Crop Planning for Organic Vegetable Growers by Frédéric Thériault and Daniel Brisebois, just published by Canadian Organic Growers, provides a much-needed structure for figuring out how to make money on a market garden. It hones in on the core issues of farm success: Which crops to grow, when to plant them, and in what quantities. Then it provides a logical, linear process for getting it all done, on time. It sets out 11 steps, including:

• Decide how much money you need to make;
• Calculate how much of each veggie you have to sell to meet your financial goals;
• Decide where you will sell;
• Make field planting schedules to ensure you have the crops you need at the right time;
• Generate greenhouse/seedstarting schedules;
• Fill out a seed order;
• Make a field operations calendar;
• Analyze profitability and refine your plans for next year.

I especially like the fact that the process begins with money, as the excerpt on the next page explains. Too many new farmers start planting with no idea of how much they can expect to earn from their crops. And then they are shocked to find that they didn’t grow anywhere close to enough to pay the bills. This book advises growers to base all of their plans on the bottom line, the net income that must be earned. Once you have identified the ultimate financial goal, you have to work backward to know how much to harvest, plant, and buy seeds for.

The beauty of this book is that it provides worksheets that enable you to do all those calculations. The worksheets can be downloaded blank for you to input your own numbers. They are available either as self-calculating Excel spreadsheets to use on your own computer, or as PDFs to print and fill in by hand.

Crop Planning for Organic Vegetable Growers is softcover, 7.5 x 9”, 136 pages, $22 plus $4 shipping. Growing for Market subscribers receive 20% off this and all books this year.