Introduction

Thomas Jefferson was a landowner, politician, diplomat, and

president of the United States. But in his heart, he claimed, he really
wanted to be a market gardener.
I have often thought that if heaven had given me choice of my
position and calling, Jefferson wrote, it should have been on a rich
spot of earth, well watered, and near a good market for the productions of the garden. No occupation is so delightful to me as the
culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden.
I have always loved that quote, because Jefferson expressed so
well the passion that I and many others have felt about gardening, a
passion that can be satisfied only by a commercial-scale garden. At
some point in your progress as a gardener, you probably have found
yourself with far too many tomatoes or zucchinis or bedding plants
to suit the needs of a single family. But its as though you cant stop
yourself from growing more and more every year, until you realize
you could be selling your produce.
Welcome to the club. I felt the first horticultural longings back
in college, but suppressed them in favor of a career as a newspaper
reporter. But my thoughts kept returning to the idea of growing
herbs, vegetables, or flowers as a business, and I avidly read every
book and magazine article I could find on market gardening. Then
I met a man who had just bought a small farm, complete with a
gingerbread farmhouse, big dairy barn, a pond, and 20 acres. My
soulmate! We married, and within a year started growing vegetables
to sell at the farmers market. The first few years were hard; we were
thwarted by drought and grasshopper populations that I have never
seen since. But we were full of optimism and energy, and we loved
truly lovedthe hard work and purposefulness of market gardening.
My biggest complaint in those years was a feeling of isolation.
We didnt know any other organic market gardeners, and we didnt
feel that anyone else could really relate to the life we were living.

M a r k e t Fa r m i n g S u c c e ss

Four Season Farm in Harborside, Maine, is a model for many of the small market farms in the United States. Owners
Eliot Coleman and Barbara Damrosch are renowned for dedication to their craft and many important innovations,
such as movable high tunnels. Colemans books The New Organic Grower and The Winter Harvest Handbook are essential reading for all beginning growers.

We didnt have an organic farming association in our state back in

the 1980s, and there was little opportunity to meet and learn from
other growers. To fill that hole, I decided to use my journalism skills
to start a national publication for market gardeners, and Growing for
Market was born in January 1992.
In the ensuing years, growing for market and Growing for
Market have been my twin occupations, each feeding the other and
keeping us going body and soul. In the beginning, the magazine
was just a sideline to our farming business, but as it became more
successful, it took up more of my time and, consequently, farming
took up less. My husband and I have continued to farm at varying
levels of intensity while working other jobs. We have sold at farmers
markets, been founding members of the countrys first cooperative
community-supported agriculture (CSA) group, sold to chefs and
the local food co-op, grown flowers for florists, and on and on. As
I write this at the beginning of 2013, we are taking a hiatus from

Introduction

farming, and I have to confess Im a little worried about exactly how

I am going to react when the days get longer, the trees start to bud,
and another growing season beckons. Once farming gets in your
blood, its not easily ignored.
I have talked to countless other people who have been bitten by
the market farming bug. I know of one Academy Awardwinning
actress, one major rock star, and one software billionaire who have
started market farms. I know builders, college professors, computer
experts, doctors, corporate executives, TV meteorologists, and others
who achieved great status in their professions but gave it up to farm.
I know big farmers who scaled down to market farmingand became
more profitable. I know young people who went to college for advanced degrees, then decided they would rather work on a farm.
Market farmers run the gamut from teenagers to people in their 80s.
They come from all socioeconomic backgrounds and from every state
in the nation, including many places that you dont think of as being
hospitable to vegetable and flower production. Growing for Market
has subscribers in every part of North America, from the US Virgin
Islands to the Yukon; from New York City to the coast of California
and every state in between. Whatever your background, wherever
you are located, rest assured that you can be a market farmer.

What to Call Yourself

Youll find there is some variation in the words commercial gardeners
use to describe their occupation: market gardener, market farmer,
direct-market farmer, vegetable farmer, and truck farmer are all part
of the lexicon. There are no official definitions, but here are distinctions made by John Hendrickson of the University of Wisconsin:

Market gardens have fewer than 3 acres in production, not

counting fallow or cover-cropped areas. Market gardeners use
mostly hand labor.
Market farms have between 3 and 12 acres in production, not
counting fallow or cover-cropped areas. Market farmers use a
mix of hand labor and mechanization.
Vegetable farms produce crops on more than 12 acres, which
requires mechanization.

