

Need help starting out? Here’s a free course to guide you along

I believe that market gardening is the simplest and quickest way to kickstart your farm and your farming career. Within a year or one growing season, you can start earning a meaningful side income and slowly transition from your 9-5 job into a farming career.

It’s not easy, and honestly, it’s not for everyone, but it can be done, as you learned today…

If you’re inspired by this story and want to start your own micro or full-scale commercial organic garden, I have a special bonus for you.

I’ve put together an email course where we’re going to go into much more detail about what it takes to become successful as a market gardener.

Want to make $100,000 farming 1 acre or less?

Great! I’ve put together a free email course about the ins and outs of setting up a profitable market gardening operation (Click here to get the free course).

The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Profitable Permaculture Farm

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What’s more important in your life, security, or freedom?

The reason I ask you this, is because the majority of people will opt for security. And they get exactly that: a 9-5 job, a regular paycheck and life in the suburbs…and yet, many will nonetheless still feel dissatisfied with their lives.

I know of many people who claim that they ‘wish’ they could start a permaculture farm – but that farm will only ever exist in their dreams. They simply don’t want to undertake the harsh reality of making that dream real. A reality that that will entail long hours of tough physical labor, low initial pay, constantly juggling “the numbers”, being hot, cold, wet, tired.

If you want to make a living from your farm, then it must be seen as a workable business. There are, of course, those who’ll prefer see it as a lifestyle choice but I wish to focus on the practical considerations rather than the ethical ones for the moment. You have to be able to make a viable living from something for it to ever be more than just a hobby. You can start that way but, it has to turn into something more.

According to USDA agricultural statistics, 80 percent of all contemporary farmers obtain the majority of their income off-farm. In fact most farms rely on off-farm income (teaching, nursing, truck driving etc.) to keep their indebted agricultural businesses afloat. So, think about it, this is our competition. I think we can do better and there are many fine examples of successful and profitable permaculture farms.

But to succeed, firstly you have to make that start and then you have to continue that commitment to go through an initial couple or so of rough years. It’s not a question of whether you can do it, it’s how you go about doing it in the first place that’s so important.

Here is what it’s all about:

Have good design>>> keep your expenses low and have a buffer of savings>>>make a basic business plan and have a source of an income immediately available>>> have a simple marketing strategy>>> learn how to crunch the numbers>>invest in education and gain the necessary skills >>> ensure your partner’s support>>>embrace the challenge and keep moving on.

Let’s dive in.

Have a good design

zaytuna_farm_diagram_2012
Zaytuna Farm diagram

This is the starting point and your vision of how your farm will develop. Everything successful starts with a good design, and, moreover, this early planning is what will make your farm efficient. Efficient design saves energy, time and money.

Bill Mollison in The Designers Manual writes: “The planning stage is critical. We design, assess resources, locate components, decide priorities, and place critical systems”.

What Bill is referring to when he mentions “critical systems” is the mainframe permaculture: water systems, access, buildings – the core infrastructure. It is this infrastructure that is the single most significant factor during the early stages. Farmer and author Joel Salatin also highlights the importance of building upon landscapes using earthworks. In his lecture ‘ten threads to farming success’ he puts ‘working landscapes’ as the primary early factor in the formation of a successful farming operation.

Depending on the available capital, this creation of a ‘working landscape’ can be conducted in stages.  Your initial blueprints should form both an outline and, for that matter, a plan of action. Once you the have the big picture down on paper, you will then know what your initial goals and priorities are.

Back to Bill: “As we draw up plans, we need to take the evolution in stages, to break up the job into easily-achieved parts, and to place components in these parts that will be needed early in development (access ways, shelter, plant nursery, water supply)”.

While a good design may indeed be the foundation for everything; it is also just the beginning. Working landscapes may harvest potential energy and create surplus energy in the system, but this is the just placing the first pieces of a much larger puzzle. As Richard Perkins from Ridgedale Permaculture states: “Design and installing are relatively easy. Designed a lot and it’s pretty much always finances/ decision-making that stall things”.

