Starting
a commercial strawberry farm takes interest, experience and capital. If
you are planning to cultivate strawberries for profit, you must
undertake intense preparation to get off to a good start.
Prepare yourself for this task by having your questions about strawberry farming answered reading our basic guide.
Strawberry Farm Startup Needs
Starting
a commercial strawberry farm is not for everyone. It requires a special
interest in strawberry farming and selling, years of experience in
strawberry growing, and a lot of capital. You’d need some $1,000 to
raise an acre of strawberries. You’d need to purchase or lease at least a
few acres of land and get the equipment to cultivate a crop. You’d need
a tractor, spreader, bedder, pickup truck, irrigation system, mowers,
and sprayers. These equipments cost a lot if you buy them, that’s why
some farmers opt to rent instead. More importantly, you have to have the
experience in growing strawberries, perhaps by learning it from
childhood if your family already owns an orchard or by working for one
strawberry farm for a long time. Experience and knowledge are needed to
grow a sensitive crop as a strawberry.
Strawberry Cultivation Basics
Strawberry
planting and harvesting often can take up to a year. You’d need to go
through several stages of planning, planting, cultivating and
harvesting. To start a farm, you’d need to prepare your soil for
strawberry growing. Check on the kind of soil you have by performing a
soil test. Strawberries prefer loam soil, particularly sandy loam soil.
Knowing your soil type and composition will help you decide how to
prepare it for cultivation. You might need to broadcast lime in order to
adjust its pH to the preferred pH strength of 6 by strawberries. Then
you need to apply fertilizer and fumigate the soil to control weed
growth. You’ll need to spray fungicides and insecticides later when the
strawberries have grown. A major task in strawberry farming is the
installation of irrigation and sprinkler system for the water needs of
the plant. All these processes could take almost a year. But there are
also varieties that ripen in shorter times. The Chandler variety is the
most commonly preferred variety because of its adaptability to the
climate.
Because
of the complexity needed in growing a crop like strawberry, intense
preparation is necessary. In order to successfully start a farm, someone
planning to do so should come up with a business plan to contain all
the necessary aspects of the business. The business plan should include
information on what kind of strawberry farming system will be used, the
orchard layout, the farming timetable, marketing strategy and the
financial analysis for the farm.
The
financial aspect should include the variable costs for seeds,
fertilizer, pesticide, labor, and overhead; and the fixed costs such as
money spent for acquiring land, and paying depreciation, taxes and
insurance.
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