M a r k e t Fa r m i n g S u c c e ss

The phrase market garden was in widespread use in the late

1800s, when seedsman Peter Henderson wrote the classic book
Gardening for Profit. (His book is well worth reading today, certainly
for learning about your heritage as a market gardener, but also
because nothing ever really changes; much of the advice he gave
in 1886 is still applicable.) Henderson refers to himself as a market
gardener, even though he grew more than 10 acres of vegetables.
To him, the term referred to someone who grew a wide variety of
produce to sell.
The term truck farmer is not used much anymore, but many
older people will recognize it as referring to people who farmed on
the outskirts of cities and trucked their produce into the city to sell.
Direct-market farmer is an all-purpose phrase that describes anyone who grows something that is sold directly to customers, rather
than into a wholesale or processing chain. Baby boomers who grew
up on farms, even large commodity crop farms, remember some direct-marketing activities taking place. Their mothers may have sold
eggs or milk from the familys hens and milk cow, or the children
may have sold garden extras at a roadside stand. That is uncommon
now on large crop farms because rural populations have declined
as farm size has increased, meaning there are not many neighbors
to buy products directly from a farmer. But many large vegetable
farms in recent years have created a direct-marketing sideline by
selling at farmers markets in nearby cities.
The phrases agritourism, destination farm, and entertainment farm have cropped up recently to describe operations that
attract customers to the farm with retail stores, pumpkin patches,
hay rides, and more elaborate attractions, such as corn mazes, festivals, and pizza gardens.

What Does It Take?

Whatever their age or background, and whatever they call themselves, people who get into market farming have many things in
common. Everyone quickly finds out that market farming is one
of the most complicated and challenging jobs you could ever hold.
You have to be a good grower, which is no simple matter itself, given
all the considerations of soil, scheduling, variety selection, crop

Introduction

management, and harvest. And you have to be able to handle all

those tasks not for one or two crops, but for literally dozens of crops.
Second, you have to be good at marketingto know how to advertise your produce, price it, display it, educate people about using
it, and cross-market with other products youre selling. Finally, you
need to have a head for businessto know how to keep records,
pay your taxes, know your production costs, stay informed about
relevant laws and regulations, buy insurance, hire help, and much,
much more.
This book isnt going to tell you how to do all those things,
because, if it did, it would be as big as an encyclopedia. There are
already many fine books and free publications that tell you how to
do each and every one of the jobs required of a market gardener.
Instead of attempting to cover all aspects of market gardening, this
book will do two things:
1. Identify the topics you need to know to get started; in particular,
it will explain the issues that make the difference between success and struggle on a new farm.
2. Identify the resources that already exist on each of these topics
and tell you how to find them.

What Will You

Find in This Book?
As a longtime market gardener myself and the editor of Growing
for Market magazine since I founded it in 1992, I have learned that
most beginners dont lack knowledge about growing; what they do
lack is an understanding of how to grow on a commercial scale.
They dont understand the planning, budgeting, marketing, and
management aspects of market gardening. They dont know the
inside secrets of the business, such as where to get the best deals on
supplies and equipment. And they dont know what information is
already out there to tell them.
I wrote this book in an attempt to cut through some of the mysteries of commercial horticulture. When we started market gardening
in 1987, we didnt even know the names of greenhouse companies
or packaging suppliersand we didnt know how to find out. Today,

M a r k e t Fa r m i n g S u c c e ss

of course, the Internet makes it possible to find virtually anything,

and should be your first stop as you search for information. But the
Internet has the disadvantage of giving you too much information,
especially if you dont know the exact name of the product you need,
or the commonly used term for a problem youre having. If you put
greenhouse into a search engine, for example, you are going to
pull up 77 million web pages, which is not a great help.
This book will introduce you to aspects of commercial growing
that differ from backyard gardening. It will give you the language
of market farming, and explain the terms that you are expected to
know. Armed with the basic concepts and terminology, you can
turn to the wealth of free information that is on the web. For example, once you know whats in a crop enterprise budget, you can
Google that phrase with the name of your state or the crop you want
to grow. Or you can go to YouTube to look for videos about stale
seedbed or caterpillar tunnel or just about any other production
practice youll learn about in these pages.
My hope is that you will be a more sophisticated market gardener after reading this book, that the information here will help
you move quickly and confidently through the inevitable learning
curve, and give you a quick start on the path to success.