Casey O’Neill is a farmer and owner of Happy Day Farms in Laytonville, Calif. The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the views of The Mendocino Voice. If you’d like to write your own column for The Mendocino Voice, send your idea to info@mendovoice.com.
Forecasting is one of the most difficult aspects of farming; how much seed to order, how much to plant, how much can I sell? Overproducing is dangerous for a business that lives on small margins and sweat equity. Gauging customer interest and participation can be tricky with the ebbs and flows of monthly income; sales are stronger earlier in the month, and then taper down towards the end. In months with five weeks the last one is likely to be much slower than usual.
It took more than a decade (and insight from our friends at Mulligan Gardens) before I even realized that there were sales trends within each month. Other factors like holidays and heavy weather also play hell with market totals; when school is out of session people are less likely to find themselves in town for an afternoon farmers market. Keeping the data and analyzing it helps to evolve my forecasting and expectations.
As our market channels have grown into multiple farmstands, farmers markets, limited wholesale work, sales to schools and food bank donations, the forecasts have become more complicated. Even after more than 15 years, one of the most difficult things I do is look at the beds of greens and estimate how many bags of salad mix they will yield, so I hedge my bets with a variety of market channels and practices.
I try to be consistent in how often and how many seeds I sow. If I have a steady supply of planted beds at different stages of progression, then I should have enough to harvest for market channels each week. A farmer friend once told me, “I just sow every week what I think I can sell in a week” and that stuck. Even so, there are always bulges or slack periods, because growth is so heavily affected by weather patterns. A week or two of dark, wet weather will slow things down, while unseasonably warm weather speeds everything up.
The heat in March was problematic because the more sensitive Asian greens blew out and went to seed easily. The bell curve of production rises as the temps go up until it bottoms out again with too much heat causing crop damage and loss. This is where forecasting production levels have to incorporate predicted weather patterns.
There is always a point in the spring where production ramps up after the shorter growth days of winter. It varies year by year depending on weather and our timelines for prepping beds and getting them planted. Usually it’s in early May, but this year it was a full month early because of the warmth, and because we were able to get so much work done in March, including more direct seeding to back up the PaperPot plantings.
This past week we did 15 pounds of salad for local events and more than 200 bags of salad mix for various sales channels. I sold as much as I could at the Laytonville market on Tuesday, stocked farmstands and retail channels and sent 50 bags to the Laytonville Food Bank. It’s important to me that high quality donations be part of our crop plan, but it also serves as a helpful outlet if I have excess production so that nothing goes to waste, and we do what we can to support community efforts to make sure everyone has enough to eat.
Our food production peaks in late spring as all of the big terraces and smaller garden beds are planted to vegetables and as meat birds edge across the pasture when we move their structures with the quad. As cannabis planting begins the vegetable space shrinks, so that even peak summer production doesn’t yield as much as that of late May. As cannabis is harvested and I get fall crops in the ground, production rises to a second peak in November.
Late March and early April are our lowest production times because the winter brassica crops have gone, and there is little in the way of heavy duty produce. Lightweight but incredibly tasty greens dominate, though I’m working on getting better at the flavorful root crops that make up so much of our production in other months. Beets have been tricky to carry until this time of year; my late plantings never really sized up, and we lost two plantings of turnips to the heat in March when they went to seed. Radishes are solid if I nail a consistent planting schedule, and I’m hoping to get better at easing carrots through the tender germination stage when they tend to get eaten by insects.
Practice makes for better results, and each week I have a pretty good idea of how much I can harvest from the beds of lettuce and mixed and single variety Asian greens. I make my blends accordingly, working from a spreadsheet with our pick list and crop locations, CSA numbers and special orders. Walking the gardens on Sunday is important for accurate planning; one of the biggest mistakes I make is operating from assumptions based on memory, which can be faulty or altered for the better by growth or made worse by weather or pest damage. It’s an exciting puzzle that keeps me coming back year after year, learning and getting better at it with each passing season. As always, much love and great success to you on your journey!