I’ve been farming long enough now (on other people’s farms) to have a pretty good idea of what kind of infrastructure and equipment I wanted.  I have seen how many farms create space for their CSA members, wash their produce, store their equipment, and select tools to manage their field operations.  Now, I know that many farmers follow the “boot-strap” method of finance - just buying the equipment and buildings they can pay for out of pocket, adding more as time goes on.  I decided to do it differently.

The more I thought about it, the more I came to believe that spending big and taking on debt was worth it, because it would allow me to operate my farm at a scale that would be economically viable, with a level of labor that I could handle.

So I made that giant list of everything I thought I needed, and put a price tag next to each one…...and it was big: $104,868.  And this didn’t include annual operating costs or working capital!  Was this did get me was: a pump set-up for the well, (2) 30’x96’ greenhouses, a 14’x24’ CSA shed, a 24’x24’ washing/storage shed, a fence, a tractor, a tiller, a chisel plow, a cultivator, a manure spreader, a lime spreader, a disk, a bed shaper, a mulch layer, and many, many more hand tools and supplies.

Now, I’d been saving money for many years as best I could.  But this amounted to just $33,000.  Still a long way to go.  Then, in a stroke of good fortune, I entered, competed in, and won one of the Grand Prizes in “Economic Fuel - The Humboldt Student Business Plan Competition”.  More on this later, perhaps, but this added another $25K!

I was still $47,000 shy of my start-up hard costs.  I also needed an additional ~25K to cover operating costs and keep me from going broke until my sales grew.  So I applied for loan funding.  With the help of an awesome non-profit called “California FarmLink”, I was able to apply for and receive loan funding from CalCoastal Rural Development Corporation - a financial development bank specializing  in ag loans.

So here I am today, with the funding I need.  The infrastructure is nearly complete, the major tools and supplies purchased.  Now it’s all about getting the word out: signing up members for awesome weekly harvests through my CSA, and exploring additional markets.

In a future post, I’ll share a nice long list of some of those actual costs.

About 15 or so people have committed to the CSA by paying me.  Up until yesterday I was dilligently working to get that number up to 30. However, yesterday it occurred to me that I was feeling quite a bit of pressure to feed 30 families, so I’m going to start the season with about 15, and accept more members as we roll on into June, when the abundance of summer starts to flood in. I feel better. Financially, this probably isn’t a wise move.  I don’t care.  It feels better to… Read the rest of this article »