Gardening for Profit

From home plot to market garden

Kate Collyns

• Publisher: Green Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780857841308
• eBook ISBN: 9780857841353
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Agribusiness
• Index: Business

More and more of us are discovering the rewards of growing our own food - and there's plenty of advice to be found on how to do so. But what about producing enough to sell, or even trying to make a living in this way? This book is for anyone who is interested in selling some produce for profit - whether just surplus from a vegetable garden or wholesale from a fully developed professional business. It takes you step by step through all the aspects you'll need to think about, including: finding land; winning customers and marketing your produce; working out what equipment you'll need (and how much to budget for); sourcing funding; deciding which crops to grow; managing your accounts - and doing the tax and legal paperwork. With an extensive directory of invaluable contacts and resources, Gardening for Profit is packed with solid, first-hand advice. It provides all the reassurance you might need that earning an income from horticulture is perfectly possible.

CHAPTER 1

The rewards of commercial growing

During and just after the Second World War, market gardens were the lifeblood of Europe: supply chains were short, food was fresh and healthy, and the local community came together to grow and eat food. That’s not to glamorise these times, of course: market gardening involves lots of hard manual work, long hours and occasional despair when crops fail, pests descend and disease strikes. But despite these perils, producing food by hand on a small scale is rewarding – mentally, physically and spiritually. On a crisp frosty morning in January, or a balmy sunny day in July, even the downsides seem to make sense. Hard physical work keeps you fit and healthy (and you really feel like you’ve earned your dinner). Working outdoors raising and tending plants aligns you with the seasons: you probably won’t mind working longer hours so much in the lighter summer days, and shorter hours in freezing winter. And it’s a constant learning process – even (or especially) when crops fail, you are continually developing and deepening your understanding of and relationship with your garden.

Market gardens are perhaps the next logical step after running an allotment or large domestic garden: they operate on a relatively small scale, with the land area typically ranging from half to a few acres – of open fields, walled gardens, raised beds, greenhouses, polytunnels or a mixture of any of these. The difference between a garden and a market garden is of course the market: cash crops are sold in order to make the business viable. A wide variety of crops are crammed into these small spaces – and variety is, as they say, the spice of life. It’s impossible to get bored when one minute you’re sowing lettuce, the next picking spinach, then weeding sweetcorn, planting herbs or picking flowers for your eager customers – who all enjoy your produce almost as much as you do.

Eco-friendly growing

Since a common motivation for growing your own produce or growing food to sell on a small scale is so that you know exactly how that food has been produced, with artificial inputs such as pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers kept to a minimum, many small-scale holdings follow sustainable practices. ‘Sustainable’ growing means food production methods that can continue over a period of time without reliance on external inputs: for example by returning organic matter to the soil through compost, using green manures to feed the soil, keeping the soil ecosystem healthy through the use of crop rotations, and encouraging natural predators of pests. Being more self-sufficient in this way, such systems are therefore also more economical.

The terms ‘organic’ and ‘sustainable’ are often used interchangeably, but, while food that is certified as organic will have been produced with sustainable methods in mind, food described as ‘sustainable’ will not necessarily be certified as organic. The word ‘organic’ is a legally protected term when used to describe produce, but ‘sustainable’ growing in a market gardening context means systems that broadly follow organic standards.

The increased interest in sustainably produced food over the last decade may be for a wide variety of reasons. On the whole, studies have suggested that food produced to organic standards tends to contain a higher level of nutrients, as well as containing fewer harmful compounds and heavy metals, than ‘conventional’, chemically produced food. Apart from this most obvious benefit of local organic food – fresh and healthy produce, with real traceability – consumers also cite improving biodiversity, conserving water systems and the environment, and ethical and animal welfare factors as reasons to buy organic. Organic food production is also important with regard to cutting carbon emissions, since it uses no carbon-dependent fertilisers or pesticides; it also sequesters more carbon in the soil in the form of organic matter via composts, mulches and manures, which plants can reuse.

Industrial, huge-scale agriculture has of course become ‘conventional’ in the UK only relatively recently: surveys indicate that many members of the public still imagine farming and growing to involve the systems used 60 or more years ago, which are no longer called ‘conventional’ but are now described as ‘sustainable’, ‘organic’ or ‘traditional’ to show that they are different from the mainstream. While organically produced food can be more expensive than industrial chemically produced food, in the case of vegetables and fruit this is partly because of the difference in scale involved, as well as a result of the extra labour required for growing, weeding and harvesting in a sustainable system. Growing food is, after all, an incredibly labour-intensive manual job. But, as agriculture has increased in scale, we have lost touch with the basics, and prefer to use chemicals to fight pests, diseases and weeds from a distance rather than use our hands or mechanical tools (even though these usually do a better job in the long term).