Keep your expenses low and have a buffer of savings

Grelinette-Story
Jean-Martin Fortier’s teepee

If you want your farm to succeed then you must learn to embrace frugality and downsize your lifestyle. This means keeping your expenses low by growing accustomed to cheap housing, cheap utilities and avoiding buying expensive equipment. The biggest mistake people make is starting out with a lengthy shopping list.

Don’t start with this list. From permaculture author Mark Shepard’s perspective “when starting out think how not to spend money”. To summarize: don’t buy lots of expensive new equipment and don’t spend too much on buildings. You can spend $100,000 building a house or you can build one for $5,000, or, even better, live in a teepee or camper. There is a 20-fold saving factor right there.

You can choose to spend a little or a lot, it’s all about your preferred style. Nobody is forcing you to do it one way or the other. However, look at the people who have made it – Milkwood, Market Gardener, Spiral Ridge. They all started frugally in cheap housing, while investing the money they saved in their businesses. As Joel Salatin observes: ”In the beginning you take care for business and later business takes care of you, If you start other way, taking care for you first than your business will suffer. ”

Another thing that will be of immense help when starting out is having a buffer of savings. Needless to say, the bigger the pot, the more time you have to make the transition to other sources of income. Being without a stable source of income is a somewhat unnerving and stressful experience, but you can mitigate this factor by accumulating cash before starting out – before you need it. Having some extra cash will also give you security and the confidence to try new things, as well if cushioning you if things start going south.

Make a basic business plan and have a source of an income immediately available

The-Eggmobile-1024x768
Joel Salatin’s eggmobile

In order to live your dream, and build something that is enduring, you simply have to make it profitable. Otherwise, you will quickly lose the precious land you worked so hard for. To put it bluntly, a farm is a business. Either the farm is profitable and self-sustaining, or unprofitable and eventually gets sold.

One problem is that permaculture is, to some extent, a set of philosophies and techniques, not a standard business plan. I think that sometimes we forget that without a business plan, it’s easy to end up working for less than nothing. Joel Salatin agrees: “it’s better to do nothing for nothing than something for nothing”.

If you want to make the switch into full-time farming you will need a return on your investment as soon as possible. Maybe you already have 1000 trees planted and have big plans for the future, but in the beginning you’ll need an immediate source of income to keep yourself in the game. On average, it takes at least 10 years for perennial systems to mature and reach their full potential, but when starting out you need some source of early cash flow to gain momentum.

To do this you need a business plan like any other farm. However, keep it basic. By over-planning things, it’s easily to get caught in ‘analysis paralysis’. Keep things simple, have a plan for next 18 months. All you need to identify at first are two things: your target market, and the products that will do well there. It may be advisable to start by growing plants and raising animals, or using existing infrastructure and resources to get some cash return within weeks or months.

Here are some of the options:

-Growing annuals and quick-yielding perennials:

You can grow in a market garden style – examples: Market gardener, Curtis Stone SPIN gardening, Elliot Coleman. Or you could use an alley cropping system and grow annuals/quick yielding perennials between the trees you planted – examples: Mark Sheppard from New Forest Farm and Permaculture Orchard.

-Raising Animals:

Free range eggs, poultry and pigs are the quickest return on an investment and probably the biggest bang for the buck. Pasturing requires very little machinery, infrastructure or buildings. Here you can learn from the master himself, Joel Salatin.

Pastured eggs – He uses ‘egg-mobiles’ and the laying hens live free-range from this. The egg-mobiles are portable henhouses, 12 x 20 foot, on mobile home axles. Here is his free video lesson on this system.

Pastured poultry – Broilers are raised in portable field-shelter housing moved daily to a fresh pasture paddock. Turkeys have a portable hoop-house inside an electrified-netting paddock moved every couple of days to a fresh pasture.

Pastured Pigs –  During the summer and fall, pigs are in special savannah pastures rotated every few days within an electric fence. In this clip, Joel demonstrates how to set up portable infrastructure for a 20 acre beyond-organic hog operation that nets $60k/year on rented land.

-Nursery business:

You can propagate plants by seed, cuttings or root division. The chances are you’ll probably need a lot of plants for your property, however. If you learn the necessary plant propagation skills you can make money from selling the plants you propagate and significantly cut your expenses.

