Farmer: Mat Ladegaard
Farm: Groundstone Farm
Location: Nambe, NM
Farm Size: ¾ acre
Tell us about your experience with season extension.
For the first two years I was farming, I was just leasing land, so I didn’t feel like I could invest in season extension, but when my partner bought the land I farm on now, I was able to get a grant from NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Service) to put in a high tunnel, which was a huge deal for me. I definitely suggest trying to get this funding through EQIP, but even if you can’t get the funding, I would still recommend that people get one because it’s pretty much the best return on investment for infrastructure on a farm.
The kits to build them are $13,000, and then there’s some other costs like lumber, a door, and labor that bring it to about $20,000. The NRCS grant covered about 50% of that cost. But even without the funding it’s a good investment because you can easily grow $20,000 worth of product in the tunnel in just one summer, so it’s a pretty fast return on investment–and that’s not even counting growing in the winter, when you wouldn’t have been able to grow at all. And I don’t heat my tunnels, so I don’t have any expense around that.
How challenging was it to put up the tunnels?
I have three 96-by-34-foot plots tunnels, and it was pretty easy because it comes in a kit. At the time I didn’t have much framing experience, so I hired someone to do that for me, but I probably could do that now. And it was a good way to pay my employees during the winter to do building projects.
I know some farmers try to do their season extension with smaller caterpillar tunnels, but it’s much harder to grow in those and you just can’t get the soil as warm that way.
What’s the learning curve like for growing in the tunnel?
Growing in the tunnels didn’t feel like a huge learning curve, it just takes a little practice figuring out how to deal with the light and the weather. I grow cucumbers and tomatoes in the high tunnel during the summer. In the winter, if I want to grow lettuce, it takes about three times as long as it would during the summer because there’s so much less light. So if you want to have a winter harvest, you’ve gotta take out the cucumbers and tomatoes early enough to get the greens to grow about three quarters of the way before Thanksgiving, otherwise you just won’t get a crop in the winter.
Johnny’s Selected Seeds has a winter growing guide that tells you how much light there is based on your latitude and helps you calculate how long you’ll need for each crop. And I don’t heat my tunnels so it was a bit of trial and error to see which crops could withstand the cold.
And I will say that high tunnels take a lot of management. You definitely need to already know how to grow things to be able to leverage them well, but if you do manage them well, you’ll have better crops in the summer and more and better crops in the winter. A lot of that is ventilation. A lot of people under-ventilate their tunnels.
In the summer, a well-ventilated high tunnel should be cooler inside than outside. But if you don’t ventilate well, the opposite will be true. And in the winter, if you don’t ventilate properly, you’ll get a lot of diseases. So that means you have to roll up the sides every single morning and roll them back down every single night.
It took me five years, but I finally got automatic roll-up sides, which were pretty easy to install and cost about $5,000 for three tunnels. They’re connected to a thermostat and will automatically go up or down based on the temperature. This is super useful. Before I had them, I had an experience once where I went to the farmers’ market and the person that was supposed to open the tunnel didn’t, and it was like an 80-degree May day and everything that was in it (including my nursery and propagation plants) got totally fried.
After that I installed fans with thermostats, which is a lower investment, about $1,000 per fan. I have one 60” exhaust fan per tunnel right at the peak of the tunnel, so it basically sucks the hot air out. You can also get smaller fans throughout the tunnel that circulate the air to move oxygen and carbon dioxide around.
How do you decide what to plant in the tunnels during the summer vs. outside?
The tunnels make it really easy to trellis plants, so I put tomatoes and cucumbers in there because they spread so much and it improves quality. I have even grown beets and lettuce in the tunnels in the summer because the dappled light can keep them healthier. But mostly I do the summer crops in the tunnels so that I can get a head start on them. So it’s February now, and I already have my tomatoes started in the nursery part of the tunnel, and they’ll go into the ground in April, which is like six weeks earlier than I could plant them outside. The nursery zone has tables with heat mats and row covers so I can do my starts even when it’s quite cold.
Who do you go to for help when something isn’t working properly?
I buy a lot of stuff from Nolts Midwest Supply. They’re a Mennonite company based in Iowa and their prices are much better than The Home Depot, and I’ll often call them with a problem, and they help me troubleshoot.
What tools or strategies do you use for efficiency in your business?
I could always be better at it, but I think the most important thing for efficiency is proper planning. When I first started, I bought a lot of things, and I see a lot of new farmers spending a ton of money on equipment, but they never recoup their investment because they’re not doing proper crop planning. You need to know you’re growing something that can actually generate enough income.So you need to have a good overall plan, and then each week you need to have a solid plan. I walk around the farm every Sunday and just look to see what needs to get done. That’s especially important if you have employees so that when they show up, you already know exactly what you want them to do.
Like in the summer, I’ll have five to six employees on and I pay them $18 an hour, so that’s like $120 an hour. And if you don’t have everyone totally set up to do what you need them to do, it’s a huge waste of money.
Apart from that, some tools that help with efficiency are the paper pot transplanter which is a cool Japanese tool. The BCS walk-behind is really helpful and easy to transport. The Jangseeder is great.
Have you done budgets for your crops?
Years ago, I did make a set of enterprise budgets for my five key crops. You can do the crops individually or do a combined one for similar kinds of crops. I read some of the small farm business handbooks when I first started farming and learned the basics of how to do enterprise planning. You should know your basic overhead costs and at least a decent estimation of how much labor and input each crop takes. I know some people feel really overwhelmed with a whole big spreadsheet, but even having a back-of-the-napkin estimate is super helpful. It’s really important to know that you’re able to actually make money on your key crops.
And there are certain metrics I have. I try to keep my labor to 25 to30% of my gross income and I think that’s pretty good for a farm. When people are harvesting, they need to be able to harvest $100 worth of product per hour.
So if I’m harvesting radishes and they sell for $4 a bunch, I need to make sure my employees can harvest 25 bunches per hour. That number should probably be updated because I’ve been using it for eight years. It’s not so important that the numbers are 100% accurate, but it is important that you’re thinking about it and that some of the numbers are adding up. You’ll exhaust yourself if you go too deep into the number- crunching.
And then there’s always a calculus of how much do you do yourself versus hiring other people. There were a few years where I was already scaling up but didn’t hire much extra help and I got really burnt out during that time. During these past couple of years I’ve maybe overhired, but I have young kids so I think it’s necessary. For example,I have someone that does the market for me every week and that makes a huge difference in my quality of life. So you have to find that balance for yourself.
What do you wish you had known sooner as a farmer?
I wish I had taken a class on QuickBooks and gotten more familiar with bookkeeping earlier.. Now I’m okay with it, but I wish I had set things up better from the beginning.
What do you think has made your business succeed all these years?
I think I’ve been really lucky to have such a good market to sell at. I think I would be really struggling as a farmer if selling my produce was a challenge, honestly I don’t think I’d still be in business. And I’m grateful to all the people and organizations who have worked to make the Santa Fe farmers’ market such a good outlet.