However, with the depletion of cheaply available oil, the once-omnipresent nitrogen fertilisers and other agricultural chemicals have been steadily increasing in price (or have been banned because of environmental concerns), so it is hoped that ‘conventional’ producers will again see the merits of sustainable techniques, and that soon organic food will become more competitive in price. At the moment, cash-strapped consumers have to actively prioritise and really care about buying local, organic food (thereby helping not only themselves but also the local economy and the wider environment), since current supermarket-led prices encourage the consumption of ever-more-intensively farmed ‘cheap’ food, no matter what consequences to our health, animal welfare, our community or the environment. In a just world, the real costs of this type of food production – such as cleaning up waterways following run-off from fertilisers and pesticides, not to mention the extra burden on the NHS caused by nutrient-poor and calorie-rich foods – would be passed on to chemical farmers and food manufacturers rather than falling to taxpayers and charitable bodies.

Wider sustainability

Growing your own veg has undergone a real revival over the last few years, and allotment waiting lists are at an all-time high. Yet the next step, of selling surplus produce and starting a small business, seems out of reach for many people – if it occurs to them at all. But smallholdings, commercial allotments, market gardens and food-producing community projects are essential if we are to improve our local and national food security. Local food production also generates fewer carbon emissions from transporting produce around the country or further afield. More local producers means a healthy local economy too: in addition to the direct benefits of using local people (local knowledge, community building), there are myriad positive knock-on effects, such as cutting commuting times and therefore further reducing fossil fuel emissions, or encouraging other local food-based businesses to start up in order to take advantage of all the fresh produce around – perhaps leading to gastrotourism and the associated tourist-based advantages that would bring.

‘Sustainability’ does not just refer to the environment, of course, nor even to the local community: to be truly sustainable, a venture must be financially secure, or it cannot survive and inspire others. For example, there are a great many excellent charitable projects that incorporate food and growing as therapeutic activities, but unless these are securely funded in the long term, or can make enough money from other strands of the project such as selling produce, they cannot be viable. That is why this guide concentrates on the nitty gritty of setting up a food-producing business, running it, and staying afloat in the long term, with the aim of producing food in a local community for a living wage and fair return for all. This might not equate to a full-time income of course, if you have other commitments and would prefer to start a part-time micro business on a very small scale. But even tiny-scale businesses must be professional if they are to survive and be truly sustainable. For many, the aim of setting up a market garden is to provide a full-time income for themselves and perhaps for others too.

Professional growing

It should be said that well-meaning and competent hobbyists, who don’t need to make a living from growing, can devalue food in a local area by selling off their surplus at a nominal price (or giving food away to those who would otherwise have bought local produce), thereby vastly undercutting professional growers who need the sales to survive. The risk is that if food is subsidised in this way for a period of time it prevents professional growers from making a living. And when the hobbyists have run out of produce, there will be nothing left from growers who have gone bust.

That’s not to say that gardeners are irresponsible for giving away produce of course, particularly when it’s to the needy, but it’s worth keeping local professional growers in mind when doing so. On the whole, growers and farmers aren’t trying to diddle anyone, or to charge more than their produce is worth: they are simply asking for a realistic living wage (often a much lower wage than is provided by other occupations) to enable them to continue producing great local food.

Points to consider before starting to grow commercially

If you are thinking of setting up a market garden, there are a number of factors to consider. The latter points in the list below are dealt with in detail in the following chapters, but the first five are more subjective – about you, the way you work and what you are able and willing to put into the project. It is worth spending a bit of time thinking about these before you go any further.

• Are you willing to put long hours (and possibly some of your own money) into setting up the business, and maintaining the garden?
• Will you be able to manage (financially and mentally) until the garden starts producing crops and making money?
• Can you cope with working on your own most of the time, or do you need people around you? Will you need extra help with all the weeding, planting and harvesting, especially in the busy summer time?
• What will happen if you’re ill, injured or otherwise unable to garden?
• Will you choose to grow sustainably? If so, how will you manage weeds, pests and diseases?
• Where will the garden be?
• Will you need funding to set it up?
• What equipment will you need?
• Who will your customers be, and how will you get your produce to them?
• How will you market yourself?
• What’s your long-term aim for your market garden?

CHAPTER 2

Finding land

Once you have decided that you would like to set up a market garden, probably the two most important questions to ask yourself are: Where will you grow your produce? And have you got someone to sell it to? You may know exactly what you want to grow, and who you would sell to, but have nowhere to do it yet. Or you may have some land you can use but are unsure how to go about selling, or what would be the most profitable crops to grow for various outlets. Finding appropriate potential customers is more complicated than finding land, since there are many factors to consider – price, presentation, demographic, competition and so on – so good market research is critical. It’s important to have both your land and potential market firmly in mind before going any further.

The next chapter is all about finding a market to sell your produce to. This chapter deals with how to go about getting land. If you already have a large enough plot, or an allotment t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1: The rewards of commercial growing
• CHAPTER 2: Finding land
• CHAPTER 3: Finding a market
• CHAPTER 4: Essential equipment
• CHAPTER 5: Raising the money
• CHAPTER 6: Paperwork Part 1: finance
• CHAPTER 7: Paperwork Part 2: law and orders
• CHAPTER 8: What to grow
• CHAPTER 9: Marketing and selling
• CHAPTER 10: Challenges ahead
• APPENDIX: Growing and business calendar
• Resources
• Index
• Also by Green Books
• About Green Books
• Copyright