Author: Christy Cassady
Planning Unit: Horticulture
Major Program: Commercial Horticulture
Outcome: Intermediate Outcome
Kentucky is home to 53,967 farms of fewer than 140 acres (Census of Agriculture, 2012), and the state’s small farmers rely on up-to-date production and marketing information to help them make the best decisions for their operations. Part of that decision-making process involves determining which crops to grow based on profit potential. Enterprise budgets are tools that farmers can use to help make those decisions. As part of a 2016 Kentucky Specialty Crop Block Grant from the Kentucky Department of Agriculture, the Center for Crop Diversification (CCD) updated its budgets for 18 vegetable and melon crops, which are set up on a per-acre basis, and developed a second set of budgets for small-scale production, based on a 100-foot row. The budgets, which are interactive spreadsheets that growers can download and complete in Excel, were posted on the CCD website in November of 2017. PDFs of each crop budget were also made available on the website for growers who prefer to complete them by hand. Paper copies of both sets of budgets were distributed at conferences in Kentucky, Illinois, Ohio and Tennessee during the winter of 2018, to accommodate growers who do not have Internet access. Since November of 2017, the Vegetable and Melon Budgets page that contains the PDFs has been accessed 576 times, while the small-scale budget spreadsheets have been downloaded 478 times and the large-scale spreadsheets have been downloaded 449 times.