We need to find ways for ordinary people to get into
permaculture farming without needing grants, loans, independent wealth, or a life of poverty. A lot of you have been doing amazing work on this for years, and I've learned so much from reading all that you've shared here (and other places). You all got me worked up, and I’m hoping to start pitching in. I’m working on an idea and would love your feedback and advice! At this point, the hope is to have a business ready and start accepting members for the 2017 growing season.
Here are the basic goals:
1. Make a decent business: have a viable, bootstrappable business model so that (if it works) others could follow the model without needing loans, grants, independent wealth, or poverty.
2. Produce food sustainably: in my neighborhood, and with minimal external outputs. Kind of like agriculture, but permanent. If only there was a word for that...
3. Spread knowledge and skills:
permaculture, cooking with whole foods, preserving food, using herbal medicine, using fiber plants.
4. Spread mindset: together we can make our own food, medicine, and clothing from our common birthright of soil,
water, sunshine, and a little bit of love.
That last bit may have exposed my hippie colors a bit. Oops. Back to business...
The rough idea is to have a subscription garden program for an urban or suburban area. Members would pay a monthly fee, and then they would be provide with a vibrant, ecologically sensitive,
sustainable garden growing food in their own
yard. We would take care of making beds, planting seeds, growing transplants, weed and pest control, fertility, succession planting, crop rotation, irrigation setup and all the other details. All the members would have to do is walk into their yard to harvest abundant, delicious fresh food, medicine, and fiber.
In addition to garden care, we would also provide:
- hands on training. I.e., if we are working in the garden, they would be warmly invited to participate and learn.
- weekly video updates and recipes about what to harvest and how to use it.
- biweekly or monthly classes in topics like
permaculture design, soil fertility, herbal medicine, fiber spinning, making raised beds, growing seedlings, conserving water, hugelkulture, and on and on and on.
- the opportunity to donate your homegrown food to a
local food bank, by having us harvest a little bit from each garden to donate.
- a taste of old fashioned, mutually supporting community. If one person had a crop failure with tomatoes, for example, others would be encouraged to share a little of their crop.
- composting of their yard waste and food scraps.
- guidebook and training on minimizing waste in the kitchen and refrigerator (this could help members save time and money, and reduce the net cost of the membership)
- a private online forum (maybe a
Facebook group) for members to stay in contact.
- participation in important plant breeding work and research, by supporting us they would be supporting our work to develop
perennial grains and other resilient, carbon-sequestering crops.
So, it would be kind of like a supercharged, year-round U-pick CSA.
The program would go year round because the work goes year round, if you count research, preparation, and the rest needed from the crazy busy seasons, and also because in the Pacific Northwest there’s actually a decent amount of winter
gardening we can do. Mostly, though, because farmers don’t stop existing in the winter, and having support completely cut doesn’t feel like a solid solution.
And I imagine it would be easier to keep relationships and memberships steady if you are in continued contact, and continually being helpful and valuable, instead of pausing the relationship for months at a time every year.
The add-ons would require little additional work to scale to more members, because most of them would be online and shareable among all the members, or stack with existing work (like the hands-on training).
A viable business in this space has to
thread a monetary needle: it needs to provide a decent income and lifestyle for the farmers, and it needs to provide affordable food to the members. The secret sauce to the approach here is having the members do the work of harvesting their own food.
This might work because (1) harvest, cleaning, storage and distribution make up a ton of the work that people pay for when they buy CSA or farmers market produce, and (2) the work of harvest, cleaning, and storage are hardwired into the human psyche, and helping people reengage with this part of themselves has got to be a good thing.
For the mental and physical health of the members, it would be a good thing. And it directly works to fulfill goals 3 and 4 above, namely spreading knowledge and spreading mindset.
Remaining for the farmers to do would be everything else. The work of weed and pest control could be kept down with proper selection of varieties, maintenance of fertility, and adequate use of cover crops and mulch. The work of planning would be kept down by having a small number of standardized bed plans that members could choose from.
The work of planting would be kept down by using John Jeavons biointensive style flats of transplants, so large numbers of seedlings could be babied in a central location and planted out when old
enough to fend for themselves. Irrigation would be taken care of by sprinklers set on timers, or by instructing members about when and how often to turn the hose on and off.
Bed preparation would be
cardboard, paper, or other mulch, with 4 inches laid down over the top of it. Strictly no till.
The biggest challenges I see are:
- Harvest, cleaning, and preservation require skill and time. This is part of why people shop at the grocery store. I assume that we can still find enough members... but it is possible that people who are willing to do that work are already
gardening themselves.
- The money needle may be impossible to thread: the time it takes for us with this model might be more than people are willing to pay for. I’m hoping we can swing it by being very smart about saving labor, and by offering a very compelling package of service + education + community. We’ll see.
- I imagine that most people will want to grow primarily vegetables (i.e. things which will take a lot out of the soil), and won’t want to
compost their manure or grow 70% biomass staples and dynamic accumulators. If we can’t find an easy, simple way to get people growing their own fertility, we’ll need to import compost to the system. This would still be a lot better than industrial food, and as long as we were educating we could move towards the right direction, at least. : /
- Initial setup will have a cost (I’m thinking in most cases some lumber for raised beds, compost, hoses and sprinklers, lumber for compost box, etc). We could either charge an upfront fee, or give free setup with a year paid in advance... but in any case, that could be a financial barrier to people. It is something that adds value to the property (right? it
should, at least), and would be well worth the investment, but if people don’t have the money they don’t have the money.
- Monthly fees might be tricky for a whole bunch of reasons. I think it is important to have a stable rhythm for this to be a healthy system, both for the farmers and members. But there still could be complications.
Okay, now for some back-of-the-envelope math. In my region, there is a lot of money floating around. This makes it easier to
sell higher-priced things, but it also raises the cost of living and means you have to earn more to keep your head above water. Pros and cons. Anyway, middle
class in the greater Seattle area is incomes between $58,666 and $176,000 according to
http://www.hughcalc.org/midclass.php.
If members were charged $100 a month, it roughly compares to a CSA (of course, different regions vary tremendously in CSA prices), and could definitely compare to a budget for vegetables from the store or farmers market. There would be potentially more produce than a CSA, and there would be wintertime crops as well, and people would have the wonderful and important
experience of being intimately involved in the process.
If a farming family could support then 50 members, that would give a net revenue of $60,000 a year. After all the taxes that self-employed people pay, that’s about $45,000 take home a year. Health insurance would also need to come out of that. In my area, that isn’t a lot of money. It is enough to buy a small house on the outskirts, or to rent something closer in. If you want to buy
land with that kind of income, you have to get out pretty far. And then you’d have to commute to the areas where population and money were concentrated enough to make this work. All in all, this would be livable, but finances would be tight enough that it would be dabbling in the end of the “farming as sacrifice” zone.
If the family could support 60 members, that’d be $72,000 net revenue, and that would be much more comfortable... as long as the workload was manageable.
If the monthly fee was $150, then it would give, to a rough approximation, 50% more revenue per member (math!). If people were willing to pay that it would give a lot more financial leeway, which would
be nice. At the same time, though, making real, local food affordable is important, too. The higher the price, the richer people have to be to pay it.
So, that’s the idea. Penny (and eternal undying gratitude) for your thoughts?
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