Courtesy of Roxanne C., Philadelphia PA Advocates inside and outside the farming industry are getting more and more creative with the words they use to instigate debate, engage supporters and propel change. There is even a lexicon of sustainability to help understand them all. SPIN salutes all these words, and...
Courtesy of Wally S., Wally’s Urban Market Garden, Saskatoon SK My post last week on how farming is no different than any other small business prompted a lot of questions on what my secret was to managing it all. It’s no secret and can be learned by anyone through the...
Courtesy of Wally S., Wally’s Urban Market Garden, Saskatoon SK I just put in a couple of segments of potatoes this week. Norland and Yukon Gold. I’ll probably plant 10 segments total, or about 10,000 square feet. That should give me  over 600 lbs. of potatoes. My potato cropping strategy...
Courtesy of Roxanne C., Philadelphia PA Established livestock farmers looking to diversify into crop production find their way to SPIN-Farming for the same reasons new vegetable farmers do – SPIN-type operations are quick to set up and produce income. But before established SPIN farmers diversify into livestock, they should apply the same...
Courtesy of Wally S., Wally’s Urban Market Garden, Saskatoon SK In part 1 of this blog I explained that SPIN turns a garden into a cash generator by showing gardeners how to value their production and set a revenue target. Now I’ll explain how to turn that revenue target into...
Courtesy of Wally S., Wally’s Urban Market Garden, Saskatoon SK SPIN-Farming reduces the amount of land needed for commercial crop production to garden size plots. It is therefore sometimes confused with square foot gardening, but SPIN involves something new. It provides gardeners with a way to put an economic value...
Courtesy of Roxanne C., Philadelphia PA Still high from a full season of farming conferences, and primed by government funded training programs, new farmers are now heading back to the land to pursue their farm dreams. Most often they include a farmstead set amid rolling hills, a lone tractor silhouetted against...
Courtesy of Roxanne C., Philadelphia PA The advantage of using a system like SPIN-Farming is that it provides benchmarks to guide your business and measure your progress in highly specific terms. Let’s take a look at what comprises SPIN’s benchmarks, and how they all add up. SPIN’s units of production...
Courtesy of Roxanne C., Philadelphia PA We have said before that SPIN is performance-based, which means that success is measurable. The traditional and often used benchmark in farming is yield. Certainly the amount of crops you produce is important. But to succeed as a business, what is most important is...
Courtesy of Wally S., Wally’s Urban Market Garden, Saskatoon SK We often get asked, “Should I make all of my beds SPIN-size?” SPIN’s “standard size bed“ is a theoretical construct, as well as a practical one. Its dimensions are 2 feet wide by 25 feet long. This bed size is...
