Success StoryKentucky Vegetable and Melon Budgets Update



Kentucky Vegetable and Melon Budgets Update

Author: Christy Cassady

Planning Unit: Horticulture

Major Program: Commercial Horticulture

Outcome: Intermediate Outcome

Kentucky is home to 30,480 farms of 49 or fewer acres (Census of Agriculture, 2017), 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 have been distributed at conferences in Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia since January of 2018 to accommodate growers who do not have internet access. From November of 2017 through June of 2019, the Vegetable and Melon Budgets page that contains the PDFs has been accessed 1,211 times, while the small-scale budget spreadsheets have been downloaded 1,191 times and the large-scale spreadsheets have been downloaded 1,076 times. As part of a 2018 Kentucky Specialty Crop Block Grant, a Budgeting and Planning: How to Use CCD Budgets workshop was offered at the 2019 Kentucky Fruit and Vegetable Conference. Twenty-three people attended the training, with 16 completing a workshop evaluation. All 16 rated the workshop as good or excellent, with 15 indicating that they would incorporate practices they learned in the workshop into their businesses.






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