One of the goals with this blog is to help farmers and farm businesses get prepared for any of the challenges that might face us in CNY this growing season. Every couple weeks, we’ll tackle a seasonal topic and share some of our favorite resources around that area of farm business, management, or production.

This week (and in our kickoff beginner farmer discussion series on Thursday, January 26, 2023, from 6 to 8 pm) we dig in to crop planning. This blog hits on the concept and first part of the process of developing an annual crop plan, but on the 26th, we’ll dig in on how to fine tune those plans for your needs and use them to order the right amount of seeds and supplies. (I hope to see you there!)

For annual crop producers—vegetables, flowers, herbs, even annual nursery plants—planning is a key step to make sure you have the products you want or need when your markets or contracts call for those crops. (They examples below focus on veggies, but can be modified for flowers and herbs as well!)

A crop plan isn’t something you just do in the winter and put away, but ideally it’s a working document that serves you as a tool to help create effective farm systems.

Crop plans can help you determine your field rotations, create greenhouse seeding schedules, communicate about your farm’s offering to customers and buyers, calculate what you need for seed and supply orders, and even set hiring and staffing schedules (for instance, if you know you have staff leaving at the end of the school break, you might not want to plan your largest or heaviest harvests to arrive when you are short staffed!).

There’s tons of different strategies you can use for planning.

Farmers with a lot of experience on their site and steady markets might take what they’ve always grown and tweak that crop mix and timing a little from year to year based on their experience and changes they anticipate for the next season.

Newer farmers who don’t yet know their market needs (maybe in the first year growing for a little farm stand or just getting started at a farmers market) might plant on schedules—like seed lettuce every two weeks, beets every three weeks, sweet corn every week, and so on.

My personal preference (as a farmer who juggled a mix of markets like CSA, UPick, and farmers markets) to generate an crop plan that makes sure you can fill your many markets’ needs is to START with each market’s needs and work back from there.

There’s a lot of software out there that can “help” with this process, but it’s also something you can do on paper (if you don’t have too many crops) or in a spreadsheet (Google Sheets, Excel, and AirTable all work for this).

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How this market-first crop planning process works:

We’ll walk through the first half of the process for my imaginary farm that sells to a mix of retail markets. In this example, we’ll look at just one month – July, and just 3 crops – lettuce, scallions, and cucumbers.

First, think about your markets and crops needs, ideally utilizing sales records from past years. This might start for our hypothetical farm by sitting down and going through week by week for each market outlet to lay out on paper what we anticipate needing.

For our imaginary 100-member CSA:

• Lettuce—we want 100 heads each week for the four weeks of July = so that looks like 100, 100, 100, 100
• Scallions—we want scallions for every CSA member one time in July = 0, 100, 0, 0
• Cucumbers—we want 3 cucumbers each week in July for each member as soon as the cucumbers start producing (and we are going to hope they start producing by week 2) = 0, 300, 300, 300

For a small farmers market we’ve been going to for three years that we have sales records for:

• Lettuce—we know people love this and we sell 25 to 62 heads each week. However, based on our past sales data, we can see that early July sales are slow for lettuce since lots of other farms have lettuce then, but that sales pick up later in the month, so we’ll plan for = 30, 30, 50, 70
• Scallions—our records might show this is a slow but steady sales item = 20, 20, 20, 20
• Cucumbers—we know that we usually have a small amount to start the month, then everyone wants them for a few weeks before interest peters out, so = 60, 150, 120, 80

For a new farm stand where we don’t have records:

• Lettuce—we think people might love this (especially for July 4th salads), but don’t know how well it will sell, and if it might get too hot sitting in the stand in summer, so = 50, 25, 20, 0
• Scallions—we don’t have any records and suspect this might not be very popular (but since we are growing it already we may as well try) = 5, 5, 5, 5
• Cucumbers—we know our neighbors love to pickle, so we might want to grow a steady amount for the stand = 0, 60, 60, 60

For a restaurant or store wholesale account:

• Lettuce—they liked our lettuce last year and requested a steady supply this year = 90, 90, 90, 90
• Scallions—they need a smaller amount for garnish every two weeks = 20, 0, 20, 0
• Cucumbers—they didn’t want any = 0, 0, 0, 0

 

Second, take the needs for each of these markets and consolidate them by week. So you can quickly see that if you have 50 crops and a number of different outlets, there are a LOT of numbers—this is where jumping onto a spreadsheet can make it easier.

