How to increase the profit from your garden or small farm

How to increase the profit from your garden or small farm NOW! (growing vegetables, fruits, nuts, berries or herbs).
As the world population escalates, food prices will rise. This trend will be reinforced by rising oil & gas prices (mainstream agriculture is dependent on oil & gas for transport, fertilizers, herbicides & pesticides). Therefore there is a great business opportunity in growing food. Over the past 18 months, I have been doing a study that takes over 100 of the main food crops and assesses and compares their profitability. This is a brief discussion paper giving you a preview. Clearly more money will be made growing the most profitable crops and this study provides you with over 100 crops ranked in terms of profitability. The crops are also categorized according to their climate suitability, so you can find for example which are the most profitable crops in the tropics, temperate or cold climates. What then are the key factors that affect profitability when growing crops? Clearly your choice of crops is fundamental to your financial success. The other factor you have to evaluate is the market demand for the crops you select and your ability to reach that market. You then need to be able to grow the crops. This subject and an overview of over 140 popular crops is covered in my book called “Growing Healthy” subtitled “How to make over $100,000 p.a. on five acres growing fruit and vegetables organically”. This book is available from the website www.growinghealthyorganicfood.com (see book 1) . For even more detail on growing effectively we have 12 monthly lessons on nature’s twelve universal principles of organic food growing. See course 1 at www.growinghealthyorganicfood.com . The other key topic in assessing profitability is cost. There are capital items like land & equipment & buildings. There are the variable costs of seeds, seedlings, fertilizers, watering, pruning & weeding, soil preparation, planting & harvesting, cleaning & packing, transport & marketing. In most of these there is a labour component and this is generally the big cost. Labour costs vary hugely around the world, where the lesser developed countries such as China & India have a big cost advantage and in the western world USA is generally much lower than say the UK or Australia. These factors and others are assessed crop by crop in my study. But for now here are some quick effective ways to improve your profitability immediately: 1. Temperature has a major impact on growth—too hot or too cold stops growth dead in its tracks for most plants. So if you are in an area that gets extreme hot temperatures (over 30 degrees C) you can improve production by using a shadehouse in the summer. Depending on the size of the area you grow in this can be a small homemade device with cloth draped over wood or plastic poles or a large walk in shadehouse with sprinklers. If you live in cold climates that get frosts or snow, then you can improve productivity and lengthen your growing season by using a greenhouse in the winter. 2. Another key factor that impacts profitability is the length of time from planting to maturity and harvesting. Fruit & nut trees for example typically take 3 years or even longer to bear a crop and then it is often then only a small crop and may take 4 to 7 years before full production is achieved. And then you get only one crop a year from most fruit trees. Fruits & nuts payoff is good longer term as the labour component is lower than for vegetables & herbs. 3. However, if you want a quick return on your investment forget fruit & nut trees. You need to focus on vegetables, herbs and berries. The typical vegetable takes 3 months to maturity. Time and cashflow are major factors in profitability, so how about these:months to grow and many of them can be grown several times a year (depending on the length of your growing season). Some vegetables you can pick many times from the one plant---it just keeps producing! 4. Let’s get specific: (a) Rhubarb is a magic crop to grow. I can pick up to 8 times in a year off the one plant. We have of course a particularly long growing season of 10 to 12 months a year, but even in a shorter growing season area you can pick every 5 to 6 weeks once the plant is mature. (b) There are some other crops that you can pick up to five times from the one plant—namely zucchini, kale and silver beet or swiss chard. (c) The other recommendation is to go for crops with the shortest time from planting Zucchini 7 weeks Radish 7 weeks Silver beet 8 weeks Lettuce 9 weeks Broccoli 10 weeks Carrots 11 weeks The exact time will vary slightly with different varieties and the weather. Conclusion: If you try some of the above recommendations you cannot help but improve your return from your activities on your garden or small farm. At least they will make it easier to cut down on your food bills by selling your excess produce nore readily! However this brief free report cannot cover all the details of growing and marketing your crops. If you want more I have recently produced a short 12 week program that does all this. It is now available as course 2 on the home page of our website: go to http://www.growinghealthyorganicfood.com/course2. This program provides a comparative analysis of the profitability of over 100 crops including helping you set up a step by step business plan to maximize the return on your land size and specific climate. This training program also gives you the use of a profitability calculator where you can input your own figures to calculate the specific profitability of a crop you grow in your climate, with your local pricing and local cost of labour and the growing time of the particular variety that you have chosen. Best wishes, Geoff Buckley.

What are the most important minerals?

