More Common Reasons Why Many Farmers Struggle, and Practical Advice On How You Can Avoid Those Struggles

More Common Reasons Why Many Farmers Struggle, and Practical Advice On How You Can Avoid Those Struggles

Image result for images of the farmer



Taking on Too Much Land, Doing Too Much

  • Spending too much time catching up, versus really learning the process.
  • Consider the value of your time.
  • With too much land you might be growing too many low value crops that don’t justify your time in.
  • More land means you have to grow more stuff, and do it well, and then be able to sell it.  That can be stressful for a new farmer.
  • Look at your first year experiences as an investment in your education in farming.

Combining Too Much Land with Starting Farming on the Side

  • You need to think about what’s going to be the most sustainable path for you, thinking long term.
  • Ask yourself, what’s going to best leverage your experience so you can do this better in the future?
  • It’s really important the first year to start learning and paying attention to the subtleties of your plant species and your area.  If you are always trying to catch up, then you may miss some of these subtleties.
  • If you are starting a farm on the side, then realize that it is on the side.  And set yourself up for success by scaling the on the side to fit the time that you have so you can do it well.  Don’t expect to successfully do a full time job, part time.
  • Start with a small manageable piece of land.  Grow a select group of crops (5 to 10 crops) that you can sell.
  • Don’t take big risks the first year.  Go with what you know has a reasonable chance of working.
  • “You don’t want your entire life to be a grind, there’s more to it than that.”
  • Make sure that you are working smart.  Working hard just isn’t enough.  You need to be smart about the approach.

Chasing a Big Profit Your First Year

  • Don’t get too hung up how much you are going to make your first year.  Focus on your education.  Work to learn, not to earn.
  • You don’t want to go through life chasing a number.
  • Gain the experience first.  Invest time in your knowledge, then look to leverage that knowledge down the line into profits.
  • If your vision of success only involves chasing a number, then you may loose sight of learning and miss some of the subtleties about your biome and plant species which could hurt you in the future because you didn’t notice those things.
  • Don’t discount building social capital the first year.

Trying to Innovate Too Much

  • Start with something that works and iterate from there.  Go with what works.
  • To survive as a farmer, you need a farm that survives.
  • Allocate a piece of your property to experiment and innovate with different techniques and crops.  But don’t heavily experiment with your primary production, which you farm depends on to keep going.
  • Transition in new systems slowly after you know that they work.

Adding on Other Businesses onto the Farm Right Away

  • Get good at one thing first.  It’s very hard to advance several businesses in parallel.
  • Don’t try to go form A to Z in one move.  Achieve the grand vision over time, by going from A to B to C…
  • Focus on what you do best first.  Because that may be a better route towards your end goal than going right after the end goal now.

SELLING TO RESTAURANTS CAN BE A GREAT WAY TO DIVERSIFY YOUR FARM’S CUSTOMER BASE

BUT…

Working with chefs can be intimidating and tricky for new an experienced farmers. Learn the proven keys to success with restaurant sales someone who has been doing it for over 5 years.
Selling to restaurants and chefs is one of the keys to running a successful urban farm that you will learn about in Curtis’s Profitable Urban Farming Course.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Five Keys to Helping Students Read Difficult Texts

Five Keys to Helping Students Read Difficult Texts Add caption 1. BEFORE READING:  Preview & Build Anticipation   T.H.I.E.V.V.E.S. with Snatches .    Previewing, looking over a text before reading it carefully, is considered a key strategy of effective readers.  The three main functions of previewing are to see how a text is put together, to realize the content of what you will be learning and thereby build or bring to memory background knowledge about the topic, and to give you enough of the content to set valuable purposes for reading it more carefully.   Building anticipation, a separate principle from previewing but often done at the same time, motivates you to become engaged and committed to reading an academic text.  It takes reading out of the realm of going-through-the-motions and puts your mindset solidly in the realm of “I have much I want to learn from this and I want to.”   T.H.I.E.V.V.E.S. with Snatches  is...
Read more

Civil Services Preliminary Examination : A Perspective

Image
     Civil Services Preliminary Examination : A Perspective S. B. Singh The simple answer to an often asked question as to why  Civil Services  Examination (more popularly known as IAS Exam.) is so immensely popular among lakhs of hard working aspirants from across a wide range of academic disciplines is that a career in civil services provides not only status, prestige, security and comforts of a government job but also lends power necessary to make an impact on people, society and finally, on the nation. If there is so much at stake, it is only natural that this examination. should be the most fiercely contested exam among aspirants. At all the three levels of the contest (i.e., prelims, mains and the personality test), there are challenges. But it is at the first stage of the exam. i.e. the preliminary exam., that this exam is found to be the most challenging. Although prelims is purported to be just a qualifying test to allow a ...
Read more

10 Tips for Dealing with Difficult Employees

Image
10 Tips for Dealing with Difficult Employees . Evaluate.  While action is essential, it is important to momentarily hit the pause button and evaluate the situation so that you are armed with a current, clear perspective. Observe the employee in different settings. Look for behaviors that introduce stress or toxicity into situations. Observe how others respond to the employee. Strive to isolate the one or two behaviors that others are complaining about to you.   . Observe. Resist the temptation to respond to complaints or innuendo without checking out the situation yourself. Talk to the people involved. Collect all the facts you can before you act. And don't discount that occasionally, everyone has a bad day or week. If a normally easy-to-work-with employee is suddenly uncooperative and uncommunicative, consider that there may be extenuating circumstances. . Develop a Plan . Based on your observations, assess whether the situation merits coaching, c...
Read more