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market-farming - Re: The $200,000 garden

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Subject: Market Farming

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  • From: Alex McGregor <waldenfarm AT sprintmail.com>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: The $200,000 garden
  • Date: Fri, 25 May 2001 10:26:34 -0400


Sharon,

You may be remembering Konakai (spelling?) Farm in Berkley. The owner of Kona
coffee owned contiguous lots in a residential area, and started growing
intensive
salad crops, marketed to upscale restaurants who were buying the gourmet
coffee.

He was GROSSING ( and I can't emphasize that enough) around $200,000 a year.
But
he never said what his NET (what he put in his pocket) was. HUGE difference!

He was next-day shipping these veggies across the country- must have been
expensive. And he faced a lot of expensive challenges- birds scratching up
seeds,
high cost of labor, high property taxes, restrictive city codes, non localized
marketing... I think the telling part of the story is that , even though he
grossed $200,000 a year, he couldn't keep the operation going.

And one of the myths about biointensive (or most small-scale) techniques is
that
they can be expanded to large agricultural scales. We use the simple formula
(like
Adriana pointed out) that if X can be done on a small scale and net Y
dollars, then
if we do 100 X, we can net 100 Y dollars. This ignores the facts that 100X
requires many complications- a multiplied capital cost, labor costs (plus
employee
taxes- FICA, unemployment, workers comp.), higher repair costs,...

But, biointensive has been successfully adapted to medium sized farms using
machinery by Steve Rioch. This was accomplished by looking at soil and plant
life
and hoe they interact. But that's another story...

Alex McGregor
Walden Farm







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