When we collate these example crops for the month of July:

Lettuce—

• Week 1 = 270 heads
• Week 2 = 245 heads
• Week 3 = 260 heads
• Week 4 = 260 heads

Scallions—

• Week 1 = 45 bunches
• Week 2 = 125 bunches
• Week 3 = 45 bunches
• Week 4 = 25 bunches

Cucumbers—

• Week 1 = 60 count
• Week 2 = 510 count
• Week 3 = 480 count
• Week 4 = 440 count

If you are a newer farmer thinking about adding a CSA to your market mix, this collation step is really key, because it’s where you can start to get a real sense of the volume of product you might need for your CSA!

Add your buffer. What this means is that you need to think about making sure you plant enough to cover any crop production losses. Do you have heavy soil and some of your lettuces always seem to get moldy? Do you have a hard time protecting your cucumbers from beetles? Are you in a new field or doing a big expansion and nervous about meeting your yield goals?

Setting a buffer is a trickier decision than it might seem on the surface, and really ties into your experience, your propensity for risk, your production systems, and the flexibility of your market outlets.

I’ve seen farmers that plant as little as a 0 to 5% buffer and as much as a 25 to 50% buffer! For folks with a steady backup market, planting a big buffer can be a low-math way to build in an excess for your backup market without doing any additional planning. For instance, if you have a new 25 member CSA but kind of want to do a farm stand on the side, adding a very large buffer to your crop plans might mean that you can safely meet those CSA needs, but also have veggies on the side for your stand.

However, if you have too large of a buffer, it can potentially sink your operation. If you do all the work (and pay all the added expenses) to cultivate a huge number of surplus crops, it takes away from your farm’s bottom line (and your labor budget/costs!).

As you gain experience, keep thinking about that buffer and what makes sense for you.

For instance, after years on our farm, we realized that we either had 100% crop yield or we had 0% yield—the majority of our plantings either succeeded or failed with little in-between. Since we had so many succession plantings to cover CSA needs, we removed any added crop buffers on any crops that we planted more than 3 or 4 times a season, figuring that our buffer was planting a high number successions, and not over-planting more at a time.

For new farms, larger buffers may feel safer. For more experienced farms, especially if you are keeping good planting and harvest records to work off of, you might want to monitor what percentage of unharvested or unsold crops that you have each season and see if you can tighten those buffer % down.

For our imaginary farm’s example, just looking at the lettuce and scallions, we might add:

Lettuce—10% buffer—we plant frequently and generally have enough, but we don’t want to risk running out before we service our wholesale account!

• Week 1 = 270 heads x 10% extra = 297 heads
• Week 2 = 245 heads x 10% extra = 270 heads
• Week 3 = 260 heads x 10% extra = 286 heads
• Week 4 = 260 heads x 10% extra = 286 heads

Scallions—we always have a good yield and plant these frequently, so we can get away with a 5% buffer

• Week 1 = 45 bunches x 5% extra = 48 bunches
• Week 2 = 125 bunches x 5% extra = 132 bunches
• Week 3 = 45 bunches x 5% extra = 48 bunches
• Week 4 = 25 bunches x 5% extra = 48 bunches

 

Work back in time to determine when those plants or seeds should get planted/transplanted.

