Scheduling of Vegetable Plantings

The next series of blogs were written by Luke Freeman, Senior at MU majoring in Sustainable Agriculture.  He was able to attend the Great Plains Growers Conference's Beginning Vegetable Farmer Track through a scholarship from Tigers for Community Agriculture (TCA), a MU student organization that is trying to create a student-run vegetable farm at the MU Bradford Research and Extension Farm.

Scheduling of Vegetable Plantings presented by Dan Dermitzel

Dan Dermitzel is the co-founder and associate director of the Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture (KCCUA). He helped build the Kansas City Community Farm, which is a two-acre certified organic vegetable farm that sells produce to the Kansas City area through farmers’ markets and a Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. On Saturday, Dermitzel spoke on the scheduling of vegetable plantings based on his experience with the KCCUA.

The objective of crop scheduling is to offer a wide variety of produce to the consumer for as much of the year as possible and thus capture the consumer’s produce dollar. Dermitzel likes to think of his small farm as being a “vegetable grocery store,” providing farmers’ market customers with one location to buy all their fresh vegetables for the week. Dermitzel showed four steps to take when planning out a planting schedule:

1. Decide what to grow
2. Schedule plantings
3. Apportion production space
4. Schedule transplant production

Sometimes after going through these steps, it will be necessary to make changes to the first step, and thus begin the process over from the beginning. Space and time availability play vital roles when it comes to crop planning and often limit what a grower can and can’t produce.

To assist him in the tedious job of making planting schedules, Dermitzel creates spreadsheets that can easily be edited. The planting schedule spreadsheet has a column for crop name, total crops planted, and a column for every week of every month. This allows a grower to easily look at one sheet and know when any given crop needs to be seeded or transplanted, and it allows for single crops to have multiple plantings. Dermitzel recommended printing out these and other record sheets and having them in an accessible place on the farm so that they can be easily accessed and edited if necessary.

It is also vital to map out the production space when planning for the upcoming season. Dermitzel uses a spreadsheet for this process as well, making rows and columns that represent physical beds on the farm. In his case, the standard bed is 4 by 150 feet with walkways three feet wide. This spreadsheet allows him to record what is planted in each bed year by year and is very useful in planning a crop rotation system.

The third record sheet Dermitzel showed is for transplant production, which can get quite complicated on its own. For this spreadsheet, he used the column headings of seed, variety, actual start date, number of starts, notes, and the ideal age of transplants. With these record sheets Dermitzel can easily keep track of the many operations happening simultaneously on the farm and have a good bank of records when planning for the new year.
(by Luke Freeman - University of Missouri, Columbia Missouri)