Pen and Pepper Farm

Good rain gear is essential for farming

One of the things I like best about farming is that I get to wear completely practical clothes, and it doesn’t matter what they look like.  In fact, the rattier the better.  They just need to be tough and comfortable.  For me, jeans with patches on the knees are perfect, because they protect my knees from rocks, just a little, while I’m on the ground, and I spent a LOT of time on the ground this season.

On a vegetable farm, you don’t end up doing nearly as much work in the rain and mud as you would on a farm with animals.  You can’t work the soil if the ground is too wet.  However, there are plenty of crops that can be harvested in the rain, and when a delivery is due, you have to be there to pick the kale or tomatoes or tomatillos, no matter what.  And plants can be pruned and staked in the rain.  I quickly discovered that spending four or five hours working in the rain is a lot more pleasant if I wore rain paints.  I ended up buying a $15 rain suit from Home Depot, out of desperation one day.  The bad news was that it pretty much smelled like gasoline, it was so raw–Tracy and the kids could barely stand having it in the car with them. And the suspenders ripped on the first day, but it still did the trick and kept me dry on plenty of days.  And it was cheap.

Next year, I plan to spend a little more and buy a stronger rain suit, maybe one that can breathe a bit.  Hiking gear is probably the way to go.  The trick is that any clothing for the farm needs to be really tough.  I really didn’t understand going into this how rough the ground is on every object on the farm–tools, equipment, and clothing.  In rocky soil like ours, it’s pretty much like working in sandpaper all day long.  The earth just wears stuff out, and fast.

Old hiking boots did the trick this year.

I’d worried about shoes/boots.  A lot of farmers wear very farmer-like rubber boots, and I didn’t have any and didn’t want to buy them (the budget felt like it was getting out of control).  I ended up using some old waterproof Keen hiking boots.  They turned out to be perfect.  If we had animals or a muddier field, I would have needed rubber boots, but in our case, we just have veggies and the field drained pretty well.  The most important quality in farm boots for me this year was toughness and comfort.  They’re shot now, but they lasted the whole season.  And they needed to be comfortable enough for me to be on my feet, kneeling, weeding, hauling, standing, for eight or nine hours at a time.  I think I’m going to buy a new pair of exactly the same model for next year.

Other key gear was my hat–a wide-brimmed Tilly hat, to keep the sun off my face and neck. Cancer runs in my family, so I have to be careful in the sun.  I always wore sunscreen and rarely got sunburned–this was also important because I couldn’t afford to miss a day of field work just because I’d been stupid and blistered myself in the sun.  That’s the thing with farming–there are no sick days.  On a tiny operation like ours, there’s no one else to take over if I do something stupid.  (I need to save the drama for my playwriting.)

For spraying organic pesticides and fungicides, I just went to Goodwill and bought an old oxford-cloth shirt that I could put on to protect my skin and easily wash separately from the rest of my clothing.  (We did more laundry this summer than ever before.  I’d come home covered in dirt from head to toe.)

Gloves were important, but they wore out quickly, especially when tying up tomatoes–nylon tomato twine cuts through gloves, and skin, almost as fast as a knife.  I should have bought three pairs of gloves going into this season, but made do with one that basically fell apart by the end of the season.  I like gloves that are fairly tight fitting, so that I can feel what I’m doing.

These chard seedlings that we bought all survived, but the kale was destroyed by a storm and rabbits.

I’m a planner by nature.  I love to make lists. I make pages of goals at the start of every year, for just about every task.  All of this makes me a natural match for farming, because if there’s one field where you can spend hours and hours, creating spreadsheet after spreadsheet planning, it’s farming.

As part of the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project, we were required to take a farm business plan writing class before we were even allowed to apply for land on the incubator plots.  It’s a smart requirement.  This way, when before I ordered my first seed packet, I already had a detailed step by step outline of what I planned to raise, how I’d market it, and where I’d sell it.

The big picture.

