No Sun, No Soil? No Problem: Start Your Own Indoor Farm!

Are you

• stuck in a low-income job regardless of your talent and skills?
• held back from starting a business due to family obligations like child care?
• looking for a sideline to add income?

Does your local area lack stores that supply quality fresh produce? Does this correlate with obesity and poor nutrition among your friends and neighbors? Or would you just like to improve your family's diet?

This presentation describes a program for creating income opportunities through home-based, small scale indoor farms that can be run by a family or a small team. You’ll be growing nutritious, organic-quality food and delivering it fresh locally.

You won’t be alone. You can join a regional network of other growers and sell your produce with little marketing knowledge. Other members will benefit from your success, so you will enjoy collaboration, not competition.

Garden of Eden Urban Farming is a training and collaborative marketing program. With our curriculum and network you can start supplementing your existing income as you build a business that can replace a conventional job and produce the equivalent of a middle class family income. Training can be done in a few weeks with income in a short time, and the cost of entry into the market is within the reach of the overwhelming majority of US households.

Getting Started

You will need

• the desire to stabilize and improve your family’s income
• willingness to be out in the world building your own future
• the ability to read and follow instructions (we think you have shown that by reading this far)
• knowledge of the food and dietary habits of your community (where are the groceries, restaurants, schools, institutions and households that buy food weekly
• a few days to research those potential customers for your produce
• enclosed space to grow - as little as a spare bedroom, a garage, outbuilding or other space in which you can control temperature, humidity and access
• a relatively small financial investment when compared to other businesses the ability to develop your business without income for a few weeks

Key startup activities include

• talking to prospective customers - you need to know your marketplace before you invest money in your business - invest time to assess demand before you invest money to buy equipment, tools and seeds
• learning to grow the product - skill comes quickly with our program based on techniques proven by us and other successful farmers
• saving the initial investment, about three months income for the median income US household

  What you’ll grow

  We recommend starting with microgreens, small edible plants with a growth phase of under 14 days. These embryonic plants or seedlings have been found to be highly nutritious alone or when added to other dishes. They are easily grown with minimal capital investment and find a ready market by direct sale or delivery to traditional distribution networks. Later you can expand the varieties you grow or branch out into other modes of growing indoors, such as leafy greens, squashes and other plants, but for now we’ll concentrate on microgreens

  How You'll Grow

  The startup garden would have one or two production units, composed of shelving with a capacity of 20 trays. Given a one-week turnaround this gives an approximate yield of 20 trays per week per unit. One tray in the USA is worth on average $25, according to published reports. This gives revenue of $500 per week per unit, or a total of around $5,000 per month.

  Operating expenses (labor, seeds, packaging, etc.) amount to about $2,700 monthly giving gross income of $2,400. With G&A that gives a net income of $2,100 monthly or $25,500/yearly. This covers all expenses of the garden and returns a modest profit as shown in accompanying documents. Required investment is in the range of $5,000 to $15,000 depending on financing, local market conditions and the owner’s decisions.

  Potential Revenue and Profit

  We have developed hypothetical models of how the economics of the business work as you grow from weekly sales of $500 to net profit of over $400,000 per year while creating local employment and fostering better nutrition in your community. Naturally, all estimates of potential income in these summaries are hypothetical and not guaranteed. Please ask your representative for more information.

Interested? Read on! Serious gardeners only, please.