A group of North Carolina farmers created a co-op to share equipment and tools. They exchange them in a way that feels fair to everyone, and they manage the business of the cooperative without making too many demands on busy farmers. They’ve been at it for more than a decade, so the name, Tool Legit, is fitting.

An email from a reader got me thinking about seed drills, those tools we dump seed into, and then push or pull down a bed to set the seed into the ground at just the right spacing and just the right depth, all in a straight line. A lot of folks probably just call drills “seeders” these days and I’ve had the opportunity to use quite a few different ones over the years so I thought a little overview of some of the basic features might be helpful for folks starting out or thinking about buying a new seeder.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably seen endless footage and photos of pristine looking market gardens where all the plants look amazing and there is nothing to do but plant and harvest. A good market garden can get to a point in which pest and disease pressure and fertility issues become virtual non-factors, but that is not the story in a first-year no-till garden

A small-scale, community-based farm store

We can’t all live near Manhattan, Boston, Montreal, San Francisco, Ann Arbor, Madison, or any number of other awesome markets for organic produce. In my experience as a farm manager on farms in the Hudson Valley, Finger Lakes, and Sacramento Valley, you can sell it all, all the time, in those markets. Not so in the myriad small markets many of us find ourselves in.

A practical approach to intercropping 

When we started A Way of Life Farm in 2009, intercropping and companion planting (the practice of growing two or more crops in the same space at the same time) were a part of how we wanted to farm. Yet, after some trial and error, we abandoned it, writing it off as “not practical on a farming scale.” However, we revisited it a few years later as we were looking for ways to maximize space in our new high tunnel. Now, it has become a very important part of how we continue to grow more and more food on the same (or even less) area over the last few years.  

Like most small businesses, our farm took several years to make a profit. After starting farming as a side hobby in 2019, we gradually grew our business until I quit my job at the end of 2022 to farm full-time alongside my husband (see my article “Making the leap to farming full-time from the September 2023 GFM, and my interview on the GFM Podcast, for more on that). With this huge change the pressure was on. If we were going to keep on farming, the business finally needed to become profitable. I’m excited to share that we pulled it off. Here are 11 things we did that helped us go from profit-less to profitable.

As farmers, our customer base is limited to the number of people within our sales range who can afford what we grow. To increase our customer base, we are used to thinking about tempting more people to put what we grow at the top of their weekly grocery list, or figuring out how to expand the geographic sales boundaries toward larger population centers. Here, we’ll think through increasing sales by reaching customers with minimal food budgets. (See the related article “Serving the underserved” in the August 2018 GFM.)

The farmers market is a likely destination for many new farmers and gardeners who are ready to try selling their vegetables and flowers. And it is a logical one — relationships need to be formed, experience needs to be gathered, lessons need to be learned, and reputations need to be forged as you begin to establish your operation. And a farmers market is an excellent place for this.

Wholesale contracts, restaurant and grocery store connections, CSA shares, these all tend to come later with a few seasons under your belt. Plus, direct-to-consumer sales are famously where the best money is to be found.

Just before you picked up this issue of Growing for Market, you likely were at your desk or computer planning out the growing season: What you will plant and where, and what supplies you’ll need to prepare for the growing season. Maybe you just charged a bunch of purchases to your credit card or scheduled payments from your bank.