-Bees and honey:

Honey has unlimited shelf life, and bees are very productive little creatures that can produce significant amounts of honey in one year. If you have the courage to give it a go, you can try natural beekeeping. You’ll be rewarded.

-Education on the site:

If there are people interested in learning more about the techniques, willing to pay for it and you can serve them…Well then, I don’t see how that could be a bad thing. You can offer PDC courses, workshops and location specific education.

-Ecotourism:

You can put your existing assets to productive use. For example, Ben Falk was renting out his main house while living cheaply in his studio. You can use Airbnb to promote your farm as a “retreat/vacation” style property. The possibilities are endless; people are even renting purpose-built tree-houses. Are you up for the challenge?

-Sustainable forestry management/woodworking:

If there are existing forests on your property you can produce fuel as coppiced firewood or use the wood to produce a huge variety of value added products – from beams and planks to eco-building materials and logs that you could inoculate with mushrooms.

The main question isn’t whether you can produce something of value; it’s what it is going to be, and who will buy it? The whole point of a business is to generate a customer base. For that you need to have a feasible marketing strategy.

Have a simple marketing strategy

Marketing doesn’t have to be hard

Farmers absolutely love to talk about growing but generally hate anything concerning marketing. They tend to think that the whole concept is a waste of valuable time they could be using for nurturing their crops.

However, underlying this seemingly blasé attitude, a great deal of discomfort can often be glimpsed…they are scared that people will reject their product, and, when somebody rejects your product, it can often feel like they are rejecting you personally. And you have put all that effort into growing, tending and making it all so beautiful….

The brutal reality is  that it doesn’t’t matter how good your product is, how efficiently you run your operation, how content your chickens are, if you cannot ultimately get people to buy your product it will not make you money., If you can’t sell it, then why put all the painstaking effort into producing it? Sure, you can eat it or give it away but, given all the time and toil you’ve put in, it’s only reasonable to expect to make a living from it.

At this point I have some good news and bad news for you…

First, the bad news: if you want to sell something that everybody else is selling using the channels that everybody else is using, you’re then in what’s called a “commodity business”. This means you’ll need to cut prices if you want to be competitive, and, in order to see a real return, you’ll have to do it on a bigger scale and at a lower cost. Here is where time and labor costs come to surface. It’s a regrettable fact that the average farmer only gets 8% of the retail price. This is because there are middlemen controlling the pricing. Basically, you have no control over the prices and you’re forced to accept whatever price the wholesaler tells you. The way to avoid this pitfall is to start developing  a brand for yourself from day one and be in direct marketing sales. Be your own middleman or woman!

On a more cheerful note, here’s the good news.

The good news is that marketing is something that can be picked up slowly and gradually. Yes, it takes time – but it doesn’t’t automatically have to be scary. Here’s Joel Saltin’s view on the subject: “Can you find 1 person to sell to? Don’t think about 100 or 1000 customers – look only for 1 person”.

Take it from me, in the beginning the hardest thing to acquire is that elusive first customer, but then it becomes easier because you get references and people start to talk and give feedback about you and your products.

Jack Spirko, who founded The Survival Podcast and runs multiple other businesses, recommends the same thing: “Start selling small and talk with your customers, understand their needs. First build a small customer base with a product like eggs or something similar, later start selling and offering other goods and services”. This is how you start to build lasting relationships with customers, by learning about their lives and becoming friends with them. You want their lasting support, and to be the person they rely on to provide them with their favorite carrots…you want to be irreplaceable.

Direct marketing is never completely plain sailing, there’s going to be some obstacles to overcome, but and this is important, you gain control your own destiny. It can take years to build up, for example, your weekly delivery route of regular standing orders from stores and restaurants within a 100 mile radius. A business doesn’t happen overnight, but it is important to understand that marketing is the key to making money. To have any kind of a market for a product, you either have to produce a lot of one product, so you can sell wholesale, or you have to market your products, which takes more time commitment. It’s your choice.

