New Sweet Corn Producer has Production and Marketing Success

by Glen Roberts

Planning Unit:  Wayne County CES

Major Program:  Horticulture , Commercial (1051)

 Collaborators: Vegetable farmer, His family, ANR Agent, ANR assistant, Farmers Market

Situation: Farmer is marketing at the local farmers market lots of produce but no sweet corn.  Customers keep asking for sweet corn and is not usually available at the farmers market..  With encouragement from the ANR agent and assistant the grower decides to grow and market sweet corn.  The extension staff and the grower and his two sons meet to discuss the process for a successful venture as they add sweet corn to their operation.  They start will a soil test and follow those recommendations with fertilizer applications.  They have rented a sod field to plant in and the ANR agent makes herbicide recommendations based on the challenges of getting the old sod killed.  As the ANR agent predicted it took two applications of burn down to get the field ready to plant.  The grower borrowed a shared use corn planter from the County Extension pool of equipment to plant his sweet corn seed.  The vacuum planter had been acquired 20 years ago with a grant for local producers to be able to plant pumpkins.  It is still used for that, but it has many other plates as well.  The sweet corn came up well and the herbicide recommendations from extension took care of annual weeds and grass.  The grower had to hand weed some perennial weeds that were not controlled by the herbicides applied .  This is a normal condition for old sod hay fields.  The crop grew well and the grower was able to harvest and market the sweet corn for three weekends at the local Farmers Market.  For the most part it was the only sweet corn there and he sold out each day.  He marketed all of the large ears for $4.00 per dozen and a few smaller ears for $3.00 per dozen.  His total yield was 1,000 dozen and he sold it for $3750.  His total out of pocket cost for everything was $1250.  He and his family had a return of $2500 for their investment and labor.  That was excellent and they were well pleased.  Farmers market customers were delighted to be able to purchase high quality sweet corn from a local producer that they had already knew.  While they were making other purchases at the Farmers Market they could get their sweet corn too.  A win/win for both.