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2018 - The Farm

Well, I've been gone a few years from the board, and away from growing peppers, but looks like life is pushing me back that way again. 
 
I recently (last month) closed on a 25 acre farm in Central Illinois with some primo soil, and I'm going to give a commercial grow a test run. 
 
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From up on the roof, when I was doing some roof repairs on the outbuildings. Not much as far as the eye can see, but cornfields...
 
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Has a 4 stall garage and a horse stable on the property
 
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Probably do my grow room upstairs here after I insulate it
 
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Built some doors for the horse barn and patched the roof last month
 
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Anyway just dropped a cold grand on seeds from pepperlover and buckeye, going to hit a greenhouse supplier up for other materials next week.
 
Have plans to build a 30x72' greenhouse in the spring, and a ~1200 sq foot dedicated grow room. Too late really to help with this year's grow, but next year it'll save me a lot of hassle on hardening off. 
 
The greenhouse, I am going to do a piped infloor heat slab, with a horizontal loop geothermal system (I own a mini excavator) that is solar powered. So heating should be nice, uniform, not create heat / cold bubbles, and not dry out plants like forced air would. I build circuit boards in my day job, so I will also build a microcontroller to handle the automated watering system with soil moisture monitors and actuated plumbing valves on the water supply.
 
Also plan on building a "deep winter" greenhouse for year round production. Got blueprints I made from a couple of years back, those are walled on three sides with heavy duty insulation, with the glass wall side angled to face winter solstice, so you can grow in the deep freeze months of the north. In the summer, those get hot enough to use as a natural dehydrator, replace the tables with racks for bulk drying.
 
Only doing a half acre or so of peppers to start with this year, the balance will be put in corn. I can't manage more than that with the labor I have available. (When you start talking thousands of plants, simple tasks like up-potting grow in to hundreds or thousands of man hours...)
 
Going to hire some local kids to help, school has a good ag co-op program for high schoolers, they can get school credit working on local farms. Since the plant out and harvest doesn't conflict too badly with corn, shouldn't have a problem finding labor around here.
 
Anyway, that's the plans.
 
We'll see how it goes.. er.. grows.
 
 
PtMD989 said:
Glad to see everything coming together. Plants are looking great [emoji106]. How many farmers markets do you sell at? Does the weed blocker keep the mud down when you get the heavy rain fall?



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Yeah there's zero mud, and zero rain splatter on to plants. Which is good for a number of reasons, such as fungus.  If I let tomatoes go in my yard like I am at the farm, they'd be full of blight. They're OK so far at the farm, the ground cover helps keep things clean.
 
PodHopper said:
How are you going to go about saving seeds?  Will you shield some to keep seeds true?
 
We're going to screen this building in.
 
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Ghaleon said:
The suspense is making me crazy! With how long it's been since the last update, you know this thread is in for some probably awesome pics.
 
 
saiias said:
I was starting to think id there was some issue with my phone. Lol.

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Ethansm said:
Yeah I'm not going to lie, I've begun to miss my morning routine of coffee and catching up on this thread haha
 
 
No there's nothing wrong with your television set, do not attempt to adjust the antenna... there's a good reason for the hiatus! 
 
Wed July 18 a worker came out to the farm sick, wife sent him home. July 19, our younger son (18 yo) who works at the farm came down sick and went home. July 20, *I* came down sick, and did not work.
 
I was horribly sick from July 20 through July 25, only ate and held down two meals over the course of six days. Because so many workers were sick I declared the farm OFF LIMITS to all workers and laid everyone off for a week. We resumed operations on July 26 with a general clean up day, every surface, every tool, every handle, every EVERYTHING was bleached.
 
We destroyed the harvest from July 20th (wife and son's fiancee were the only two who worked that day, they harvested 5 bushels of peppers). Was sad seeing 5 bushels get chucked but I couldn't risk selling anything with so many workers being sick that week. So we were absent from farmers markets July 21, and July 25th.  
 
Resumed harvest Friday July 27, 65 man hours, to get things ready for our grand opening of the retail area on Wednesday Aug 1st. Took some of it to the market in Lincoln IL on Sat July 28 and did reasonably well for a change; sold a bushel of peppers, a bushel of cucumbers, a peck of okra, and all of our watermelons...
 
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(This was from an hour after open we'd already sold out of several types of peppers, etc)
 
Because I was sick the Friday before last, and was so busy harvesting this last Friday, I didn't get our "weekly pictures" taken and uploaded. 
 
But I will try to catch up this week. We're doing three markets this week as well as having our grand opening of the retail area.
 
Oh! I got our first Grocery store deal and took them a bushel of produce Saturday to start the ball rolling there.
 
We harvested NINE BUSHELS of cucumbers Friday.
 
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So at least money is starting to slowly move in the other direction now. Not enough to stem the tide of expenses but at least ONE finger in the crack in the dam.... actually had $400+ in revenue Friday and Saturday. 
 
A guy who makes beef jerky stopped by the farm Friday while we were picking and bought a half bushel of cayenne off of us.
 
Everyone is loving our watermelons, that's definitely a crop going in again next year in larger qty... easy to harvest, easy to sell, and making $15 a piece off of one pick is MUCH easier than making $4 off of a quart of peppers that takes 20 minutes to pick, or $3 in Okra that takes a half a damn hour to cut off the plants... :)
 
Hopefully as the harvest picks up steam, we can actually make a buck or two?
 
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Produce is bigger than my dedicated produce washing sink :)
 
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Some good looking melons coming out of the north field, these are 25+ lb Crimson Sweets
 
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This is what we took to market yesterday, came home a lot lighter than when we left!
 
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Your farm journey is nothing short of a tv series Trent. I feel like you missed a golden oppirtunity. You should have filmed everything and could have become next duck dynasty.

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First year is always going to be hard, but i am sure next year will have much better success rate, because you have already dialed in some of your growing methods and what nutrients works best for you.
 
Been away, for a few days. Good to see things are doing well up your way!
 
If the maters were that tight here snakes would be an issue for sure ;)
 
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