Crop Ranking

We are getting into crop planning season and each year we re-create how we do crop planning. This year as a team we made a crop ranking sheet that takes into account income data from our harvest log and adds to it to scores the management team and full time employees made. Here are the top 20. You may download the whole spreadsheet HERE.

We use a form in Airtable to collect harvest data, but the past couple of years we used a google form (we got the idea from a Growing For Market article). I love this because it auto fills a spreadsheet for you so you can sort by crop, search, and have a digital record. This is good data for this activity and for organic certification. So far we have focused on weighing everything in, next year I also want to focus on capturing data for crops based on how we sell them (average bunch size for example) so that when it comes to income per bed you multiply the units by your average price.

Also, since we are getting to the scale where we are planting more by successions of multiple beds vs. one bed at a time it is very useful to have the total number of units per succession. It also gives more accurate data to take an average over multiple beds vs. one bed.

This was our harvest log from 2020:

We’ve made some hard choices for 2021, including decreasing beds for squash, potatoes, and fall brassicas. It helps with decision making to have a document like this to refer to.

Happy crop planning!