I have lived under a vow of poverty for 16 years now, so at my farm I choose to do subsistence level farming. What that means in practical terms is that I don't buy things to use in my garden. I don't buy seeds. I don't buy plastic. I don't buy
compost, fertilizer, or poisons. I don't heat the greenhouse (except for one or two extremely cold nights when spring is well upon us). I don't install tomato cages. If I use bean poles, they are coppiced from the orchard. As a corollary of that, I don't keep many records of what I plant or what I harvest.... I'll plant a crop of okra, or of yellow tomatoes just because I know they will please one particular customer or other. The cost of producing okra in my climate is much higher than I could recover at the farmer's market. Some years I miss planting a few species or other because the seeds weren't with me on planting day, or I spaced them off, or I missed my planting window. I pretty much have turned my attention to plant breeding to develop varieties that thrive here in spite of the growing conditions and the farmer. I focus on growing
staple crops like beans, corn, and squash, even though they are not the most popular things that I could take to market. They are big, fast growing plants that can thrive with only one weeding during the summer, and they produce a lot of calories.
There are other farmer's at market that count every vegetable that they
sell, and they wash things, and sell them in fancy containers, and they air-condition their greenhouses during the summer and heat them all winter and plant things under row covers so that they can sell out-of-season vegetables. And they pick vegetables all week long and store them in refrigerators. They sell a lot of vegetables, but they also have a lot of costs. It's easy to throw infrastructure at a garden... It's much harder to do a proper return on investment calculation about whether that infrastructure is actually paying for itself. I pretty much have to have irrigation, a couple of hoes, a saw and pair of loppers, some baskets, a rototiller, and containers to store seeds in. It's really nice to borrow my daddy's tractor a couple times per year.
The first few years I farmed for market, I'd say thing to myself like, "There are 8 weeks of market left, and I have 80 row feet of carrots, so I can take 10 row-feet to market per week". Then I'd try to pay attention to how many $ a row-foot could be expected to produce. These days I grow what pleases me. I grow muskmelons instead of cantaloupes, because I love the taste and smell and soft texture. I grow old fashioned sweet corn that is chewy and doesn't have very much sugar because I like that old corny taste and the reliability. Most people want sickly sweet mushy corn, and bland as can be hard cantaloupes... Sorry, they won't get them from me. Those people that like non-industrialized food come back to me week after week. I take
medicinal herbs to market with me, even though only a few people know what they are or how to use them. I think that the people that buy them are the most clever people at market, and the ones that I'd most like to associate with. So I choose who I want to feed, and I learn what they like, and provide it for them, even if i'm the only farmer at market with mullein.
I highly recommend saving your own seeds. If you grow on plastic, then select for plants that thrive with plastic because their ancestors for years have been growing on plastic.
The one thing that I don't do, that I wish I did was I haven't incorporated animals onto my farm. I'm commuting to the farm, and I feel like I aught to be living with any animals that I'm raising. I tend to think that pigs, chickens, and goats could help clean up the perennial rhizome weeds which are such a profound nuisance in my fields.
I started with 3/4 acre. Here's what that field looked like during my second growing season with it.
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