Business plans

Worked examples

What a good answer to the hard sections sounds like. These are examples we wrote to be read — not real farms, and not plans anyone submitted.

These are examples, not real farms

Nobody wrote these but us, and no farm here is a real operation. There are no figures in them either — not a yield, not a price, not a projection. A number in an example gets read as a number that is roughly right, and what is roughly right for your ground is not something we can tell you. Where a figure would go, the example says what the figure has to come from instead, which is usually the part people are actually stuck on.

Two growers in straw hats standing together in a field of young crops, talking, with the sun low behind them.

Read them, then write your own. There is deliberately no button that copies this text into your plan: a plan carrying our sentences under your name is a plan you cannot answer questions about, and answering questions is what the meeting consists of.

Example: a two-acre market garden going direct to consumers

A small vegetable operation moving from a single weekly market stall to a mix of market, CSA and restaurant sales. Written to show what a direct-to-consumer plan sounds like when the writer knows their own customers.

7 sections worked through.

Read it

Example: adding a preserved-product line to an existing farm

A fruit grower adding jams and pickles to sell alongside fresh produce. Written to show how a value-added plan handles processing, labelling and the fact that the new enterprise competes with the old one for the same hours.

5 sections worked through.

Read it