Coordinator: Kristine Swaren, Canadian Organic Growers, Ottawa, ON, Canada
Project location: Canada

Summary
Crop planning for the organic market garden has many variables including variety selection, season length, climate conditions, soil, moisture, start-up versus ongoing land use, grower skills, continuous or determinate harvests, integration of field and greenhouse, markets (e.g. CSA customers, farmgate or market, institutional sales), etc. Pulling all these planning elements together with organic management methods of crop rotation and soil building is a challenge.

This project will produce a handbook Crop Planning for the Organic Market Garden (for publication June 2009) that details the planning elements and provides guidelines for various Canadian bioregions, designed to enable producers to increase their organic production and markets. COG’s objective is to present research results with farmer experience to make practical information available to organic and transitioning growers.

The practical skills handbook will get technical information into the hands of as many growers as possible. This will be measured by:

1. Sales, both direct and wholesale;
2. Reviews and recommendations given in various farm media and resources centres for organic and conventional growers;
3. Addition of new distribution channels.

Informed growers will be enabled to increase their production, acreage and/or markets – which is also a COG objective. This will be measured by:
1) COG’s annual survey of organic production
2) Statistics Canada (federal government)census data

A final report describing the results of this project is expected in February 2010.