Many people spend the first week or two of early January making plans for the coming year, and farmers are no different. Planning and scheduling are two of the ways humans endeavor to accomplish the impossible goal of predicting the future and preparing for it. But those tasks are also critical to getting as much as possible done, as efficiently as possible.
The person who came up with the term “Better late than Never” was not a farmer. In agriculture, it’s more often true that “Late = Never”. Plants and crops set their own schedules and farmers have to follow them. Playing catch-up is not a thing.
We don’t start each year at Terra Firma with a blank slate. First and foremost, we have our “permanent crops” — orchards and vineyards. They are the backbone of our annual schedule because they are always there. Even if we lose the crop, they still require TLC at critical points of the year: pruning, irrigation, fertilizing and weed management.
The crops we have to plant each year are more flexible, but we start with a template from the previous year with deadlines for buying seed, ordering transplants, and planting. But the critical details: how much to plant and what varieties to plant, changes every year.
Because of our year-round harvest schedule, the planning process never ends. We evaluate each crop as we are harvesting it and make changes to the plan for the next season in real-time. But as they say about the stock market, past performance is not a guarantee of anything — and that is even more true in farming. The weather is the biggest factor, but it’s also the easiest to identify. For example, this January we are having quite possibly the best Broccoli harvest we’ve ever seen. We’ve had apparently an ideal amount of rain combined with warm days and mild nights, causing the plants to explode in growth and produce some enormous heads. The broccoli has also been maturing more quickly than usual for January.
As a result of these “Goldilocks” conditions, our crew has not been able to quite keep up with all the Broccoli, despite picking it nearly every day. But that doesn’t mean that we planted “too much”. Many years in January, the broccoli grows so slowly that we only harvest it every other week. The heads are smaller, and it takes much longer to fill up a box. If we cut back on next year’s plantings based on this year’s bumper crop, we would almost certainly end up regretting it.
The same phenomenon holds in reverse. If we have a crop that produces too little one year due to weather conditions, we don’t change the plan to plant more the following year. But if it happens two years in a row, then we take a serious look at the plans and consider whether we need to make changes to ensure we have adequate production to meet our demands.
2025 is beginning very differently than either of its two predecessors. January can be one of the wettest months of the year here, and it certainly was in 2024 and 2023. But many years it is dry for most of the month — I call that the “January Dry Spell”. That makes planning difficult. For example, if we order transplants for delivery January 15th, it may not be dry enough to plant them. The same is true of other tasks on the farm, everything from pruning to weeding. Harvest is the only task we can actually accomplish when it’s raining.
So most of our plans for this first month of the year are conservative and contigent: we have a sketch, an outline, and a list of priorities. Having dry weather in January means we can get some things done now that other years don’t get done until February or March — and some years don’t get done at all. For example, we can plant Lettuce in January and it will mature before it gets too hot. If it’s wet in January and February, we miss that opportunity: even March 1st is too late to plant lettuce here. That means that we will have a few more items available for your boxes in early Spring than we otherwise would.
I am not worried yet that this January Dry Spell will last into February and beyond. We truly needed it to dry out after the very wet period that ended 2024, and it’s a welcome change from the soggy conditions of the two past Januaries.
Thanks,