Alain D'Aoust wrote:Hi folks,
I'm located in Ontario and am planning a 1 acre permaculture nursery. I'll be growing mostly trees from cuttings intensively planted in permanent raised beds for sale at market and online. We've begun erecting a 30'×52' high tunnel as well.
Can a nursery like this profit in year 1? What can I do to earn a living from my farm in the first year without taking space away from the nursery?
We do sell eggs from 200 hens, but profit from that enterprise is not impressive as of yet.
Thanks in advance!
Yes. But 1 acre is far too much space to start with unless you are planning to sell big trees which is not a good idea - too much negative cash flow at the beginning and lots of size related logistical problems. If you start with a 4 x 8 misting bed, you'll have lots of cuttings started. Right now one of my beds is half full with hardwood cuttings and has around 500 cuttings in it. Transplanting to 7" pots will take up less than 500 square feet. Unless you live in a really big market place such as Toronto, you won't generate much volume at markets. Online is a far better bet. You need to keep shipping costs down so that means that your plants
should be small if you are looking to do volume. It's more likely that permies are interested in 12 aronia 12" seedlings at $7-10 each with Xpress shipping under $20 that they are in 12 aronia seedlings at 2-3' at $15-20 with Xpress shipping of $40-60. It's really easy to go broke buying in expensive plants. Some permies have deep pockets but many don't Having larger plants presents other logistical problems, pot size, space, watering, etc. If you have parent plants, you have an unlimited supply of cuttings. Each spring when I know what has rooted, I go through prior year plants that have not sold and get rid of the ones that are too large to sell. Some get gifted, some get planted along the roadside beyond the reach of the municipal brushing butchers and some go to the
compost pile after the soil is knocked off the
roots. I'm not interested in running a warehouse business.
Wholesale to
local nurseries, which is what I do, is even better. Check out what they are offering (they've done your market research for you) in the spring because that's what you're going to offer them. Local nurseries like to buy locally because they know that the plants are acclimatized to local weather conditions, in particular cold temperatures. Your plants do have to be larger so I grow my 7" pots for at least a year depending on what the growing season is like. My plants are inoculated with mycorrhizal fungi and have rock dust in the pots as well. Some numbers? My clients buy in lots of a dozen at a minimum of $5/plant so I gross $60 per lot. What do they want? Black currants, red currants, white currants, gooseberries, grapes (I have 6 cold hardy, sweet seedless varieties), thornless blackberry, elderberry, hardy kiwi, 5 cherry plums (not chums). So 20+ plants by $60 is the minimum with a single nursery. And they usually sell out of a few of the plants. I sell to 5 different nurseries. Gross is +/-$6000. Ongoing costs are 40 cents/pot or about $500 although I do scrounge the garden centres, especially Loblaw. I make my own potting soil. So the net is around $5500, say $5000 since bits and pieces tend to add up. Start up costs: <$500 for a single misting bed.
Significant start up costs: learning how to propagate. Some stuff is easy, some stuff isn't. Don't underestimate the learning curve. What's the timeline on that? Hard to say. If you start small with fairly foolproof plants such as grapes, you could have something to sell the first year. But you also need to stick a
lot of hardwood and greenwood cuttings to learn the tricks. It took me a number of years of hit and miss until I discovered misting beds. Then things changed dramatically and my results were more consistent and more wide ranging. If you have any horticultural
experience at all, then I think that it's possible to be up and running using a misting bed in two maybe three years.
Don't even talk to anyone until you've figured out how to propagate cuttings. I find that the best sales pitch is to walk in with a healthy looking Concord grape in a 7" pot and ask the question are you interested in buying a dozen of these. I ask the question but the Concord does the selling.
Be careful with what you plan to sell. For example, selling Borealis Haskap without a propagator's licence will get you in trouble. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency has a "breeders rights" section that lists what is protected. Here's the info on blue honeysuckle -
http://www.inspection.gc.ca/english/plaveg/pbrpov/cropreport/bluehe.shtml
Doug Bullock has written a pretty good introduction
A How-To for Starting a Permaculture Nursery and Why You Should. The first reference he lists,
The Reference Manual of Woody Plant Propagation: From Seed to Tissue Culture : A Practical Working Guide to the Propagation of over 1100 Species, is invaluable.
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