Welcome to Market Gardening Tips

I love being a market gardener! No matter what the economy, or who is elected, or what 'Paris' or 'Brad' are doing, people still need to eat! And more and more what they want to eat is fresh, local organic veggies and meats.

This is great news for the small farmer; local organic produce carries a premium price. And if you structure your business right, you can create a nice market garden business on 5 acres, or 2 acres, or even less than 1 acre!

So, what' s the 'right structure'? Here' s the principles under which we operate award-winning New Terra Farm

1. We are as natural as possible. We don't use chemical pesticides or herbicides or fertilizers in our market garden, and our livestock animals get only organic feed.
2. We sell all our farm produce directly to our end customers. We don't believe in 'middlemen'; we like to get to know the people who we are market gardening for.
3. We don't raise 'confinement' anything. We don't believe in raising animals in cages, all our livestock animals are raised on pasture.
4. We don't grow anything unless we can sell it. In fact, in our award-winning small farm marketing and management model, just about everything on our farm is sold before it is grown!

And our techniques are scale-independent; this means that you can start small (we did) and grow your market garden and your income as your skills and experience increase.

For example, our first year market gardening we found 16 families that wanted to buy from us (we were operating in a Community Supported Agriculture model.) That first small garden was only about 6,000 square feet (1/7 of an acre) but we sold about $9,000 worth of veggies from it, and another $4,000 worth of organic pastured pork and chicken, too.

The next year, we doubled the size of our market garden; in year three we tripled that again! And our garden was still less than 1 acre.

What's the secret to growing a successful market garden? Well, just like any other business, there is a business cycle that you should follow. In other words, if you do things in the right order you can have a thriving business on your small farm.

What is the 'business cycle' you need to follow? It's simply this: You must do PLANNING before MARKETING, MARKETING before MANAGEMENT, and MANAGEMENT before PRODUCTION. It goes like this:

1. You plan your business, setting targets for sales and income, estimating expenses and calculating your price to make a profit.
2. Then you market your business, to find enough customers who will pay your price to generate your income
3. Then you put the management practices in place to make sure you can meet those customers expectations
4. And finally you start production to deliver the goods

Find out more about our market gardening model