An insider's guide to market gardening and farming for those in the business of growing and selling food, flowers, herbs, or plants.
Market Farming Success identifies the key areas that usually trip up beginners-and shows how to avoid those obstacles. This book will help the aspiring or beginning farmer advance quickly and confidently through the inevitable learning curve of starting a new business.
Written by the editor of Growing for Market, a respected trade journal for market farmers, Market Farming Success condenses decades of growing experience from every part of the United States and Canada. It focuses on the factors that are common to market gardeners everywhere and offers professional advice that includes:
• How much you'll need to spend to start a market farming business;
• How much you can expect to earn;
• Which crops bring in the most money-and whether you should grow them;
• The essential tools and equipment you will need;
• The best places to sell your products;
• How to keep records to maximize profits and minimize taxes;
• Tricks of the trade that will make you more efficient in the greenhouse, field, and market.
This new Chelsea Green edition of a 2006 classic is greatly updated and expanded, and includes full-color photos, charts, and graphs, plus many inspiring and instructive profiles of successful market-farming pioneers. "We've used the first edition of Market Farming Success in our beginning farmer program since 2007. This new edition contains additional information that makes it an even greater asset to those exploring and starting a market farm."-Adrian Card, Colorado State University Extension
"This overview of the business of market farming is a survival kit for new and aspiring vegetable farmers. It sheds light on esoteric Unknown Unknowns, and can save you from many pratfalls on the learning curve. Lynn explains each challenge of professional small-scale vegetable production in a calm, clear, confidence-boosting voice. She speaks from her own experience and includes sifted information gleaned from the many growers she knows as editor of Growing for Market. My own writing focuses on the planning and execution of crop production: the equally important marketing side is here covered by an extremely knowledgeable mentor."-Pam Dawling, author of Sustainable Market Farming
"With over 20 years of market gardening experience and teaching others the ins and outs of it via her wonderful publication, Growing for Market, Lynn Byczynski has created an up-to-date guidebook for direct-market farmers. Whether you grow vegetables, berries, herbs, plants, or other horticultural crops, Market Farming Success is a practical must-read. I took home useful bits of advice about sizing and building hoophouses, different trays and inserts for seeding transplants, storing leftover seed, bed mulches, working with restaurants, creating good intern relationships, types of insurance to consider as a market gardener--and found an appendix full of places to seek out more information. The stories and photos of farms around the country brought the information to life and provided me with new ideas. This book will no doubt become a dog-eared reference guide that is pulled from my bookshelf often as we develop our new diversified farm."-Rebecca Thistlethwaite, Sustain Consulting and author of Farms with a Future: Creating and Growing a Sustainable Farm Business
"We succeed at working this good land by having the savvy to sell what we grow. No one offers better insights to do just that than Lynn Byczynski. The marketing side of growing food needs attention as much as soil prep. Market Farming Success doesn't miss a beat when it comes to launching your hopes onto the local food scene."-Michael Phillips, owner, Heartsong Farm and author of The Apple Grower Lynn Byczynski is publisher and editor of a monthly news letter Growing for Market.
