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  • From: "Bill Shoemaker" <wshoemak AT inil.com>
  • To: "Market Farming" <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] Why do it II
  • Date: Fri, 25 Apr 2008 07:20:07 -0500

It's one thing to be able to grow $90K worth of produce per acre, another thing to actually convert it to that much money. And the greater the effort, the greater the expenses. What was his actual net returns? Perhaps there's a need for more research.
 
But an example that bear's out the tremendous value of production is an acre of tomatoes. It's not unreasonable to produce 20 lb of tomatoes per plant on some varieties. If you have a population of 4000 plants per acre, that's 80K pounds of tomatoes. If you market them at $1.25/lb, which isn't uncommon around here, that's worth $100K/acre. But then reality hits in. You're only harvesting for about 30 days. You need to successfully market  more than 2600 lb of tomatoes every one of those days at retail value. They don't last very long so you can't put it off for a few days, especially because you're still picking. The problem isn't production, it's successfully marketing at retail on such a scale. However, if you're successful at marketing 20% at retail, that's $20K/acre. Sell the 75% of the rest in bulk at wholesale for $0.50/lb. You still bring in another $26K in revenue without the expense of retail marketing. Total gross revenue = $46K/acre. If expenses are $15K/acre, you realize a profit of $31K. Unless, of course, hail hits hard just before harvest. Not an easy business, is it?
 
All this is just speculation. It's very hard (I know by experience) to do a business analysis on field production research. It's very difficult to build in all the risk pressures that growers really face. Just my 2 cents (no inflation).
 
 
Bill Shoemaker, Sr Research Specialist, Food Crops
University of Illinois - St Charles Horticulture Research Center
www.nres.uiuc.edu/faculty/directory/shoemaker_wh.html
----- Original Message -----
From: Christian
Sent: Monday, April 21, 2008 12:09 AM
Subject: [Market-farming] Why do it II

Here's a guy from Ohio that swears he can grow $90k per acre per year. So why is it that the only person to respond with a per acre profit is waaaay down in the $5,000/acre range???  Why is it that the typical profit range is so low?

http://extension.osu.edu/~news/story-print.php?id=4487




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