How to hit that Sales Goal

Posted on by goingtoseed

Part 2 in my Planning Your Growing Season series. (Part 1 is here)

Yesterday, you set a profitable Sales Goal for your farm.

Today you determine how you’re going to hit that Sales Goal.

The simple answer: Bring a pile of vegetables somewhere. People take those veggies and give you money. (You may find that this experience is much more pleasant by tossing in a little chit chat and a smile that brightens your eyes over your mask.)

Let’s make that a little bit more actionable:

  1. Think about where you’ll be taking those vegetables
  2. Determine how much of your Sales Goal do you want to earn from that place.

Let’s say you run a CSA ..

If your season is 20 weeks long and you value each week at $30, your share price would be $600 per member.

To hit $33K in sales, you need 55 members. ($33 000 ÷ $600/member)

Let’s say you sell all your produce through a Farmers Market …

If your season was 25 weeks long, you would need to make $1320 per week.
($33 000 ÷ 25 weeks)

And of course, you might run a CSA and go to market!

(30 CSA members x $600 and 25 weeks x $600/week would do the trick.)

That was simple enough.

But we’re not done.

  1. Make a weekly plan for your CSA and your market.

This is when you head to your spreadsheets!.

For each week, plan out what crops you want to sell at that time of year, and how much you would need to sell to hit your weekly target.

(The SUMPRODUCT formula is a great tool to calculate your total sales for each week.)

Try to hit your weekly sales targets right from the beginning of the season. It can be easy to accept lower early season sales and bank on peak summer yields. But this can be a recipe for heartbreak.

In my 20 years of farming, August hasn’t always delivered. There were a few seasons where the summer just never got hot enough for tomatoes to really take off, and big hail storms that knocked out promising crops, and I won’t mention the weeds in the onions that one year.

So choose a crop mix that hits your sales targets from the start of the season.

Once, you’ve planned out your sales season, it’s time to figure out how you’re going to grow the vegetables that you plan on selling.

And we’ll do that soon in Part 3!

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