Crop Planning: The Winter Work That Makes Summer Harvests Possible
For vegetable farmers, the winter months aren’t all about rest — it’s when the crucial work of crop planning begins (among many other important tasks). As a commercial grower at Heartbeet Farm, I’ve learned that success in the field starts with success in spreadsheets.
What is Crop Planning?
Crop planning is the systematic process of mapping out the entire growing season before the first seed goes into soil. It’s about answering critical questions: What will we grow? When will we plant it? How much do we need? Where will it go in our fields?
At our farm, my partner Kate spends a full week immersed in spreadsheets each January, creating our roadmap for the season ahead.
Where to Start with Crop Planning
The secret to effective crop planning is to work backwards.
Step 1: Set Sales Target
We start by envisioning our end goal with a back of the envelope calculation to set our gross sales target.
Step 2: Choose Sales Channels
Then we decide where our produce should be sold (i.e. CSA vegetable boxes, farmers’ market, online store, etc.) and the percentage that each sales channel accounts for.
Step 3: Decide What to Grow
From there, we choose what we want to provide in our CSA vegetable baskets and bring to the Kanata Farmers’ Market each week. This involves careful review of:
- Customer feedback and surveys
- Previous season’s crop notes
- Historical yield data
- Market demand patterns
Step 4: Decide When to Harvest
Using this information, we can determine when we want each crop to be ready for harvest. Then we work backwards to figure out planting dates, accounting for each crop’s specific growth requirements.
Working backwards helps us create a crop plan that meets our sales goals, ensuring the long term success of our farm.
Understanding Key Growing Terms
For those new to farming and gardening, here are some essential terms we use in crop planning:
Succession Planting: This means planting the same crop multiple times throughout the season to ensure continuous harvest. For example, we plant carrots four times per season, with each planting providing fresh carrots for about four weeks.
Direct Seeding: When seeds are planted directly into the field soil. Crops like carrots, beans, and radishes are typically direct seeded.
Transplanting: The process of moving plants started in the greenhouse or inside into the field. Many crops, including tomatoes, peppers, and brassicas, are started indoors and transplanted when conditions are right.
The Mathematics of Growing
With over 40 different vegetables and 95+ varieties in our plan, precise calculations are essential. Here’s how we approach it:
- Calculate harvest windows needed for each crop
- Determine number of successions required
- Factor in days to maturity for each variety
- Add a safety factor (10-30% extra planting) to account for disease pressure, wildlife damage, weather events, and other potential losses.
From Plan to Seeds
Once we know our planting schedule and quantities, we can calculate seed needs. This varies dramatically by crop — from 500 broccoli seeds to 200,000 carrot seeds! Our plan includes detailed information about:
- Plant and variety names
- Greenhouse seeding dates and requirements
- Field transplanting schedules
- Direct seeding timing and quantities
Resources for Your Own Crop Planning
Whether you’re a commercial grower or home gardener, good planning tools are invaluable.
At Heartbeet Farm, we started with a pretty basic Excel spreadsheet, which required a lot of manual entry and calculations. A few years ago, we upgraded to Dan Brisebois’ The Farmer Spreadsheet Academy, which offers sophisticated spreadsheets using Google Sheets. Dan’s Google Sheets greatly sped the crop planning process. But it’s not the only tool available!
Today, gardeners have a wealth of crop planning tools at their fingertips. I’ve listed a number of them below. I haven’t personally used all of them. Consider these as a starting point as you search for the right tool that meets your needs and style.
For the bookworms, Crop Planning for Vegetable Growers is an excellent guide that walks through an eleven-step planning approach. It includes practical examples from real farm operations and valuable reference charts that can be adapted to your needs. It also includes downloadable Excel spreadsheets to get you started. Check it out on the Canadian Organic Growers online shop.
Johnny’s Selected Seeds provides an entire suite of free tools and calculators to help you get started. Check out their Planting Tools and Calculators page.
For the tech-savvy gardener, check out these smartphone apps:
Getting Started
If you’re new to crop planning, resist the temptation to plan your entire plot at once. Instead, choose just 1-3 crops that you love to grow and eat, and use these to learn the crop planning process.
Work through all the steps:
- Calculating your sales or food needs
- Deciding harvest dates
- Counting backwards using days-to-maturity
- Determining planting dates
- Calculating seed needs
- Keeping good records throughout the season.
Once you’re comfortable with basic planning, challenge yourself with a crop that requires multiple succession plantings to provide continuous harvests.
Whether you use a simple notebook, spreadsheet, or smartphone app, the key is to plan ahead, execute when the sun shines, and make notes to look back on next winter. These notes become your personal growing guide, helping you refine your timing and quantities for future seasons.
With enough practice, you’ll amaze yourself with the amount of food that can come out of a small area!
Happy growing!
David Mazur-Goulet
Heartbeet Farm
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