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Greens are big business for Curtis’s farm. Both in terms of volume of product, and dollars generated for that product.
His customer base, which is mainly made of restaurants, buys a lot of greens. And they pay good money for them. But like many things on the farm there is a seasonality that goes along with restaurants and the products that Curtis sells to restaurants.
Typically spring is a slower time of year for restaurant sales, and thereby farm sales. Things just aren’t as busy.
But this year is a bit of an anomaly, because Curtis’s revenue is way up for the season.
That increase in revenue can be attributed to a couple things. First, he has picked up a few new wholesale customers outside of restaurants, and second, he is selling all of his customers more high value product, specifically greens.
More demand, means more production, so Curtis’ production of greens on the farm is way up this year.
But it’s not just as simple as planting more beds of greens. There’s a lot of nuance involved…
When the beds were planted, how far apart the successions are, when do you harvest whole beds versus halves.
Logical considerations, but not always the simplest to wrap your head around.
That’s what we will be focusing on in today’s episode – Early Seasons Greens Production.
Managing Greens in the Spring
- When to Stop Cutting Greens:
- Does the crop look good?
- No.
- Unless it tastes good, don’t use it.
- Can you market it in a different way?
- Does it taste good?
- No, don’t use it.
- No.
- Leafs aren’t regrowing back as fast or as uniform.
- Would you be better utilizing that space for another crop?
- Does the crop look good?
- In the spring are you growing the right crops?
- Are they higher value crops that can produce better in the shoulder season?
- Maximize the space that you do have.
- You could try to wait to plant longer season crops until May versus trying to force them early in the year and use up the extra space, when you could be growing something else that you could be selling more of, faster.
- Are they higher value crops that can produce better in the shoulder season?
- Crop not selling?
- Try tweaking how you grow your crops and present your crops before abandoning the crop.
- It may take you a long time to perfect your growing methods to grow this crop in the optimum way that works for your customer base.
How to Know When to Terminate a Crop
Green City Acres Weekly Farm VLOG Updates
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