The Truth About Vegetable Farming for Profit

Just north of my farmhouse. NOT your typical home garden

Here's the truth about vegetable farming for profit: there's a world of difference between the typical home garden and a successful market garden. Organic vegetable farming is a more complex and demanding, and requires much more in the way of planning and management than casual home gardening.

Raise food, build shelter, generate your own water and power.

Carefully Curated Resources For The Homesteader and Prudent Property Owner

The world seems to be a little unsettled these days. I'm always looking for ways to make New Terra Farm more self-sufficient and productive.

Here's a few of the best ways I've found to make self-sufficiency happen. Useful Homesteader Resources

But the Serious Home Gardener Should Read This, Too

If you want to have a serious home garden that provides a significant percentage of your food, the following applies to you as well.

Here's what separates vegetable farming for profit from the other kind:

1. The diversity of crops grown

Crop diversity is essential for successful (organic) vegetable farming. You need to grow a complex “polyculture” of crops, for a couple of reasons: first, this helps create a mini-ecology on your small farm, supporting soil microorganisms and beneficial insects that contribute to garden health.

And second, the more things you grow, the greater the resilience of your garden. For example, if you are growing just two crops and one fails, you have lost 50% of your garden.

On the other hand, if you are growing a complex polyculture of perhaps 30 or 40 crops (like we do at New Terra Farm) and 3 or 4 fail completely, you are still at 90% productivity. This is important if you are depending on the garden for income (or food!)

We built a Garden Planner Spreadsheet to manage our garden

2. Integrated management of crop production and animal husbandry.

Our pigs help clean up the garden and maintain soil fertility

I tell people (only somewhat facetiously) that organic vegetable farming consists mainly of moving manure from where it is to where you want it to be. Vegetable farming for profit depends on maintaining soil fertility by the application of composted manure, crop rotation, and cover cropping.

This has to be integrated with cash crop production, and with your overall garden plan and schedule. For example, carrots don't like manure applied in the same year they are planted. So when planning you crop rotation, you would plan to grow carrots on a spot that was manured the year before, where perhaps onions or lettuces had grown.

3. Integrated management of garden pests

This includes animals, insects, weeds and diseases. In the home garden, losing crops to the 'bad guys' is annoying; if you are vegetable farming for profit, your income can be wiped out!

In our garden and greenhouse we use extensive passive and preventative means of pest and disease control. We buy disease-resistant cultivars. The garden is surrounded by electric mesh fence to keep out marauding animals.

We use about a half-mile of floating row cover row cover each year, as a physical barrier against insects. We grow multiple varieties of each vegetable (see Diversity above) and we do multiple plantings.

We leave large 'wild strips' in the garden to provide a habitat for beneficial predatory insects. We rotate crops to reduce the build-up of pests.

In short, we expend a lot of effort to protect the crops we grow, because our income depends on it.

Row cover and film mulch reduce insect pests and soil micro-organisms

4. Accounting for labour

The home gardener probably doesn't care how many hours her garden consumes, or the 'payback' achieved. However, if you are vegetable farming for profit, labour will be your biggest expense. So you have to think about getting the most return you can for the effort expended.

This is true whether you do the work yourself or hire help. Some crops you just will not be able to grow profitably; you will need to keep good records to determine which.

This also means you need to continuously strive to find ways to me more efficient – i.e. more output for your inputs, while remaining true to your principles.

This can be challenging, because many techniques are scale-dependent - e.g. double-digging garden beds is feasible in the home garden, not so much on a 40,000 square-foot market garden. This means that sometimes, growing the size of your garden requires completely changing how you do things, and getting new equipment to do it.

Bed shaping equipment can save a LOT of hand labour

A good example of this in the picture above. We hired a neighbor (thanks Dan) with a tractor-mounted tiller and bed-shaping equipment. He built our whole garden (about an acre) in one day.

Aside from all the labour saved, this also meant I could plan out our garden crop placement more easily. And, big bonus, no bottleneck in planting because we fell behind in bed making.

Last tip, whether a home gardener or a market gardener, order your seed early. Supplies of popular cultivars occasionally run out. Here's some seed houses I recommend that have a great selection, good prices and lots of 'grow-how' information on their websites.

The Most Profitable Garden Model

Now includes Garden Planner software

CSA Market Gardens typically have the highest net income.

Bootstrap Market Gardening shows you step-by-step how to start-up, market and manage an organic market garden based on CSA principles.

New edition includes my Garden Planner spreadsheet and Get Bootstrap Market Gardening  only from New Terra Farm.

If you would rather build it than buy it, this is for you...

Jam packed with practical projects, tools and techniques to make you money and save you money

I didn't write this one, but it's an excellent resource for the homesteader or small property owner anyway!

The Self-Sufficient Backyard has literally hundreds of plans and practical tools and techniques for the serious homesteader.Written by a couple who have actually done the work.

From growing food, to medicinal herbs, solar electricity, root cellaring, growing small livestock, and selling select produce as a side hustle, plus many more money-saving and money-making ideas, this book is an encyclopedia of growing and building knowledge. A must-have in your homestead library.

I only write about topics I have personal experience with. The authors of The Self-Sufficient Backyard have done the same. Highly recommended!

More like Vegetable Farming for Profit

I use raised beds in my market garden to provide early soil warming and to protect against flooding. Here's a raised bed garden plan that can be adapted to grow a variety of crops.

Farm planning is critical to small farm success; small growers don't have the luxury of wasting time and resources on enterprises that just won't pay. Here's how we do business planning at New Terra Farm.

Learning how to start seeds efficiently is important for the new small farmer or market gardener. Here's a primer

Growing sweet potatoes can be an important part of your food plan. And despite the fact that Ipomoea batatas is very susceptible to cold, you can grow them even in my chilly 45N latitude. Let’s talk about the why, what, how, and how much of growing sweet potatoes in a cold climate.

How to plan a garden for efficient use of space, and your time. Since its getting to be that time of year for seed starting (at least in the northern hemisphere) I thought I would provide a quick example of how I plan my plantings here on the farm.

Vegetable farming for profit requires resources – equipment, machinery, tools and sometimes 'hired help'. You are going to need some start-up capital; that's one reason we created our Bootstrap Market Gardening model

I’ve read a few articles about growing high income crops, but they seem to leave out a few things.  Here's my take

If you have not yet begin farming, or even if you have and want to have better success, you need to focus on farming for results

Growing seed potatoes can be an important contribution to your long-term survival food supply. Here's how we grow' em and store 'em at New Terra Farm

How a New Grower Made a BIG Mistake...

Let me tell you about a beginning market gardener's big mistake. . .

I have a good friend and neighbour who started market gardening after I did. In fact, she worked on my farm to learn the business.

She was passionate about growing great organic vegetables, she was a hard worker, and in fact she learned a lot about successfully growing for market.

But . . . she made a mistake her first year that cost her about $5000 in lost sales!

You may find it hard to believe that one mistake could cost so much, but I can verify it is true.

Let me tell you the rest of the story . . .

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