Preparing the 2021 farm crops

The fall on the farm had some ups and downs. I was able to get peppers to market from late summer to November. I sold wholesale to a local supermarket but the price fetched was not that great at $2 dollars a pound. Weekly I would take about 20 pounds to that supermarket. I tried a lot of different venues but with COVID there were simply not many buyers. Wholesalers kept saying they were full, some would actually tell me they didn’t sell the product when I could see it on their shelves. “Locally” sourced places would actually source their stuff from non-local places. It is frustrating. I have read many books and listened to podcasts about farming and the hardest part is finding a market. This is where I am now for produce. I have found ready markets for sheep and goats but not fresh produce. My original plan was to sell to restaurants, COVID made that kind of difficult in 2020. Hopefully, 2021 brings some new customers.

Getting a New Barn

I am now focusing more on capital improvements to the farm. I will be building another 24 x 105 high tunnel in March and will start work on a new 48×30 barn in April. Two big expensive projects. I am going to switch focus to fixing some fencing for the goat pen, building a small shelter for the goats in the pen for kidding, and electrifying about 1500 feet on the outside perimeter of the farm to help manage coyote attacks. For the high tunnels, I have a potential restaurant customer that wants cilantro so I will be planting more of that in one high tunnel and will start germinating both orange and red habanero peppers in racks for transplanting in May to the second high tunnel. That might seem late but I have found that at least here in Florida you can sell your peppers pretty much until early fall.

Finally I will be posting more updates regularly on the website, if you have any questions on what i have been doing or what i have learned, if you have read this far then you can email me at abdiel@abdielsalvafarms-us

Regards,

Juan