Starting a Strawberry Farm

Summary: 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.