Written by Alexander Christian Greco
Michael Bell is a small farm owner from the Dallas area who’s managed to sell a variety of crops, with a focus on salad greens. With only 1/3 of an acre, Bell has been making a profit for several years. While their focus is on CSA profit, their farm serves as a model for anyone attempting to either start a farm-to-market or direct to consumer venture, or anyone looking to start a homestead and feed their family from their land. I had the opportunity to talk with Michael Bell about his farm—which he’s successfully been making a healthy profit with for several years—and greatly appreciate sharing this knowledge of his about growing greens.
Without further ado, here is my interview with Michael Bell:
Bell:
I am a full time intermediate PE teacher and have been since 2002. I also run a 1/3 of an acre market garden where I grow seasonal organic vegetables to families using a CSA business model.
I graduated from College with a Bachelor of Science in Kinesiology which I use for my PE job. As for farming, I have 40 years of experience growing vegetables. I learned the business model of market gardening from YouTube following great farmers like Curtis Stone and J.M. Forteir.
Around the country, there’s around 1.9 million farms, 42%, or 800,000, of which are small farms, under 50 acres.
Many farms are utilized for either farm to market sales or for self-sustainability. Around 50-70% of direct-to-consumer farms are around 25 acres or less, and the average homestead being around 3-5 acres.
With only 1/4 acres of land, growing potatoes, squash or legumes, some of the most common crops, one person has the capacity to grow food to supplement their entire family around 8,000 calories/day for the entire year.
A market farm of a few acres might make up to $40,000-$80,000+/year.
Michael Bell has one of these market farms, utilizing a CSA model, or a Community Supported Agriculture model.
Shareholders pay the farmer upfront for a recurring reportion of the farmers’ harvest. This helps the farmer pay for costs, and share the risk for things like droughts, floods, and blights. If the harvest is good, then the shareholders receive more produce.
With this, Bell has been able to make a stable profit from their farm for several years.
What should people know about your farm?
The first thing is it’s tiny but very productive. I grow in basically 10 36-inch-wide beds that are 140 feet long. In each bed which I can grow 4 rows of lettuce, 7 rows of carrots, or 8 rows of radishes. I can also grow tomatoes that I trellis upwards and grow a nice row or two of green beans or beets underneath the tomatoes.
Needless to say, growing is very intense and space is not left empty for long.
People should also know everything I do on the farm is done by hand. I do not have a tiller or any other mechanized items on the farm. I plant everything by hand, pull weeds by hand and harvest by hand,
If you’re looking to start your own farm, there are a number of considerations.
What to grow depends on the type of garden or farm you’re trying to start/what the goal of the farm is.
Plan before you spend any money on your farm though, you need to plan the entire farm.
What are the exact dimensions of the greenhouse/fence. How many seeds are you going to need. What sort of watering system are you going to need.
From here, you can begin determining costs, and then a plan to start the farm. You might get everything you need all at once. You might pay for materials as you go, over time.
When did you get started?
I have always grown stuff. I always tell people I was probably the only college kid that would water his tomatoes with a really bad hangover. It’s been a passion for as long as I can remember. I started my farm in 2016 though and have been growing the farm and the business every year since.
What sort of crops do you grow?
I grow the same things a person would grow in their back yard just on a larger scale. Salad mix is my bread butter as far as sales go. During the winter its a ton of salad and a lot of root crops like, radishes, beets, carrots, and turnips. Then in Spring I grow salad ’til mid June when it gets too hot but its also the same time the tomatoes, squash zucchini and peppers also take off. I sale 52 weeks a year with August being my slowest month due to the heat and dryness.
What to grow depends on the type of garden or farm you’re trying to start/what the goal of the farm is.
Farmer’s markets succeed with crops that are valuable and difficult to grow—aren’t easy to find or readily available, and/or are locally grown, which supports local farmers communities, and compliment peripheral purchases. Farmers markets near the ocean do well complementing things like fishing, while areas with deer/bird hunting, bird and cattle farms do well complementing these diets.
Family farms aimed at self-sufficiency are successful with high calorie/nutrient crops, with a high calorie:cost/square foot ratio. How much food can you feed your family the most efficiently and make sure they’re getting all the vitamins and minerals.
