Ep. 83 Why November Planning Starts in September

0:00To complete these records, first off, if you have a crop plan for the growing season, well, then you're in a really good beginning point. Go get your crop plan, print it out with what you expect or what you wanted to put in each bed of your field. Then take that crop plan, head out to the field, you can bring a cup of coffee if you want, some kind of other beverage, or maybe you shouldn't because you also want to have a pen on hand. And maybe don't bring that beverage. You want to bring a clipboard, a clipboard with a printout of what you expect to be in the field, and you want to walk through your field and look to see, did you plant what you thought you were going to plant in that spot and modify it that printout to represent reality. Welcome to episode 83 of the seed farmer podcast. The podcast where I want you to harvest seeds from some of the vegetables and flowers growing in your farmer garden, and then to plant that seed out to grow delicious vegetables and beautiful flowers.

1:01I'm your host Dan Breesboa, seed grower at Turnisal Cooperative Farm in author of the seed farmer, a complete guide to growing, using, and selling your own seeds. Today's mini-sode is about how to wrap up your farming season and your seed season with good records. But first, last week on September 5th was actually the one year anniversary from episode 30 of the seed farmer podcast. A mini-sode about picking peppers for seed. And I mean, though that's a good episode in itself, the fact that it's an anniversary is that's when I switched to publishing a seed farmer episode every week of the year. And we've done that ever since. So here we are a year later of weekly episodes. And wow, that's a lot of episodes. And I couldn't have done that without my podcast producer, Molly Breesboa. Molly does all the editing and post-production on these episodes. And I think she really brings out the heart of the seed farmer conversations, which I really

2:02appreciate. But Molly also helps me stay on track with the show. I'm often trying to balance the podcast with farming and my writing, not to mention family life. It can be easy to get caught up in trying to meet short-term deadlines and getting caught in the weeds. So I love having someone to collaborate with and to plan out upcoming episodes and strategies about the year. Molly also happens to be my sister, spoiler. So it's fun to have the opportunity to spend more time together than we might be able to otherwise and to get to see each other's skills and strengths and ways that not all siblings get a chance to do. Thank you, Molly. This podcast would not be able to come out every week without you. If you enjoy the seed farmer podcast and find it to be a good resource that helps you improve your seed work and farming, please support the show at spreadsheet.form slash support podcast. As far as seed work is going at turn of soul these days, I just recently harvested a bunch of amaranth and the last amaranth seed crop that I had grown maybe two years ago hadn't

3:04germinated so well. And I was a little bit frustrated. I actually talked about it with Sarah Cleager from adaptive seeds on episode 59 of the podcast. She recommended biting the seeds to see whether they're fully formed or not when you're harvesting. So I actually when I went out to to harvest that amaranth, I put on episode 59 and listen to my conversation with with Sarah and grounded myself in her love for amaranth and tried to make sure that I harvested fully mature seeds. I'll know in a couple of weeks once we've threshed them and done a germ test, but the plants looked really great. And the other thing that I want to talk about is it is time for the seed farmer mentorship to return the seed farmer mentorship is a guided learning experience designed to help you build confidence deep in your knowledge and grow better seed one crop at a time. There's seven modules at the core of the seed farmer mentorship. The first one is seed basics, she's a little bit of taxonomy and what you should know.

4:09But this mentorship is not primarily about taxonomy and growing seed crops. It's actually about a lot of the other stuff that you might not find in a seed book or in other seed resources. And that's kind of where like module two focuses on record keeping for seed harvest and cleaning, how to make sure you keep track of all of that module three is focused on germination tests, seed storage and inventory management. And module four is about crop planning to make sure that you have enough seed for for your own use and for any seed that you might sell, whether it's through a seed contract or through your own online seed store module five is about plant selection and on farm plant breeding module six is about sharing and selling seeds. And then module seven does come back and gets back into the actual growing of seeds and it's a module on seed harvest and cleaning techniques. But the core modules two through six are about a lot of other stuff than what's happening in the field. And I'm bringing you know 20 years of experience running a seed company and also running

5:13the farmer's spreadsheet academy and the overlap of those two things to to create resources to help you run this part of your seed operation. So that's the seed farmer mentorship and registration officially begins today. And when you sign up, you'll immediately have access to the modules. They're pre recorded. Some of the modules have I think the first module might have one video, but most of them have two to four videos and you can go through and you can binge right away if you want and do it all. But in addition to the modules, there are also live sessions. The first live session will be on October 22nd and in that live session, we're going to get into record keeping. So we'll review the videos and this will be a chance for you and your cohort to get into all your questions about record keeping based on the module videos, but then based on any other questions that you have. So that'll be the first live session on October 22nd.

6:13And then roughly every two weeks afterwards, there's a total of five live sessions that give you opportunities to exchange in real time and answer your questions about the different modules. And I've tried to time them so they kind of go through what you might be thinking about at specific times of the year. So kind of the first one is record keeping which year going to be wrapping up and which are actually focused this episode about also getting you to that point. And then the next one will get into germ tests, which you'll probably be doing by November so that you know what seed is good for the next year and so forth. So there's the seven modules, there's five live sessions and you can sign up as of now. And in addition to that, there will be a cohort of growers and this cohort will be a resource for you during the mentorship to support you with your work and to exchange with. And then also afterwards, you'll still be able to reach out and communicate with them. So I'd love to see you in the mentorship.

