Crop Planning
*Scroll to bottom for spreadsheet templates
At the end of every season, I get giddy with excitement to look back over a season’s worth of data and use it to create a new plan for the clean-slate-of-a-season ahead. But if you don’t have a crop plan, or any data on hand it can be a HEADACHE to create all this from scratch and hope your guesses are correct.
Good inputs = good outputs
Before I create a crop plan, I sift through my harvest records to come up with realistic yield totals for each crop, or even each variety (where that is relevant). Throughout the season I may have trialed a few different growing methods (for instance adding a 4th row of carrots to a bed, or trialing different seeding rates) and the results of those trials will be reflected in the decisions made during crop planning too. It’s useful to have your pricing determined and market tested as well, prior to crop planning too. Whenever you lack in experience, you’ll need to make up a number. Make sure you base this on information from a trusted source so that you aren’t disappointed when your real life actuals are a mile off-target (and know, that it farming is variable enough that it happens to all of us!).
The real finesse of a crop plan comes from averaging your 'Real Life Actuals’ from each season behind you. However, if you are just starting out, using the Days to Maturity (DTM) and Days in Greenhouse provided by the seed company create a good foundation of data to start with. Its important to note that seed companies will indicate whether their DTM is ‘from transplant’ or ‘from seeding date’ and will affect how you enter that data. Testing the limits of the season is important, since our climate is always different you might be glad you seeded 2 weeks earlier this year and got the first peas to the market, but if winter lingers on and delays spring planting, hopefully there wasn’t too much of a financial or labor investment riding on that ‘Maybe’. Definitely bank on what date you KNOW work well, and take a risk here and there for the sake of experimentation. Sometimes those experiments become innovations!
A plan on paper
A crop plan, created in the winter, printed in the spring, and followed closely all season is a great tool. Its a guide that you can follow, but you can also adapt it. My crop plan usually has additional seedings added on the fly penciled in, and notes about failures, or circumstances that are important factors to consider when looking back in the winter when the season behind you is a blur.
Each season I print out the crop plan on heavy cardstock paper. I find that it endures the wild life of being on a farm, and being handled in the field with dirty hands a lot better that way. If you manage to keep your hands clean while you are on the farm, you might choose to use your phone, and make entries directly into the planner as you seed your way through the year. If you are a paper copy kind of person, that’s OK too. Keeping track of your ‘Real Life Actuals’ is important. When do you actually seed the 25th succession of salad mix? When did you actually plant it in the field? What seeding rate did you end up using? When was it actually at perfect marketable size? This data is helpful to collect along the way for each planting. It will customize your crop plan to your climate, soils, and management style over the years. Once you are a honed in pro you’ll have your plan dialed in and you’ll be able to relax on your record keeping to some degree.
Limitations
Since crop planning on a market farm can be a mind-boggler, I thought I would share my template for planning out a schedule. The template I have here starts with the harvest date and works back from there. It then generates an annual gross income projection (by crop) a greenhouse schedule, direct seeding schedule and a seed ordering checklist. What this crop planner cannot do for you is create a crop sequence for each bed or field block, or let you know if you have planned more than the space you have available. If you want those things figured out for you, you can achieve that with a farm planning software like Tend.ag but it comes with a monthly fee. From my free trial period, that software is pretty versatile in its approach. But a good old spreadsheet will get you most of the way if you .
Getting it on the calendar
In years past, I have taken my greenhouse and direct seeding log and used a google sheets add on like “Event - o-matic” or “Calendar Event Automator” to take dates, and plug them into my google calendar so that each day when I wake up, I can see what is on the to-do list for the day. Also, from there you can drag your events around easily! If you want to do all you direct seeding on Mondays, and all your greenhouse work on Tuesdays, its easy to drag and color code your tasks in that way to make the spreadsheet conform to your life and work flow. One year I even had my wake up alarm programmed to read aloud all my seeding for the day, but I don’t recommend that unless you sleep alone and only live, eat, and breath farming.
Crop Plan Templates for you!
I have provided a blank (free) and a pre-filled ($5) version of this template for you to check out. You are welcome to make a copy for yourself and plug in your own growing plan from there.
Get the Pre-filled Crop Plan Template - Kat's Crop Plan Template with 35 Annual Crops pre-filled (including salad mix!) - Retail Pricing Suggestions - Yield Projections - Suggested Plant Spacings for 40'' wide bed - Earliest and Latest Indoor & Outdoor Planting Date guide - Generates a Greenhouse Seed Chart, Field Seeding Chart, Seed Order Chart, and Total Revenue Projection Use it as a starting point for your own plan.
