For the past few years I've been trying to learn the gardening/farming trade with hands on experience and some additional study. We've got a 2,500 square foot garden now (50x50) and I've been using no-till methods and cover crops to condition the soil for planting. My approach isn't perfect, and yields a mix of success and failures, but one thing that is working is our strawberry patch. Right now it's about 400 square feet and it produced about 40 pounds of berries this year, and did similarly well last year.
It seems plausible that I can scale that up and bootstrap the whole thing with minimal investment. I can ramp it up over the next few years so I can scale infrastructure and hone my methods and grow a market too.
It seems plausible that an acre of strawberries on my property could produce 4,000 pounds or so of berries, which might sound like a lot, but consider that some farms in California can produce 50,000 pounds per acre! It really varies state to state because of the local climate and growing season length, of course.
Regardless, 4000 pounds is pretty good. As a back of the envelope number maybe if the berries are processed into jam or retailed directly, I might end up grossing $20,000 per acre. (that's probably optimistic). Even if it's $10,000 per acre, that's not bad at all.
My key challenge will be growing the berries in an environment that's chock full of critters. My casual observation is the animals aren't crazy for the berries the same way they are about blueberries. Some losses are to be expected, especially since I won't fence the areas, but I'm going to try to grow the berries among cover crops and see how well that works to get the patch established and producing without losses.
If I can get that method dialed in, acres of production is really feasible. So I've got my first experimental patch underway this summer and we'll see how it goes.
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