7:15You can click on the link in the show notes to get the full details of what's involved. And if you have any questions, feel free to email me them my way. And I guess that brings us to this mini-sode. So it's September and it is a busy time in the field. I bet you probably have to do lists that are way beyond anything that anybody could come to eat, not to mention. Well, I was going to say not to mention weeds that you don't want to look at, but who am I

8:18to presume what your fields look like? Maybe they are perfectly weeded and you can just see your straight rows and abundant crops. And that might be the case. So I won't assume about the weeds. But I do imagine that you have more things than you know what to do with and that it's a pretty busy time and that you're thinking about the weather, hoping it doesn't rain, you don't have an early frost and all those kinds of things. And here I am about to give you another little task to add to your to-do list. I'm going to do that because September is also when I think you should start reviewing your growing season because come November, it's time to plan next year. And that's when you want to be deep into it. To plan effectively, you need to understand what actually happened. And you probably have a good idea about how the growing season has happened. But come November, there'll be some things that you suddenly realize.

9:20You don't have as good a grasp on as maybe you wish you did. And you're going to realize that there are holes in your knowledge about your farm. When come November, it might be too late to get some of those pieces of information. And that's why September is about season review. Sometimes I call it a season review challenge to coach you through all of that. And if you want to think of as a challenge, go for it. There are four things that I think you really should be making sure that you have a good understanding of. One is what happened in the field. Two is what your team thinks happened in the field and on your farm. Three is how your sales channel is performed. And four is how your clients feel that your sales channel is performed. And your farm has delivered to them. And this week is about figuring out what happened on your farm this growing season. Essentially completing your farm records.

10:23And in a few weeks, maybe a month, we'll come back and talk about your clients and your sales channels. Now you're listening to a seed farmer podcast. And we're going to talk about this from a seed perspective. But everything I talk about in the season review challenge episodes applied just as much to any other kind of grower. You know, if you're a market grower growing vegetables or flowers, they're the same kind of things that you should be thinking about. So let's start about what happened in your field. Now you have a visceral experience of what's going on, hopefully positive, but also some negatives I bet depending how the season's gone. What you do want to know also is you want numbers. You want to actually know what happened. Now if you already had a great crop plan and you have great records of the season, maybe you already know what's gone on. But I know that not all of you do.

11:25And now I'm not making any assumptions about any individual listener here, but I know some of you don't have complete records. And perhaps even some of you don't even have any records. And that's what we're going to talk about here. What records do you want to make sure you have by the end of this season and that you want to go in and figure out how to replicate or maybe make up at this point in September a number of months into the growing season? What records should you have? Well, really the two records that I think you need to have are records related to what you planted and records related to what you harvested. What you're planting records need to have at the least is where you planted each crop and how many bed feet or what bed length you planted of that crop in each of those locations. If you're a market gardener, you also want to know roughly when you planted it.

12:29But as a seed grower, you don't care as much about the planting date. If you have a loose idea, that's pretty good. You know, it could be early May, mid May, early June. That's precise enough. So to complete these records, first off, if you have a crop plan for the growing season, well then you're in a really good beginning point. Go get your crop plan, print it out with what you expect or what you wanted to put in each bed of your field. Then take that crop plan, head out to the field. You could bring a cup of coffee if you want some kind of other beverage or maybe you shouldn't because you also want to have a pen on hand. Yeah, so maybe don't bring that beverage. You want to bring a clipboard, a clipboard with a printout of what you expect to be in the field. And you want to walk through your field and look to see, did you plant what you thought you were going to plant in that spot and modify that printout to represent reality? You might come to some areas that you've already tilled in and you don't remember what happened.

13:33Just write a note, maybe a couple of question marks beside it. And you could always ask your team about this so that they can help you rebuild the season after the fact. But if you're growing predominantly seed crops, there's probably a lot less successions than if you were a market grower. So it might be easier for you to put together what was in each of those spots. So just go through your field and validate whether you planted what you thought you were going to plant on the crop plan or not. You could also take this time to make notes about how good the planting was. Is it something that looks fantastic? And maybe you could put it on a one to 10 scale. So 10 being a crop that germinated well. So there's no major, major holes in the planting came to maturity with pretty good weed control and is looking healthy and had a good crop on it. And something that had germination problems in two thirds of it, but you kept because you

14:37wanted a little bit of that crop, maybe you put that a two or three. You figure out what that rating is from one to 10. But that's a way for you to get a bit of an idea of how well the crop performed when you're evaluating it later on or when you're thinking about it later on. Now if you didn't have a crop plan, you can still do the field walk and just start maybe with a piece of paper and go through and write, you know, bed one, what you see in it and how many bed feet and then give it a rating. And so you could do that through all your beds and then go back to your office and get this into a spreadsheet, get this into your computer so you can look at it digitally. So that's the first piece of records that you want is to have a record of what you planted, where you planted it and how much of it you planted and roughly when you planted it in the year. Also, you know, I mentioned writing down a rating from one to 10. You could also write if there is maybe another little column or another section.