Either route requires commitment, determination, and a ton of time and effort.
What are your day-to-day activities on the farm like?
I wake up at 4 am and I get to the farm by 4:20 AM. I usually take a quick walk around the beds looking for insects that might have moved in the last 24 hours. After that I either plant something, water something or harvest something and most days I do all three things. I leave the farm about 6:15 to get home and change so I can get to school by 7:00 am. I am at school til 4ish. After dinner and family time I go back to the farm around 8:30-10. I don’t go every night, just during the busy seasons.
What should people know about starting a farm in general?
I do a ton of consulting with new farmers and the biggest thing I have learned is to start small! Focus on 3-4 crops a year and a very small area. Most beginners want to start with way too much space and way too many crops, which usually causes massive failures. Become a great grower of 3-4 crops then each season add in 1 or 2 new crops. Within a couple of years you are rolling!
Another thing farmers do is over commit when trying to make a sale. For example, a guy might try a bag of lettuce and love it then immediately call the farmer. This guys might say “Hey my sister owns a catering business and she wants 50 pounds a week of this salad can you get it to her?” First of all 50 pounds of salad is a huge order! The farmer is so excited they instantly said yes before any thought goes into it 6 weeks later the farmer only has 12 pounds for the caterer and shes very upset! That farmer had good intentions they just didn’t know how much that was and lost a future customer! Always scale up slowly!
What should people know before starting a farm?
People need to know what will sell in their area. Ask as many people as you can what they would be interested in. Weather is the next important thing. They need to know their first and last average frost date. They need to average temps for each month and the extreme temps, rainfall amounts. etc. You can’t control the weather but if you can predict it will help tremendously. You should finally know what your financial goals are. I like to count backwards which means If i want to make $1000 a dollar a month, that equals out to $250 a week. In order to sell $250 a week I need to sell 50 bags of salad at $5 a bag. It could also mean I need to sell 31 bags of salad AND radishes which i get $8 total for. Using this method has really simplified things for me in trying to budget and plan ahead financially.
An average acre of land costs around $5,000, though some areas, particularly metropolitan areas, can reach up to $10,000 – $20,000 an acre. The infrastructure for a market farm can cost around $3,000 to $4,000+ to $20,000 to $25,000+. Equipment costs around $5,000 – $10,000 an acre. These prices scale per acre, though some costs can be mitigated.
Average profit on an acre of land will return around $10k/year, which then returns the value of the land, equipment, etc. after around 3-5 years. Most farmers ought to expect little to no returns the first year—potentially a few hundred to thousand, though don’t expect to bring home $10,000+ your first year or two. Most farmers will begin making $8,000-$12,000+/year from one acre of land after around 2-4 years. Generally speaking, full-time, committed farmers can potentially expect $15,000 to $30,000 on a 1-2 acre lot after 5-7+ years, though this requires much dedication, effort and resource commitment.
As a part-time commitment, or even as a full-time commitment, there is much potential to market farms, even at a small scale. A farm like Michael Bell’s likely costs less than $20,000 for initial costs. Across the same trajectory scale as a 1-2 acre plot, a .5 acre plot of land can likely return $7,000-$12,000/year, with enough effort and commitment.
What should people know before making a business out of it? People need to know simple things about their bills. Things like water bill, property tax bill, electric bill, and then supply costs, like packaging, seed cost and other farm expenses. Without having some sort of idea of what these numbers look like it makes planning for income very difficult.
What can people expect when they first start out?
They need to plan to fail their first year!
This is why I am such a huge fan of starting out part time and keeping your full time job for the first year at least. You will learn things about your farm that you never even considered. My first year I made less than $1000 total but what I gained in knowledge was worth so much more. Things like how much moisture will your soil hold which in turn determines how often you water, or in the Fall that huge Pecan tree puts too much shade on a certain area of the farm and that 20 feet of bed space just doesn’t grow due to lack of sunshine. Little things like this can’t be taught in a book, they have to be learned through experience.
They will also learn if they truly love farming or if they just want to go back to a small backyard garden! I know several people that thought they wanted to grow commercially but after 6 months they hated it for various reasons. While others fall in love with it and would go to the ends of Earth to make it successful.
