Crop Planning

Oh my goodness work has begun. I would like to extend a warning to readers that I have a feeling my blogs are going to become much more detailed and agricultural driven. I am hoping to use this blog from this day forward as an active log book to keep track of the lessons, experiences and mistakes that takes place during my apprencticeship at Klippers Organics. Being a novice 'green thumb' I hope to walk individuals who are equally as green as I through the processes that take place on an organic farm. Further, since my ultimate goals do not only include being able to grow my own food, but being able to do so for a living, I will also explore some of the business aspects that are involved in making that a reality on this farm.

To start, Annamarie Klippenstein of Klippers Organics, began with our first apprenticeship curriculum course: crop planning. There are a number of considerations that need to be addressed before you can even begin determining your crop layout. First, you need to identify your financial goals in planting. For instance, are you planting in order to earn you livelihood or are you planting to supplement another primary income source? In order to determine your market prices to do your cost analysis, you can find market prices by talking to other farmers or checking the prices in stores. When you first start going to the market, you can match the prices of your competitors.

Once you have determined your financial goals, you can then go about estimating the number and type of plants you will need to plant and the area needed to carry out your planting using a seed catalogue. It is important to buy a seed catalogue specific to your region as it will be your source of all information including when to seed, when to transplant, when to cover, how far to separate, how much to overplant and when to harvest your crops throughout the season. For example in BC, West Coast Seeds would be a good start.

Once you have taken your time to figure out your planting schedule for the season, it is vital that you 1) follow the schedule and 2) keep a log book with daily records of what is going on in the fields. The log book is imperative because it allows you to track the weather patterns which will help you analyze growth anomalies and the plant stages, track field work, record what items went to market and in what volume, as well as record when items went to market. The log book also allows you to keep track of the hours you put into each product to better help you determine the true cost and in turn profitability of a product once it has been sold. This information can then be used from year to year to help you assess whether new products should be planted or perhaps if a crop should be rotated to another field.

It is important to actually plan crop rotation within your schedule. This helps to minimize pests and to preserve the integrity of the soil by putting different demands on it via different plants from year to year. I know very little about crop rotation but hope to learn more. Please feel free to share any knowledge or advice on this topic as it will be much appreciated.

We then moved onto the topic of crop insurance. At Klippers, their crop insurance is to have a large diversity of crops - ranging from tree fruits to grounds crops - in order to allow them to compensate the loss of one crop with another. For example, let's say that there is a big hail storm at the formative stages of a particular apple variety that causes bruising and depressions. In a worst case scenario, where these apples would not be able to be sold at the farmers' market, Klippers would be able to plant any number of ground crops to financially compensate the loss of those apples. Fortunately, one of the benefits of selling apples at the farmers' market is that Klippers is able to explain the damage through direct marketing and still sell the apples at retail prices.

However, for a monocrop apple producer who sells to a packing house, external insurance would likely be a better route even though it doesn't always provide a big safety net. Let me take you through a few scenarios. First, I have learned it is possible to buy insurance specific a particular tree fruit such as apples, peaches or cherries. A farmer can take out insurance on a specific amount of his crop as well which would be measured by volume. Let's say that a farmer usually harvests 400 bins a year, 200 of which are of an early variety and 200 of which are of a later variety. In any given year he insures 200 bins. One year the farmer is able to harvest his early variety but his late variety is subject to a hail storm. Since this farmer sells his product to a packing house, his late variety is now valueless because it no longer meets the aesthetic requirements of the packing house or retail distributors. (In essence, he has lost 200 bins because of his distribution method.) Also, because he has already harvested 200 bins already with his early variety, his insurance does not kick in because he has met his minimum insurance amount.

On the flipside, if the hail storm ruined both the early variety and the late variety, the farmer would get paid out for his insured lot of 200 bins and end up ahead of scenario one. The reason the famer is better off not selling anything at the market is that all of a sudden the farmer has been paid market value for 200 bins but has saved his thinning costs, picking costs and bin costs.

Really, we were advised it only makes sense to invest in very expensive crop insurance if you monocrop, sell to a packing house and are at a risk of experiencing a substantial loss from one year to the next.

We then entered a discussion on the benefits of using solar power on farms of this size (40 acres). In BC, it is determined that it is not financially viable because there are not as many incentives and financial rewards to use solar power as there is in provinces such as Quebec or Ontario. The reason for the discrepancy is that BC has a lot of power and not a very dense population. With solar power out east, because people are afraid of running out of power, there are big returns available to individuals who set up solar power on their properties and sell it back to the province. This is certainly a technology I would like to investigate further for my family farms in Quebec.

On Organic Farming

I learned another downside to spraying your plants with pesticides is that 'bad bugs' have a much shorter lifecycle than 'predator bugs'. This means that it will take the beneficial bugs much longer to replenish their population in a sprayed area and you will thereby risk explosing your crops to even more damage without continuous spraying.

I learned that it takes approximately 3 years to get certified.

I learned that there has been a debate about allowing organic farmers to use 'organic manure' versus 'conventional manure' though it has not been passed.

I learned that in BC woodchips for pathways between beds need to be tested for arsenic because it was heavily used to mediate the damage done to pine beetle trees. Arsenic is not organic.