(farm is in zone6)

1. It should only be about 3 workers.

2. Should we only farm a few acres? Produce lettuce, spinach, chard ect... and other veggies, and sell to a local market?

3. I know I am in the organic section but I am leaning towards a slow release in-organic fertilizer and using it light. I dont know how to get local compost, any ideas organic vs in-orgainc?

4. We will probably only use small tractors with small tillers/cultivator, and golf carts for fertilizing,ect...

I am asking these questions because I dont want to plant more then we can harvest. If we got into grain and corn we would need to grow alot, sell a lot, and have huge machinery. Am I right?

Please any help would be good. We hope to have a productive farm this year, even farm one or two acres to get it down.

Anyone please feel free to help, it will be much appreciated.

Thanks.

Any info would be good.

Keep your variables down while trying to figure out what works or you'll never figure out what worked. I.E. If you planted a field with tomatoes and wanted to know how much manure to apply to it, don't use 3 different manure sources and 3 different varieties or a field of peppers with one manure rate and 3 different irrigation systems (drip, furrow and sprinkler.

Start simple and don't plant the whole darned acerage to veggies, remember for disease and weed prevention it is a very good strategy to rotate cropped fields with fallowed ones. Fallow is best done with cover crops in my opinion, you'll want to experiment with those crops also, Spring and Summer.

Do research (reading) till your eyeballs fall out of your head!

Be observant at all times in the field, I know it sounds obvious but it is worth remembering.

Keep good records of what you do and the results of what you did(nt).

Revel in your success and learn from your failures.

Without larger equipment 20 acres would be unmanageable. If the value of the land is high and taxes too, it will need to produce income. Perhaps most of it could be sown to good legumes and some hay harvested by leasing it out and a small area utilized for fruits and vegetables.

If the land is run down some, even the gardened part could be partly in a soil building rotation.

Haha, yes I will!!! ;)

Thanks so much. I have been looking into marketing and found if we sell it not in bulk but to the high end market we will spend 50% of our time selling/marketing. We will NOT go to the "farmers market" either.

I think we will farm 1-2 acres to get a hang of it.

Hey, thanks for the tips so far.

No not at all, maybe just gardening, thats it.

Thats why we are more or less going to just make a huge 1 acre garden of various veggies. The owner has years experience growing in a small green house growing tomatoes but thats it. I have seen gardens that use ride on small tractors and golf carts, and with there system I could see they could easely of farmed way more land. If we grow mixed veggies we can sell more selection to each individual. We will keep it small at first, but I would still like to here some good hints.

The land is very flat and the area he wants to farm is a little higher elevation so it wont flood.

I think he said it was fenced too!! : )

Thanks everyone.

I second the recommendation that you don't plant anything until you have a market, and not just vague promises either. I also say start small so that your mistakes are smaller. Do not grow for wholesale at the scale of proposed operation. Direct marketing is best although time-consuming. Well over 50% of my labor costs involves marketing. Of course, my operation is as much a demonstration urban mini-farm as it is a production unit. So we tend to grow a great variety of fruits, herbs, and vegetables and use somewhat expensive techniques to enhance growing environments.

I just found there is a apple orchard on the farm too!!! So cant wait till spring but the work starts soon. Like I said after looking into the market we will probably just grow organic small farm for friends and family. Just take it one step at a time, thats all.

Thanks for the help, I will be going into this more informative becuse of your help.

In my market farming I use my landscape management crew to handle yard waste and composting and to do orchard chores several times a year. I have two other workers that help with gopher and rabbit trapping, bed prep and some weeding. I would judge that they spend about a quarter of their time "farming". I spend a similar amount of time purchasing supplies, doing starts, seeding and transplanting and some weeding. So let's say that about one man-day is dedicated to cultivating the market garden of nearly 2 acres.

I have 3 people who work about two man-days a week in direct marketing, including harvesting and handling, bagging and boxing and deliveries as needed They also collectively spend another man-day/week helping with plant grooming and some planting/transplanting.

My market garden beds are permanent and have been double dug and amended so that they are very productive and require a minimum of weeding.We use growth promoting materials and techniques, especially floating row covers to protect against pests and, in season, various plastic bed covers. For much of the year we rely on drip tape for irrigation and limit overhead sprinkler irrigation to covercropped areas.

This is apropos, because I am finally getting serious about ramping up production at an acre that I rent. Myself and another are going to build an 8-foot deer fence around the whole acre - which the lack of for the past 12 years has kept me from putting in serious field time - and then she will take a third for flowers while I will expand to keep the other two thirds well managed (IOW, put in enough time to prevent take-over by grass and shrubs).

It is an amount of space that is right on the cusp of being slightly too large to manage with the time I have available and too small to justify buying serious equipment. We can hire tractors on occasion - in fact we just hired a rotovator -but the drive is considerable. I personally feel that frequent roto-tilling is a very damaging practice otherwise I would simply buy a large walk-behind and the problem would be affordably solved. Maybe I should buy it anyway and just use it for areas that get out of control. Or maybe with a good deer fence it will be worth putting in 500 hours a year of hand labor. If it were prime soil it would be worth it, unfortunately it is over-drained sandy soil.

