Brace yourself for some math. I think one of my favourite parts of farming is the planning (besides the obvious, like super tasty fresh food). In this article I wanted to touch on some math behind our farm shares, the benefits of this type of CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) model.
When we first started this venture, we did lots of research to gain a better understanding of how exactly farms work. We noticed that there was a lot of misconceptions and misinformation out there, especially for farms of our size. In the not-so-distance past of the late 1800s to early 1900s, our farm size (50-100 acres) was the normal size. Farms at that era often had a diverse offering of products and practice what we now refer to "mixed agriculture". They would keep a limited number of different kinds of livestock and they grew different grain crops, vegetables and fruits all in a cycle to make the best use of the land. Modern farming of having 1000s of acres of one crop heavily reliant on specialized machinery and chemicals was not common practice, but it seems to be one of the only ways that farming can be viable.
We started out on this journey with a desire to break from this trend, to grow the food closer to your plate and prove that it can be done in a viable way.
So, I said that we were going to talk math, and with that history out of the way, here's what I want to show. Although we have 40.6 acres on our farm, our property is broken down like this:
- 1.4 acres - House and outbuildings (Barn, Equipment sheds, Nursery)
- 5.8 acres - Naturalized Forest
- 3.6 acres - Pollinator gardens, pond & food forest
- 29.8 acres - Fields
In the 29.8 acres of fields, all of them were overgrown with scrub growth and invasive species, and about half of overgrown so badly that it may take 3 years before we have time to finish returning them to a productive state.
In 2022 we planted on about 1 acre, and in 2023 we are doing about 1.8 acres in total. We are working an area of about 5 acres so that in the following year we will be ahead of the cycle and able to maximize our capabilities for field work.
In our produce field, this is an area that is 610 feet long by 363 feet wide. This allows for us to have our preferred bed that is 90 feet long and 3 feet wide, with a 10 foot aisle between the end of each row. Between each row is a 2 foot walking path for plant maintenance and manual harvesting. This gives us that on a field that is 610' x 363' the total is 221,430 sqft, of which we are able to plant in 111,780 sqft. This ratio, I refer to as planting plot %, is 50.48%. I have optimized the bed sizes and standard for our entire property, this number works out to be generally the same, between 49-52%.
So, remember that 29.8 acres of Fields? Well, even if we were going to plant produce on them entirely, our numbers have to be reduced by the area that we are actually planting, which in this case would lower that to 15 acres of true planted area. The reason that this is important goes back to the current trend of farming, where there is not nearly the same reduction of planted area. In those other farms, with specialized equipment, field tomatoes are able to be planted, maintained and harvested without every needing to physically touch the plant. However, they have to picked a bit earlier than ripe so they can be mechanically handled without damage (we'll talk about ethylene gas ripening in another post). These farms are able to plant 98-100% of their fields area. However...
The yields for us, based on our farming method, are no less than 8lbs of tomatoes per plant over the season, and each plant takes a physical area of about 4.5 sqft. There is 43560sqft in an acre, and with our coverage of 50.48%, we could theoretically plant 4,886 tomato plants, which would yield a total of about 39,000 lbs per acre. According to public data collected for the Province of Ontario, the last 10 years the average yield per acre is 72,961 lbs per acre. If we didn't have to leave room for paths and aisles we would be in that range as well. Oh, and just an extra tidbit from that dataset, the average wholesale (multiple tonnes) value that an Ontario farmer gets paid for their tomatoes is less than 10 cents per pound. The rest of the cost at the supermarket is made up of a variety of factors, but shipping, insurance and multiple profit margins are the bulk of that. Remember, there is no sales tax on food products like produce. This means that the average value per acre for a mega tomato farm is $7,077 / acre. This is considered viable because of the economy of scale of the large acreage and specialized equipment.
So back to the farm shares and how this all ties together. In an another future post I want to break down the transparency of our cost margins and how we arrive at the prices that we do, but for brevity, I will say that for 2023, our average sale price per pound across all of our produce is $2.99. Almost seems like a made up number, but each row bed with different plants has different values and different yields. We arrive at this average price by taking our total planted area for this year (which is 1.8 acres), multiplied by our minimum anticipated yields and reduced by a safety factor to account for additional losses. We then set the number of shares that are available to be sold based on what we anticipate these minimum yields to be, which we have adjust this year to be 1500 shares that are available to be purchased.
We limit the number as we want to make sure that anyone who is a share holder gets priority when we fill orders. These shares are store credit that is able to be used for when we have products in stock. Similar to buying shares in a publicly traded company, these shares help our business with our cash flow by pre-purchasing store credit and you benefit by locking in your benefits. The benefits to you as a consumer are a discounted price (which is applied to purchases of multiple shares, up to 25% savings), plus we've already locked in our regular prices for the year (inflation protection!). The credit doesn't expire so you're able to carry over any unused balance. Also, as opposed to a basket type CSA, you're free to pick whatever you want and schedule your 24/7 contactless pickup.