Creating and maintaining a healthy balanced soil is crucial to success in growing crops organically. The father of soil science is Professor William Albrecht who studied soils all around the world all his life. He demonstrated that in terms of volume the major elements are calcium, magnesium and potassium. Nitrogen, phophorus and silcon are also significant.
Later research shows that volume is not the only important factor. Individual elements whilst small in quantity can be essential catalysts to the many chemical/biological processes that take place in plants such as photosynthesis. There is a heirarchy of elements needed for these processes to work in plants and this might also apply in humans. (I have added the most common natural food source for us in brackets).
Sulphur is necessary as a catalyst for all the reactions that begin with boron and end with potassium. This is apparently the biochemical sequence of nutrition in plants. The 8 elements in sequence are:
1.Boron (lettuce)
2.Silica (brazil nuts)
3.Calcium (broad beans & watercress)
4.Nitrogen (cucumber)
5.Magnesium (Beans, poppyseed & spinach)
6.Phosphorus (Beetroot)
7.Carbon (vitamin C)
8. Potassium (Lettuce)
There are 92 elements that make up the earth and the human body and not a lot is known about all the minor trace elements. I believe they all play a role and as an example who has heard of yttrium? This element created a three-fold increase in the lifespan of test animals!! Yttrium is found in cabbage, lettuce and tomatoes (if grown in soils that contain yttrium). Lettuce should contain many of the above important minerals and has become one of my favourite foods!!
Geoff Buckley Click here for more information on creating a healthy balanced soil.

Maintaining Fruit and Nut Tree Orchards

I have had a couple of emails this past week from people who want to know how to maintain fruit trees when they are growing them in lawn areas. By coincidenge, the next video that will be posted on this site deals with this topic and you can see how we maintain our lime trees. For ease of maintenance we have planted them in groups of 30. They are now 3 years old and are growing well.

Barring accidents, which include such things as untimely hail storms or strong winds, the amount of fruit you will get from your fruit trees will be determined by the amount of food that the tree has available to it to create the fruit. If the soil is nutrient rich, well drained and has a high (10% or greater) level of organic matter, then the tree will produce an absolutele abundance as long as there is plenty of water and sunshine. Unfortunately most soils aren't as good as they should be so you have to make a habit of feeding your trees regularly - at least once every couple of months.

Soils are generally deficient in several minerals, have less than optimal organic matters and may be poorly drained or too sandy. My rule is that if I want my trees to produce, say, 100 kg of fruit per year, I will need to feed them the right amount of the food they need so that they can do this. If I value the tree's production at $4 per kilo, then my tree will give me $400 worth of fruit per year. So that it can do this, I give the tree 1/10 of the value of that fruit in the form of nutrients. This means I need to spend $40 per year on each of my trees. If you give your tree nothing, it will give very little in return.

I think an investment of $40 to get $400 worth of fruit is pretty good value, but the problem is that first you have to believe that the tree will give you the fruit and second you have to be prepared to make your investment before you reap the harvest!! Most people think it is sufficient to plant the tree and let nature look after the rest. Unfortunately, it generally doesn't work this way.

To feed your tree you can give it at least some of the following: blood and bone, lime, a really good all purpose fertilizer, molasses, boron, fish or kelp fertilizer, soft rock phosphate, silicon in the form of diatamaceous earth and lots of organic matter. Trees like to be fed regularly, so the rule is a little, often.

Don't dig around the trees. This damages the root systems. Cover the ground area with mulch keeps the weeds under control. Use cardboard to stop light getting to the weeds. Think of the area around your tree as a mulch pile and keep adding to it, remembering not to pile anything too close to the tree truck. Take your mulched area right out to the drip line of the tree so that you can mow right up to it. Weed the area by hand whenever necessary and pile the weeds back under the tree. Weeds make really good mulch.

The reason for not using weedicides around your fruit trees is that the weedicides kill the soils' micro-organisms. Through their root systems, your fruit and nut tree give out 50% of all the sugar they produce through the process of photosynthesis. The reasons they do this is to attract billions of fungi and bacteria to live around their roots. A tree must consider these microscopic creatures must be pretty important for them to give them so much of the food they create. If the trees consider them to be important, don't you think it might be foolish to use weedicides which kill those micro-organisms? All the orchardists I spoke to when writing my book "Transition Farms" told me that once they realised they had to stop using Roundup to control weeds, their whole farming operation improved significantly.

Growing fruit trees is not difficult but it does require on-going investment to keep the trees healthy and productive.

Written by Bev Buckley
For more information go to www.growinghealthyorganicfood.com