According to my plan, we would be in two different farmer’s markets–one in Jamaica Plain and another (every other week) in Acton-Boxborough, and to the World PEAS cooperative CSA.  I thought I’d sell a tiny bit to neighbors, too.

So I planned for gross sales to work out like this:

• World PEAS cooperative CSA: $3,156
• JP farm stand: $3,582
• AB farm stand: $1,718
• Neighbors: $125
• TOTAL Planned income: $8,644

This would be against planned expenses of $6,280 (which included gas).  So theoretically, we could make about $2,300.

Not bad.  Except that all my sales projections were based on the tiniest bits of data and lots of wishful thinking.  It was very hard to know how much we were likely to make at the farmer’s markets–I’d heard wildly different stories, but found little actual real numbers.  And the truth is that prices and traffic volume varies wildly from market to market.  I could find some number for crop yields, but I knew I was a beginner with lots of gardening experience, but very little farming experience.  (And I learned fast that they are NOT the same.)

In terms of special ideas for the farmer’s markets, we planned to put out recipes, have a lending library, and offer special pre-packaged “salsa packs” for our customers.  It was hard to see if any of these would work.  But they sounded good.

Farm Plans Change Early and Often

The entire season was filled with making adjustments to the plan.  The big ones came early.  I found out that my World PEAS bid was capped, because I was a first year farmer (smart move on their part).  So now I could only plan on selling them $2,635.  And then we found out that we did not get into the Acton-Boxborough Farmer’s Market.  That cut more than $1,600 from our projected income.

Early drought followed by a rough spring storm and rabbit problems wreaked havoc with the snow peas and early kale.  We had planned to deliver 80 pints of snow peas to World PEAS–amount actually delivered: 0.  Our beets ran into problems all season long, with only one succession really thriving.  The initial planting of kale was too small to keep up with our expected deliveries.  Onions were attacked by root maggots and never sized up.

But there were unexpected surprises, too.  We grew and sold more basil and zucchini than expected.  We had tons of late kale and kept selling the extra to World PEAS, gradually making up for the missing beets and snow peas.

At the market, the recipes were a big success, the library was of small interest, and it turned out that “salsa packs” didn’t really make much sense.  And we were lucky to be shut out of the Acton-Boxborough market, because we really didn’t have the time nor the produce to sell.

More and more, we learned how much farming is about adjusting plans based on existing conditions and new data.  In the long term, in farming like any business, good planning is an iterative process.  The initial plan is necessarily flimsy.  Next year, we’ll do better, but still miss a lot.  In ten years, we’ll have a much better grip on what we’re doing.

So how’d we do?

At the end of the year, we didn’t miss our income targets by as much as I would have expected in early June when we were having crop failures right and left.  Here are the actual numbers:

• World PEAS sales:  $2,913
• JP Farmer’s Market: $4,206  (over 19 weeks)
• Neighbors: $510
• TOTAL actual gross income:  $7,630.

So we came up about $1,000 (11%) short of our best-case, somewhat uninformed projections.  Which, to me, feels pretty good considering the unexpected loss of one market and cap on another.

Our expenses so far this year are $5,613, not counting gas.  I think we spent about $1,300 on gas, bringing us up to $6,913.  Which would mean we almost broke even.  If you count mileage expense (8000 miles @ 55.5 cents/mile), rather than gas, our expenses were $10,071, for a loss of $2,441.  Which isn’t great, but not as bad as it could have been.  (And clearly proves that it pays to live on your farm.)

My goal this year was to learn a lot, have fun, and not lose too much money.  I think we made it.

