Earning Potential of Market Gardening

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Get expert advice on how to make your market garden thrive in “Market Farming Success.”
Get expert advice on how to make your market garden thrive in “Market Farming Success.”
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Market gardeners sell in diverse markets, including farmers markets, to restaurants, and through a community-supported agriculture (CSA) component. Earning potential varies from farm to farm.
Market gardeners sell in diverse markets, including farmers markets, to restaurants, and through a community-supported agriculture (CSA) component. Earning potential varies from farm to farm.

Market Farming Success (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013) is the go-to guide to market gardening for those in the business of growing and selling food, flowers, herbs or plants. In this new and expanded edition, learn how to find land, which crops to grow, how to market your produce and more. Author and editor/publisher of Growing for Market, Lynn Bycynski’s expert advice will help beginning farmers advance confidently through the learning curve of starting a farming business. In this excerpt from chapter one, “Getting Started in Market Farming,” find out the earning potential of market gardening, whether you garden full time or part time.

You can purchase this book from the MOTHER EARTH NEWS store: Market Farming Success.

How Much Money Can You Make?

Even if you accept the fact that farming is not a high-paying occupation, even if money is not highly important to you, you still have to think about it when you’re starting out. You need to know how much it’s going to cost to get started. You need to know how much you can potentially earn once your farm is established. You especially need to know whether to hang on to another job in the meantime. As you develop your new farming business, you should make financial viability one of the tenets of your planning. A business can be sustainable only if it makes enough money to meet your financial needs.

Financial needs differ from one farmer to the next. A family of five has different financial needs than those of a couple without children. Someone who wants to make his or her entire livelihood on the farm will have a different perspective on profits than someone who views farming as a sideline. I’m not going to tell you how much you need to make to be considered a success. That’s entirely up to you. Over the years, my definition of a “sustainable farm” has broadened, and I now think that the person who keeps farming obviously has achieved a satisfactory measure of financial sustainability.

  • Published on Oct 8, 2013
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