From this point on, pull out a calendar (and those seed catalogues, if you don’t know your DTM, or days to maturity, for your crops). We’ll just look at the example of lettuce here:

Lettuce—if we are growing these by transplant, and the DTM is 60 days, but the seed catalogue says to take 2 weeks off that DTM if growing by transplant, then our field planting DTM is 60 days -14 days less for the transplant = 46 days, or 6.5 weeks, so we need to transplant our lettuce seedlings on:

• Week 1 of July = plant the week of May 15th
• Week 2 of July = plant the week of May 22nd
• Week 3 of July = plant the week of May 29th
• Week 4 of July = plant the week of June 5th

If you were direct seeding the lettuce, you would just use that 60 DTM number, and directly seed in the field May 1, 8, 15, and 22nd or so.

For transplants, we keep that calendar out, though, and work back to determine the date when we need to start the seeds in the greenhouse in flats. For lettuce, let’s say we transplant our seedlings out when they are 4 weeks old, which means we need to start our greenhouse trays on:

• Week 1 of July = transplant May 15th from greenhouse seeds started April 17th week
• Week 2 of July = transplant May 22nd from greenhouse seeds started April 10th week
• Week 3 of July = transplant May 29th from greenhouse seeds started April 3rd week
• Week 4 of July = transplant June 5th from greenhouse seeds started March 27th week

We’re halfway there, but will stop for now!

At this point in the crop planning process, you can run through these steps from:

• Determining your market needs
• Combining crops needs by week for each week of your season
• Adding any buffers you need in your production systems
• Getting out your calendar and starting to figure out the dates to get the crops into the ground (or the seeds into the greenhouse)
• Once you’ve run through this process all this for your crops, you’ll have a working outline of what you need to harvest by week, and when you need to seed or start it in order to meet that market need.

 

Next Steps:

This first part of the process helps get your dates and plant needs together in conjunction with your market needs.

The next step is starting to match these crops with your field space and figure out how much you need to plant in the field to get to the necessary harvest. (We’ll walk through this in a few weeks!)

Even just half way through the process, this is a stopping good point to start running some reality checks on your numbers, and maybe adjusting your planned harvests and schedules. Some of the potential issues that can pop up at this point are along the lines of:

• Do you have a market that you normally sell $1000 dollars of product in a week but your crop plan has you growing $3500 of product for it some weeks? What can you cut out to be more realistic?
• Does your CSA at this point in planning have some weeks where they get 22 items in a share and some weeks with 2 items? Can you even those harvests out so you don’t overwhelm or underwhelm your customers?
• Does your plan look great but calls for you to direct seed beans on April 12th? Stop and think if all of the projected planting date work with our lovely CNY spring weather!

 

If this is a new process, it can feel like a bit to wrap your head around, but once you walk through it a few times, it becomes much easier! Fortunately, there are also resources that can help you wrangle your way through the process the first time or two.

I’m happy to help answer questions—you can reach me via email at ms3573@cornell.edu. If your questions are of a technological nature, you can also drop in at our Ag Business Center office hours or set up a time to meet and we can work on your spreadsheets or cloud crop planning tools. And we’ll be talking more about this on the 26th!

This blog is also a super quick overview of the first half of the planning process—you could literally write a book just explaining it.

Fortunately, someone did (and we have it in our Ag Business Center library if you want to stop by and check it out):
Crop Planning for Organic Vegetable Growers

Cornell’s Small Farms Program Online Course extensively covers getting from planning to planting:
https://smallfarmcourses.com/p/bf-120-vegetable-production-i

For those doing CSA-style crop planning, this is more of a training curriculum, but it has good sample appendices in the back:
https://agroecology.ucsc.edu/documents/Teaching%20Direct%20Marketing/4.5_CSA_crop_plan.pdf

Huge resource library (search under “crop planning”) that includes a lot of different materials to support all aspects of the crop planning process:
https://nesfp.nutrition.tufts.edu/farmer-training/library

Join us on the 26th, or check back here in a few weeks for the next edition of crop planning!