Crop-by-Crop

I’m especially interested to see which crops met or exceeded our plans, and which ones failed miserably.  So I’ve put together the table below to figure out which were our winners and losers:

[table id=1 /]

Man, do I love spreadsheets.  (seriously)  This shows so clearly how our plans were forced to change over the season.  There are a whole bunch of tiny sales that were items plucked from our garden (rosemary and dill) or seeds/seedlings planted to fill late season empty spaces in the field (cabbage).  You can see we were all over the place in terms of whether we met projections or not.  Of 21 projected crops, 13 (60%) sold less than we expected.  Of those, we missed our projected sales by 50% or more!  But on the plus side, we surpassed sales by more than 50% in 4 crops (basil, beans, kale, zucchini).  With all the ups and downs, we still only missed our sales targets by 6%.

When you look at quantities, this chart also shows other areas where our plans didn’t turn out as expected.  Not only were quantities different, but by looking at the difference between sales and yield differences, you can see that we were surprised by some prices, too.  For example, we sold about 17% more pints of beans than we expected, but earned 149% more than expected.  Prices were  higher than expected for beans, garlic, and potatoes.  Prices were lower than expected for cucumbers, lettuce, hot peppers, and tomatoes.

(Just in case you’re wondering whether our sales fall into a classic 80/20 scenario, where 80% of sales comes from just the top 20% of products–the top 6 crops accounted for 62% of sales in our case.)

Anyway, you get the point.  Beginners have a hard time planning, because they have poor data.  We’ll do MUCH better next year (my head is still spinning from this spreadsheet), but we’ll still never nail it, because of weather and pests and changing markets.  We’ll have to ready to keep adjusting all season long, every season.

That’s part of what makes it fun.

Kale was one of our biggest crops this year. We sold more than 600 bunches.

The final pepper harvest, right before frost.

Now that the season is over, it’s time to make sense of all the lessons we’ve learned over the past eight months.  When I was out in the fields or at the market, there was very little time to reflect on what was happening.  Every day was filled with learning and skill building.  Now is the time to write it all down, so that next year’s learning curve won’t  be quite so steep.

When I was starting up, I looked at a lot of other farm blogs, and a lot of them were inspirational, and many were written by experienced pros, which was very helpful.  But I could have used a few more posts from people who were busy making mistakes and trying to recover, with the fresh astonishment of newness.  Plus I wanted data.  All season long, I’ve been gathering as much data as I can (though not as much as I’d like). I might as well post those attempts at understanding here, so other newbie farmers might find it.  (And more experienced folks might give me more insight and clues.)

Some caveats to all of these lessons–these are for a quarter acre microfarm of vegetables, in the Northeast, using organic methods, with most of the labor done by hand. And I was in the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project, which meant that I had a lot of techinical support and infrastructre in place.  Much of what I learned would be useless for a small new farmer in the Midwest, where a small farm might be 400 acres, or a new dairy farmer, or someone cultivating five acres using small tractors.  And a lot of what I think I learned might be wrong.  There will be better techniques that I don’t even know about.  What I can say is that these are my experiences and my data.  I’d love it if there were another twenty blogs series just like these from other new farmers, and we could compare them.

(If you know of any, please let me know in the comment section.)

Some farmers are shy about sharing data on yields or income.  Either they don’t want to look bad or they don’t want to seem like they’re bragging.  I accept that I’m new at all of this, and in some ways we did all right for ourselves, and in many ways we have a long way to go.  But I think all new and prospective farmers would benefit if there was more accessible data out there from small-scale farms.

So, this is the start.  For the record, we grew 19 different vegetables (48 total varieties) on less than 1/4 acre.  From June 14 to November 25, we harvested approximately 3,000 pounds of vegetables, resulting in gross sales of $7,630.  We live far from our farm (almost 40 miles), so we drove more than 8,000 miles.  If you count mileage expenses (at the IRS rate of 55 cents per mile), then we lost money.  If you just count money spent on gas, then we pretty much broke even.  (More exact budget details to follow in future posts.

We learned a lot.  And we sold some great vegetables to a lot of people and ate a lot of them ourselves. We had a blast.

We’ll do it again next year.  Hopefully better.  Here’s an attempt to learn from our successes and failures.

All that was left in November was kale. And lots of lessons learned.