Diary of a Young Farmer: April’s Cash Crop
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
Written by Zoe Bradbury, from Our Friends at Edible Portland Magazine
Zoë Bradbury left her urban job in Portland to start farming on the south coast of Oregon. She’s blogging here about her experiences. Below is her fifth entry in Diary of a Young Farmer.
As Zoe experiences the springtime cash flow crisis, the USDA offers no help
The generic plot goes something like this: farmers spend lots of money in the spring, then make it back in the summer and fall.
Springtime = money out. Harvest time = money in.
Unfortunately, there’s a months-long vacuum between “money out” and “money in,” seeing as most crops take at least eight weeks to reach maturity. My carrots promise that they are 57 days to maturity, my tomatoes 80 days, and my asparagus, well, we’re talking two years till they’re ready.
Amidst all of this waiting for veggies to grow on, size up, and get ripe, money has been hemorrhaging out of my pockets to pay for one-time startup expenses, like my greenhouse and irrigation system, and for annual operating expenses, like seeds and soil Jim, my regional FSA agent, asked me all about my farm over the phone. How many acres, and is it leased ground, and what am I growing, and how long have I been at it? After I finished up with the details, Jim hesitated. They’d like to be able to give me a low-interest loan, he explained, but there were a few problems.
First off, if I wanted to spend the money on something permanent – like a buried irrigation main – well, they couldn’t give me the loan because my farm is technically on leased land.
The next bad news: the loan amount they could offer me, explained Jim, would be determined according to my projected income, which they calculate by multiplying my predicted crop yields by the state commodity prices for each crop. (more…)
