a small market garden in the city of cleveland

I went back and forth a few times before deciding to buy this book at the Acres USA conference last December. What tipped the scales?  The glowing endorsement on the back cover by Jean-Martin Fortier of Les Jardins de la Grelinette in Quebec. I’ve been familiar with Fortier since coming across a few of his postings on the SPIN Farming message board and have done my best to follow his work on his website, though it’s in French and mostly images which makes it hard to google translate. From what I can tell he appears to be the French-Canadian Eliot Coleman of my generation, which is cool. So I figured I’d take his word and see what more I could learn about crop planning.

The book is written by two other French Canadians who appear to have their shit together too. Frederic Theriualt and Daniel Brisebois run Tourne-Sol Cooperative Farm, a 250-member CSA farm in Quebec that also sells their own open-pollinated seeds (very cool).

What they have done is put together a really valuable resource for both beginning and veteran farmers (many of whom I suspect do not plan as thoroughly as the authors) which is both practical and enlightening. The ideas that “organization=success” and “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” seem central to their crop planning philosophy.

The book is divided into 11 chapters which take you though the entire crop planning process – from setting financial goals to analyzing crop profitability and planning for the following year. Tucked between these chapters are short farm profiles which give you real world examples of how the principles and practices in the book are practically applied on vegetable farms across Canada.

The first few chapters primarily discussed ideas with which I was relatively familiar: setting your financial goals, devising a marking plan to meet those goals, and then formulating a planting schedule to grow what you need when you need it. One thing which I had never done before was create a separate field planting schedule for each crop that we grow and then use the planting and harvest data from these sheets to feed into a master planting and harvest schedule. I suspect that as the size of our farm grows, I will benefit from this more methodical approach.

One aspect of these crop worksheets that are extremely useful are the formulas that help you determine how many bed ft of each crop to plant based on your desired harvest. By using the handy reference charts in the back of the book you can find out essential information on most crops including days to maturty, rows per bed, yield per row ft, etc. Having all these numbers in one place was extremely helpful and I found myself continually returning to the charts in the back for guidance.

After creating a field planting schedule the authors take you through the process of creating crop maps to diagram where everything gets planted, choose varieties to plant, and fill out a seed order. Because the beds on our farm (25ft) are significantly shorter that the book suggests (1ooft) and we are at least double-cropping all of our beds I found it somewhat difficult to follow the crop mapping methods outlined to such detail. Instead I combined these methods with those I read about in the November issue of Growing for Market.

Another process which I hadn’t gone through before was creating a greenhouse planting schedule. It’s relatively straightforward since your working backwards from your field planting schedule. Nonetheless it was valuable learning and will become more-so as we continue to integrate more transplanted crops into our production plan.

The last few chapters of the book address how to record, monitor and adjust your crop plan as you work through the season. My personal experience has been that this is the area where your plan starts to fall apart. It’s easy to be reflective and sit on the couch for hours with a spreadsheet in the middle of winter – not so much in the heat of the season. That’s why my new year’s farm resolution this year is to pay special attention to my observation and record keeping during the growing season. I look forward to using these chapters as an aid and will report back this time next year on how helpful they were.

If I have one criticism of the book it’s the depth of farm profiles, which are interspersed between the chapters and are supposed to provide real world examples of the principles and practices outlined in the book. Towards the end of the book many of the profiles are only a paragraph or two in length and repeat what’s already been said a few times in the book. Rather than include a profile after every chapter, perhaps it would have been more useful to focus in depth on just a few farms?

But truly this is nitpicking what is otherwise a really great book. At $22 it is well worth the investment.

My two cents: A dense yet concise volume which would be a wonderful addition to any beginning farmer’s bookshelf.