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My advice would be to continue renting out your land except for maybe a half-acre mixed vegetable field for personal use. You aren't going to net 60,000$ farming with 2 people farming 20 hours a week and forget about farming multiple acres unless you bring in better business partners. From what I understand about mushroom farming, you typically do it indoors in sterile conditions. I would seek the advice of a local mushroom farmer. If you're farming organic, you had better make sure your tenants also farm organically and have been farming organically for 3-5 years already. Also your plots will be fully infested with weeds year round if you're leaving the heavy work for weekends. If you're not farming organic, good luck selling at the farmer's market. You should consider an Illinois pesticide applicators license. Who's going to man the vegetable stand? That's a long shift including set up and take down. A lot of farmer's markets have waiting lists. You might be able to sell your friends and family on a CSA but there's no guarantee you'll produce an acceptable amount for them with no apparent farming experience. I would just give your friends your extra produce for free. That way there's no expectation and they're not buying in.
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Mar 20, 2017 04:04
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| # ¿ May 2, 2024 17:26 |
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Sorry man I'm not as experienced with farmer's markets as you think I am. I just buy produce from em sometimes and I've also worked with farmers who have wanted to sell stuff on the farmer's market. It helps to have a friend who already has a successful stand to piggyback off of so your idea of finding someone else's stand to use is pretty good. I'm sure they'll want something in return for helping sell your veggies. Since you said you're rehabbing the land to grow organic, that might be real difficult with your tenants. Since they're farming row crops conventionally I can all but guarantee you they're spraying roundup all over their crops. That's a wide-spectrum herbicide and will definitely kill your plants through drift. Your farm won't be considered organic until 3 years after they stop spraying the roundup everywhere and you'd have to do a bunch of paperwork and put up no spray signs everywhere. I'm sure it would cause a lot of tension between you and your tenants if you forced them to go organic. You're gonna want to just plant as much variety as possible instead of only garlic/tomato/beans your first year. You aren't going to know what will be successful for you unless you plant it and then next year you can focus in on whatever plants worked the best for your land/your time commitment/your cooking. I would go to a seed store and buy basically everything you can then divide your land into 4 sectors and focus on different plant families in each sector. As an example: solanaceous (tomatoes potatoes peppers), alliums (onions garlic chives etc), brassicas (kale brocc turnips), legumes (always need beans in a crop rotation because they fix N to the soil).
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Mar 21, 2017 03:29
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