Growing More Than One Crop Is Cheap Insurance

In June two years ago, a fifteen minute hailstorm crossed our valley and shredded every tomato plant we had. We had put almost everything into tomatoes that season, about 1,400 plants across two plots, because the previous year they had been our best seller at market by a wide margin. The storm took most of our expected income for the summer in a quarter of an hour.

The farm two miles east of us was hit by the same storm. Their tomatoes were flattened too. But they also grew garlic, which had already been harvested, potatoes, which were safe underground, and a late planting of squash that was barely out of the ground. They lost a crop. We lost a season.

That difference is the whole case for growing a mix of crops on a small farm, and it is a case that gets less attention than it deserves.

Why small farms drift toward one crop

Concentrating on one crop is tempting for good reasons. You learn it well. You buy the right tools once. Your market customers know you for it. And when one crop sells better than others, putting more space into it looks like simple good sense.

The trouble is that concentration increases your exposure to things you cannot control: weather, disease, pests and market prices. A neighbor of ours who has farmed for decades and follows the weekly football pools on ankertoto once put it bluntly. Nobody sensible stakes the whole week on one match, he said, so why would anyone stake the whole year on one plant? He was half joking, but the logic holds. A single crop is a single bet.

How a mix spreads the risk

Different crops fail for different reasons and at different times. That is what makes a mix work as insurance.

Risk	Crops most exposed	Crops usually safer
Summer hail	Tomatoes, peppers, leafy greens	Root crops, garlic already harvested
Late spring frost	Early squash, beans, fruit blossom	Brassicas, onions, garlic
Wet season disease	Tomatoes, potatoes with blight	Beans, brassicas, squash
Drought	Leafy greens, shallow rooted crops	Established squash, deep rooted crops
Market price drop	Whatever everyone else grew too much of	Less common crops with loyal buyers

No mix protects against everything. But a farm growing six crops with different weaknesses rarely loses more than two in the same season, while a farm growing one crop can lose everything to a single event.

The advice I disagree with: specialize to be efficient

Much small farm business advice pushes specialization. Find your niche, do one thing better than anyone, and let efficiency drive profit. Diversified farms, the argument goes, spread themselves too thin.

For large operations with crop insurance and deep reserves, specialization often makes sense. For a small farm with modest savings and no insurance, I think it is risky advice. The efficiency gains from growing one crop are real but modest. The cost of losing that crop in a bad year can be the farm itself.

What I recommend instead is a lead crop plus several supporting crops. Keep the thing you are known for, but make sure it is no more than about 40 percent of your planted area. The rest should be crops with different risks, different harvest windows and ideally different buyers. Soil health also benefits, because rotation between different plant families breaks pest and disease cycles, as covered in why cover crops fail in their first season.

Choosing a mix that works for your farm

A useful mix balances three things: timing, risk and market. When we rebuilt our plan after the hailstorm, we asked the following questions for each crop:

When is it harvested? We wanted income spread from late spring to autumn, not concentrated in August.
What usually kills it? We avoided having more than two crops with the same main weakness.
Who buys it? Some crops sell at market, some to restaurants, some as preserves. Different buyers mean different price risks.
Can we manage it? Diversity is only useful if each crop is still grown well. Six crops done badly are worse than three done properly.

We ended up with tomatoes on about a third of the space, garlic, potatoes, winter squash, salad greens in succession and a small plot of dry beans. Succession planting of greens was new for us and turned out to be easier than expected, especially following the approach in succession planting without a spreadsheet.

What the mix has done for us since

The season after the hailstorm was a wet one, and late blight took about half our tomatoes and a good share of the potatoes. Two years earlier, that would have been another disaster. This time the garlic, squash, greens and beans were all fine, and our income for the year was about 70 percent of a normal season rather than close to zero.

Last year was good across almost every crop. Total income was a little lower than in our all tomato year, because tomatoes really are our most valuable crop. But the difference was small, and in exchange we have not had a season of real panic since. More on planning a farm that pays steadily is in our Growing Food section.