Why do farmers destroy their crops when weather conditions are bad? Why bother going through the trouble? Why not just let them grow and get at least some harvest?
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I manage a small (25 acre) organic produce farm. Crop failure is worked into the business model. We need several thousand dollars worth of produce weekly, and much of what we grow is fast growing stuff that makes money (salad greens, radishes, turnips, kale chard etc). We have no crop insurance as the insurance system is not made for what we do.
If a crop fails, we destroy it as quickly as possible and replant. Each bed on our farm (approx 200 30″x 100′ beds) will cycle 2-4 crops per year, with one of those usually being a cover crop. Portions stay tarped to kill weeds. We don’t till. All this means that we can turn over a bed to a new crop within hours much of the time and keep it productive and making money.
Examples:
We plant a plot of kale, let’s say 600 plants. The kale grows, looks good for a while but ends up diseased. Very little is harvestable, and it takes us 5 minutes of work to get a dozen good leaves per $4 bunch, where in a good kale crop it takes us about a minute to cut a dozen leaves for a $4 bunch. That crop is a looser. It gets torn out and replanted in a single day to something else immediately. Sucks to take a loss, but produce farming is always a gamble.
We plant a bed of radishes. They grow in three weeks. The first thinning harvest yields $100 worth of radishes. The next week is hot and dry, and all $800 worth of beautiful radishes turn black and are unsaleable. We might spend the time to pick through and find some good ones, or say fuck it and flame them, cover the bed with a tarp for a month, and come back and plant something else.
One of the biggest pitfalls we see amongst less successful produce farmers is their unwillingness to trash a crop and move on. It’s a waste of time, money and energy. This stuff is hard work, and if it’s not going to pay you, rip it out and replace it with something that might.
Learning to cope with failure is possibly the biggest and most important hurdle to successful produce farming, especially in an organic setting.
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