Learn how to crunch the numbers

Profit-Revenue-CostProfit = Income/Revenue – Expenditure/Overheads

So, you thought you wouldn’t need algebra again once you passed your high school exam? Well, I’m afraid you’re wrong.

How are you going to know what works (or not) unless you’re keeping track, making calculations and quantifying outcomes? How are you going to improve something you can’t directly quantify it? Joel Salatin and Sepp Holzer are probably worth millions. Do you think they are bad with numbers? Given the fundamental importance of getting the maths to add up, can anyone even run a profitable business without some understanding of the numbers?

Each enterprise on your farm will have its income and expenses.  And then there will be the overall expenses for everything. You will have to know those things if you want to run your farm as a business.

As a useful example, let’s take a look at Joel Salatin’s accounting practices. He defines every single direct cost to establish a gross margin. (percentage of total sales revenue that he retains after incurring the direct costs associated with producing the product). For instance, when pricing the cost of producing a chicken for the table, he will calculate the price of the chick, and then the costs for each chick: feed, maintenance, processing, packaging, hot water, and so on.

Moreover, Joel will do time and motion studies to assess exactly how to raise the chicken. These include where the feed is placed in the chicken house for the bird’s ease of access and how long it takes in terms of labor costs to feed, care for and prepare them for the table. This type of time and motion analysis is highly important. Conventional farm businesses already adopt this kind of strategy. Why should your farm be any different?

Mark Shepard emphasizes the importance of understanding taxes and how to access financing. He said: “Learn how to manage your numbers. Set up your IRS Schedule F farm business yesterday!  Build your credit rating, learn how to ‘exercise’ your credit”.

The bottom line is numbers are important, yet they can also be fun. What I want to stress here, however, is that if you want to achieve good margins every single cost needs to be quantified. There is no room for guesstimates. These hard accounting skills will tell you the pure truth about your business in minute detail. No romance there just invaluable black and white facts.

Invest into education and gain the necessary skills

Bill & Geoff
Find mentors like Bill and Geoff

The best investment you can ever make is to invest in yourself. You can lose your job, house, farm…but nobody can take away the knowledge and skills you’ve acquired. Humans have an unlimited potential to transform their lives and become whatever they put their mind to.

What differentiates humans from animals is the ability to envisage their future, and the best way to plan for it is to learn from other people’s experience. So, listen to podcasts, read books, go on seminars. Learn from other people’s successes, and their mistakes. Predict what can happen, don’t just guess, learn what works from people who have done exactly what you plan to do.

Let me ask you a simple question: How much have you spent on coffee this month? Is it $20, $30, more? Did you know that Joel Salatin’s book “You can Farm” costs 20$? By purchasing this book you can absorb his extensive business experience in a week’s worth of reading. In my opinion having a diverse variety of knowledge and skills is crucial to making something with so many aspects to consider as a permaculture farm work. For this you need to double down on your brain. Joel Salatin states: “Read broadly, read food, marketing, business books”.

The willingness to invest in yourself is one of the most important ways to achieve what you want. So, just how committed are you to making your vision a reality? When people say ‘I don’t have much money to make an investment in myself, I only have a little bit here and there’…well, I’m afraid to say that, in that case they are almost certainly going to get the same results they always get because they are not willing to invest in getting a different outcome. So, if you are one of these apathy prone types, you should be prepared to accept your current situation, quit complaining and be happy with where you are, and will remain, at.

If, however, you want more, then you need to actively seek out people who you believe in, admire, and who can help you get where you really want to go in life. Pay them, read their books, work for them for free. You must track down these people in order to improve your circle of influence—they rarely just show up by chance. Realise that success is something you will attract by the person you become. In other words, your level of success—in every area of your life—will rarely exceed, and generally parallel, the current level of your knowledge and skills.

Ensure your partner’s support

Kirsten_Bradley
Nick Ritar and Kirsten Bradley – Milkwooders

Listen, none of this successful permaculture farm thing even matters if your domestic life is in a mess. A successful farm, healthy produce, astute marketing… none of this really matters if your partner is not reading the same page as you.