You are plagued with an excessively sandy soil, meaning your expenses for amendments are high and yields of many crops lower than would be the case with growing on better soil. You have an advantage of being able to grow a cover crop/green manure crop in the Fall, allowing winter kill and having some residual effects for the Spring planting.

If you read back this is why we are not going to farm for profit. After looking into the market the big farms ran out small farmers long ago, just like these huge depatment stores that run out mom and pop, not going to name any names.

So when there is all poor people and only a few rich, who will the rich sell to? ;)

Marshall, indeed it is a tragedy that my rental piece is not on some of the prime ag land that makes up about 1% of the island. That land is pretty tough to get a crack at as you can imagine. People that are willing to waste a lot more time than me have it all wrapped up :)

pnbrown,

Feel free to be on your subject, I enjoy learning anything new. : )

Proviso: I don't earn any money whatsoever from agriculture nor horticulture so take anything i say with that grain of salt.

Got to get me one of those.

Harvesting IS the biggest problem and is often considered to take up to 60% of your labor, even though the harvest may run only a few weeks to a month or so, of your 5-7 month season of toil. I often discovered that when harvest begins, most of the rest of your life stops. Kind of like Dairy Farming. :)

Anybody have first-hand experience with these?

A neighbour runs a vegetable market on five acres just up the road from me. He says growing the stuff is the easy part, marketing and harvesting is the hard part (he really loved to garden). I've sold compost to a couple who tried the CSA route but they got drowned out and then the municipality shut them down due to zoning regs. I think the CSA would work well but it would require a huge leap of faith on the part of the shareholders.

Lloyd

I'm picturing your 20 acre farm as one big square field.

Back left corner fenced off 3 acres
I would plant Hazelnut trees and grow truffles
I would also grow berries for now in between the trees, away from the trees roots. Later on you might have to stop growing berries around the trees.
I would also have bee hives in that fenced off area
The link below is info on how they are growing truffles in zone 6/NC and the state is giving grant money, see about this in your state. Also what other crops your state is helping farmers grow with grant money. As stated above by art 1 organic nuts and berries cost a small fortune.

Front right corner feced off 2/3 acres
I would get movable sheds to have chickens, organic large eggs cost min 6.00 a dozen.
I would also get a couple of jersey cows.
Then with the chickens and cows I would use the mob stocking technique. The cows would be eating all natural grass, weeds, flowers, ect. Then produce manure onto the ground. Then the chickens will dig through all of the manure in hunt for maggots and things, spreading the manure all around and making fertilizer for the cows food to grow better each time.
Then of course you have all of the manure from the chickens and cows in bedding to make your own compost.

Moving 5 acres
I would grow all of the grains (cover crop) for the chickens to eat.
Then when they were done I would grow my veggies on that plot and move the grains to the next 5 acres.

If you have any forest acres
I would go on some nature hikes and find wild ramp beds and transplant them in the forest area. Ramps sell for 15.99 a pound. After transplanting you should only have to let nature do the work. Zone 6 is perfect for ramps.

Hope some of this helped.

Permaculture is the way to go, but it would be doing good if it paid taxes on the land in addition to providing good sustainable food for the operators. Really the same goes for all forms of agriculture. The only way to wring cash renumeration comparable to doing something else for a living is to mine the land in some way. The years and years of people trying to get money out of land has resulted in severe demineralization. The minerals have been stripped, sold, and sent to the bottom of the ocean. That is why I spend absurd amounts of time and quite a lot of money growing food that is better mineralized, because it virtually can't be bought.

I'm all for permaculture, in fact it's the only answer, but driving tony high-priced gourmet crops for miles when one could be spending their time improving the permaculture system is idiocy, IMO. Let people get their own fancy crops, I say. Which makes more sense - spend some of your time doing something that fetches many times the money per hour, and then use the money to create a superior horticulture, or to allow the exigencies of an economy that places no value on horticulture whatsoever to force you to create a crappy system that ultimately leaves the land no better or worse than you found it?

Stay small enough to handle the work, develop local retail marketing program, and concentrate on quality.

Lloyd

And I am very much a small farmer as my farm is under 10 acres and the growing takes place on under 4 acres. of course it did take close to 20 years to get here and the big secret is to stay out of debt as much as possible

You no doubt have lots of hard work in your work. I have to tip the hat to you.

And yes to BCS, with 33" tiller, moldboard plow, brush mower, and chipper shredder attachments. Get the Honda motor if possible. Hire a tractor for larger jobs unless you can buy one and be the one hired.

Problem is, once it's a business, it is no longer much fun. If I must do something that is not a great deal of fun, most of the time, I might as well do whatever brings the most income. If that was farming, I'd be doing it.

My gardening started as an outgrowth of my career in restaurants, and as such has in fact always been profitable, because I had the market before I started, and have for most of my career followed that approach. As I became more skilled, I introduced new crops and techniques that allowed me to have products that were unavailable elsewhere, and were thus high-value to the chefs I serve. I have my own opinions about how small-holding growers should manage their businesses that are frequently at odds with others on these forums, but I think the profitability of my operation is a strong argument for the viability of my business model. The bottom line must by necessity be the primary decision-driver of any business, and all of my crop decisions eventually devolve to the $/sq.ft./year calculation, with all of the wonderful complexities that entails, but the fact that it is still a business should not preclude the possibility that it is, if not always enjoyable, at least nearly always satisfying, and sometimes a true delight.