Production

Enterprise Budget: Sea Island Red Peas

Sea Island Red Peas growing on the Georgia coast, May 2015. These peas are seeded and harvested by hand.

Sea Island Red Peas growing on the Georgia coast, May 2015. These peas are seeded and harvested by hand.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been working with a farm in the Georgia Lowcountry to create a detailed enterprise budget for Sea Island Red Peas. The farmer has been producing this specialty heirloom crop for several years. Demand, particularly among chefs, is still on the rise. Although sales have been steady, the farmer requested some diagnostic financial tools to assess whether he was pricing his crop accurately and--frankly--whether production, post-harvest processing, and marketing were really worth his time. Outside of some tillage work, most of the operation is performed by hand, which, over the long term, carries an unacceptable level of risk in taking the crop from seed to market. Hopefully, the new enterprise budget will give the farmer a lens to analyze his operation, help him see what constellation of yield volume, cost, price, and labor points would suggest purchasing machinery, and support his case when it's time to go before a lender. 

This particular enterprise budget cannot be published because it is sensitive and proprietary. Keeping it private protects the farmer's opportunity cost to grow a finicky crop in a challenging and often extreme environment. 

However, universities and nonprofits across the country do excellent work publishing an array of enterprise budgets, preparing farmers to make informed decisions before planting and after final sales. Below are several good enterprise budgets for Southern field peas. I will also link back to this page in Resources. 

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Genetically modified crops on the rise

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The June 30 crop progress report, besides signaling the smallest U.S. corn crop since 2010, had some interesting data about actual plantings of GM crops in 2014. Despite calls from consumer groups and activists across the country to label genetically-modified organisms or ban them altogether, farmers continue to purchase and plant these crops to the point of almost complete market saturation. Planted acreage in each of the major commodities with herbicide tolerance and/or insect resistance increased over 2013:

  • Corn: up 3 points to 93%
  • Soybeans: up 1 point to 94%
  • All cotton: up 6 points to 96%

Cotton's surge in 2014 places it ahead of soybeans in total percentage of planted acres for the first time ever. The data doesn't suggest whether this jump owes to good marketing or Southern farmers' attempts to combat herbicide-resistant pigweed (more on the circular logic of controlling superweeds at another time). 

The charts from USDA ERS below track the rapid adoption of GM crops since their introduction. The data does not include information from 2014. Note that crops with stacked traits--Bt (insect resistance) and herbicide tolerance together--comprise the majority of planted acres in both corn and cotton.  

Devising crop rotations with limited space

“There becomes two schools of practice in sustainable agriculture when it comes to annual crop production, extensive and intensive. The ‘extensive’ farmers we know basically have two farms, one in cover crops and one in cash crops flipping them each year or so. This allows them to rest the soil and build organic matter but also means they have to have twice as much land, a luxury most farmers don’t have, like us. The other end of the spectrum is no cover crops and to just rely on organic matter sources imported onto the farm- manure, leaves, hay, compost, etc. Not only more expensive and labor intensive but in many ways not as biologically diverse which can lead to a less stable/sustainable system.”
— Alex Hitt, Peregrine Farm
Alex Hitt at Peregrine Farm.

Alex Hitt at Peregrine Farm.

If you're interested in sustainable vegetable production in the South, then you need to know Alex Hitt. 

Hitt and his wife, Betsy, own Peregrine Farm outside of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Farming organically since 1980, they have pioneered the local food movement in Southeast and become leading experts in the operation and maintenance of sustainable production systems. While Betsy handles the cut-flower side of the business, Alex grows vegetables--in addition to speaking regularly at regional conferences and thoughtfully blogging on the technical details of growing specialty crops without synthetic chemicals and large off-farm inputs. 

In a recent post he covered the thorny subject of implementing crop rotations with limited space: specifically, how to balance a cover cropping and rotational strategy with year-round demand for market crops. "We currently have 5 quarter acres blocks that we are now trying to fit nearly 9 quarter acres worth of crops into and another 4 of cover covers crops, not easily done," Hitt says. His answer is to expand his current five-year rotation, which rebuilds soil and breaks disease and pest cycles, into a less elegant six-year plan. 

Hitt is even generous enough to share his schematic for one bed (see below). Read the entire post here. Note: blocks in green are cover crops.

Six-year rotation for a single bed: http://peregrinefarm.net/2014/06/20/peregrine-farm-news-vol-11-15-62014/.