Open Enterprise Budgets

AppleSeed Permaculture designs diversified organic farms using permaculture principles and processes. Our designs integrate agroforestry, keyline planning, holistic management, biodynamics, aquaculture, and restoration agriculture.

We also install 1000-tree nut groves, plant permaculture food forests, dig earthen ponds, and more – whatever it takes to bring your farm to the next level. And, we do farm business planning to figure out how to make it all profitable.
Now, we’re collaborating with the good folks on FarmHack.net to offer new tools for the farming community: Open Enterprise Budgets. These tools are not for deep ripping or easy weeding – they’re economic. They’ll help you understand the numbers and choose profitable crops. They’ll help you make smart decisions and avoid costly mistakes. Basically, they’ll help you do less work and make more money.

Unlike standard enterprise budgets, which often offer an average of many farms’ finances and are focused on large-scale conventional agriculture, Open Enterprise Budgets use an online wiki-like format to preserve the diversity of different farms’ experiences. You can view a full range of financial realities and use them for your own farm planning. You can also contribute your own financial data, improving the overall usefulness of the tool for other farmers. For the first time, small farmers and organic farmers can pool their knowledge to create budget tools appropriate for their scale and management practices.

Extensions officers and university folks who have created the bulk of all enterprise budgets to date (Thank you!!!) are equally welcome to participate, adding your perspective and considerable knowledge alongside the voices of farmers who are on the ground growing food.

These budgets will stay up-to-date and relevant to farms of scales and management practices, simply by crowdsourcing (crowdfarming?) real time data from farmers around the world.

To view the budgets, head on over to our Open Shop on FarmHack.net. We look forward to your input.

Also, to continue our research for the farming community, we’re teaming up with the Carbon Farming Course and doing a Time Use Survey. Complete the survey and receive a 5% Discount on the next Carbon Farming Course!

Survey: Click Here