Fruit Farm Project

For my fruit production class this past semester, our semester-long project was to plan out the design for a fruit farm. We had to find a site in Minnesota or any other adjacent state where we would set up the farm. The farm had to include a "mainstream" crop like apples or grapes and at least one crop that wasn't quite as common. I ended up making a fruit farm where I would grow grapes, raspberries and blackberries for commercial jams, preserves and other value added products. We also had to go through the process of looking at USDA soil maps, choosing the cultivars of fruit, and thinking through all the other small details like cover crops, marketing, organic practices and five year plans.
Below are snippets of my program so you can get an idea of what I came up with. I figured it would be easier to show you instead of describing it. The following isn't the whole thing, because the whole thing is 17 pages long and I don't want to bore you all to tears. And, of course, I'm not an expert farmer so if my theories about cover crops and five year planting plans are a bit weird, cut me a little slack, this is my first one.

So there you have it. Lots of tables and lists of information, and putting it together took a really really long time, but I'm pretty satisfied with the outcome. I didn't include some of the stuff about my marketing plan and a lot of the hefty list of cultivars I chose, among other things. But I figured this was a lot of reading as it is. If you have any questions about it, feel free to ask. Next up on my list of blog post is some of my field trip experiences which will be up sometime next week!