The single biggest derailment factor in running a farm is differences in opinion between partners. Generally, one person is passionate and can’t wait to start but other is a little less passionate about the switch. One craves this lifestyle while other may just be going along with it. Unspoken expectations between partners are one of the most common causes of breakdowns in relationships, and a significant obstacle to overcome in making the change to a permaculture lifestyle.

The hardest thing in life is our relationships with others. Growing veggies is easy in comparison, so is business, these are things you can control, but you can’t control the desires of another person, and nor should you attempt to. If you both have the same goal, you can  start celebrating now, because not having support from your partner is the single biggest problem you’ll face, more so than anything farm-related.

You and your partner have to have a shared vision or it just isn’t going to work out. If your partner is not with you on this, then I’m sorry to tell you, but you’ll have to put your dream on hold.

However, there is, perhaps, a way to change their mind. I will let you in on a little secret that I learned from Joel Salatin. Here’s what he recommends you to tell your partner: “You know what, I will put my dream on hold until we are both on the same page”. Sounds simple and I can’t guarantee it will work, but at least it will make consider their own dreams, and how important is to have your support in achieving them.

Embrace the difficult and keep moving on

Expect hardship and prepare for it
Expect hardship and prepare for it

Everybody would love to have the freedom that a successful farm offers, but only a few are ready to endure the first few couple of years of struggle. I think Joel Salatin sums it up perfectly: “Everybody wants to be like me, but they don’t remember the 8 years that my wife and I lived in the attic of our parents’ house so we could save money and we lived on 100$ a month and drove the same car for 10 years”

If you really want to live the “good life” you’ll have to earn it. That may mean putting in a lot of hours, making a whole heap of sacrifices, cutting expenses and taking some odds jobs to earn some extra money on the side. Plan for the first year as being very lean and prepare for this eventuality in advance. Everything will probably cost more and take longer than you estimate.

There is no magic formula and you will probably fail a few times before you succeed – your failures though, are what will guide you to ultimate success. Anticipate setbacks and plan for them remain determined not to be demoralized when they occur. In the beginning it’s supposed to be hard, the hard is what makes it all so rewarding in the end. If it took you years to decide to quit your job and start a farm, why do you think you will succeed at first thing you put your effort to?

So, you’ll need to be innovative, creative and do whatever it takes to make it happen. You absolutely have to have a can-do attitude. To make it through first couple of years while establishing his farm Mark Shepard drove a truck, Joel Saltin was living in the attic of his parents’ house on just $100 a month; Market Gardener was living in a teepee for two years. I think all these examples prove that if you really want something hard enough – it’s within your reach.

Jack Spirko said: “in the beginning it’s damn hard and then it becomes simply hard work. When it becomes hard work you can be happy”. Just accept that when you’re starting out you’ll probably be an incomplete version of your ideal of what you would want to be, but at least you’re moving in the right direction.

IN SUMMARY

Running a farm today in 2015 is all about forming a vision, a good grasp of marketing, creatively utilizing resources, financial planning and entrepreneurship.

As in any business today, some people end up making  a fortune and some will just fail miserably. Farming, to my mind, is especially hard because it requires entrepreneurial skills and all the hard physical work involved.

Don’t let this discourage you, however. Here are some useful pointers to help you succeed:

  • Planning is critical – have a good design and install working landscapes
  • Keep your expenses low –  embrace frugality and downsize your lifestyle
  • Have a savings buffer – accumulate cash while you can and before you need it
  • Start with a basic business plan – think how are you going to survive the next 18 months
  • Have a simple marketing strategy – put the bigger challenges to one side and start to focus on developing a small customer base from day 1
  • Learn how to manage your numbers – the math never lies about profit and loss
  • Invest in yourself if you want to succeed, find people you can learn from and learn from other peoples mistakes
  • If you don’t have your partners support none of this matters, you can’t make it alone
  • It’s going to be hard, anticipate the setbacks and plan for them

Remember what Joel Salatin states:

“You make your way, you deserve your destiny with hard work”

It’s worth mentioning that I still feel I’ve only really just scratched the surface of this huge topic. Is there anything specific from the list you might be struggling with?

Let me know in the comments!