15:43If there's a specific reason that some of these crops didn't do so well and if you already know what you should have done, just record that right away. This is not a time for you to go soul searching and to think deeply about it, but there's a crop that maybe you know that you didn't irrigate right away and it didn't germinate. You could just write a note about that and that's something that you can reflect on when you're doing your crop planning in the fall and make sure that your irrigation system is set up and working the way you want it to. So just note down if there's anything that you know you wish you had done differently already at this point and it's okay to not have any of those notes down as long as you have the bed feet and what crops it is. So that's your first set of records. Those are your field records. The other records are your harvest records. Now if you have not kept track of any of your harvest this season and you're a market grower, well that's a lot of information to go and try to put together after the fact.

16:49And in that case, maybe your best bet is to go and look at your sales records and assume what you sold is what you harvested. And that is a really good starting point if you have no better information. So that's just a thought for market growers. Now if you're a seed grower, there's a lot less harvests than a market grower has. And if you don't have great harvest records now, you are probably not in a dangerous situation of losing information. In fact, this early September, you may have barely threshed or cleaned any of your seed. They might be lying in piles on tarps in greenhouses or outbuildings or maybe still on the plants. Or maybe you have extracted some seed and it's sitting in bins or tubs waiting to get germ tested somewhere. And you're kind of ignoring it for the moment trying to bring other crops in.

17:51At least that's what I'm doing right now is I got a lot of bins that need a little bit of love that I'm not paying attention to while I just try to keep bringing crops into the from the field while the weather is good. And so in this case, what you really need to make sure you do is that you're going to want to have a sheet that has all the crops you grew and how much weight your final weight of each of those crops. Now if you have a bunch of individual harvests, you could keep track of those. But for a seed grower, the harvest dates aren't as important. I mean, they're definitely important as you're learning when to harvest a crop as you're building a relationship with it. The seed dates do matter, but ultimately the most important thing for your planning later on is what the final weight is. Because if you have that final weight, if you know that you harvested four or five kilograms of a brassica green out of a hundred or two hundred bed feet, then you can divide one

18:56by the other and you can get the yield. So let's say you harvested five kilograms out of, which is 5,000 grams out of 200 bed feet, which is not the right unit for grams, what we're going to do it anyway, but 5,000 grams divided by 200 bed feet comes out to 25 grams a bed foot. And that piece of information there is something you'll be able to use later on when you're planning for your next season. And on its own, and anyone giving season, you don't want to assume this is the absolute right yield for that crop. But as you build up years of data, you will start to get a good idea what to expect from a specific species when it's time to harvest it and also from different varieties of that species on your farm. So this information is invaluable. So now is the time to set up some sheets on our farm, the way it works is we have a

19:58nursery that we use after we finished with the seedlings and we use it to dry down seed crops out of the rain. And that's where I do a lot of threshing and we wind up with a bunch of bins there. And then we send bins of seed from there into our seed warehouse. And in the seed warehouse is a receiving area. I put them on this palette and Emily goes through and she weighs everything and puts it into another area and takes a germ test sample. And so that's the point where we get that information. You can set something up like that and make sure you have a clipboard where some means of recording that weight when you take it. So there you are, two simple pieces of information that you want to get, which is your bed length and your seed weight. It's nice to know where they happened and it's nice to know when they happened, but the length and the weight is the most important thing for you as a seed grower. If you're a market grower, you probably want to spend a little bit more extra time to

20:59capture all those when things happened, you know, when the harvest happened, when the planting happened to make sure you understand how your successions work. But it's not as important for a seed farmer. And I think you're now ready to head out to the field and go check how many bed feet you've planted of each of your crops. And with that, you've begun your season review challenge. And that's episode 83 of the seed farmer podcast. I hope you do take the time to go and fill in your planting and your harvest records. If you are wondering about harvest records and how to have a more elaborate system for keeping track of your seed harvest, that is something that we're going to start off. That's module two of the seed farmer mentorship. So that's one way that you can get more resources and tools to do this part of your seed work. All the details about the seed farmer mentorship are in the show notes and registration has begun.

21:59Thank you to Sephya said Dalton for the theme music. You can hear more of their music at Sephya said Dalton.com. Thank you to Molly Breezebwe for editing this episode. And thank you so much for joining me in these conversations with seed farmers. You can find more seed growing resources on my blog at seedgrower.farm. While you're there, you can subscribe to my newsletter full of seed growing crop planting and farm spreadsheets. You can also find out where to order a copy of my book, the seed farmer, a complete guide to growing using and selling your own seed. And you can support the show at spreadsheet.farm slash support podcast. If you haven't already subscribed, now's the time. You wouldn't want to miss the next episode. Until then, happy farming.