Crop Planning for Farmers Markets

Balancing Flexibility with Strategy

Selling microgreens at a farmers market offers a powerful mix of opportunity and unpredictability. Unlike restaurant or subscription orders, markets are spontaneous—customers vary week to week, weather impacts turnout, and seasonal rhythms shape consumer preferences.

This variability makes crop planning for markets both more challenging and more rewarding. A well-structured crop plan can give you the confidence to meet demand, minimize waste, and seize opportunities.

Start with Sales-Based Projections

Unlike wholesale or restaurant orders, you don’t get advance orders for markets. That means your sowing decisions must be based on projected sales.

In the beginning, your estimates will be guesses—but over time, they should be informed by:

• Historical weekly sales
  • The more markets you do, the better you will be able to make a reliable crop plan
• Weather forecasts
  • On a seven-day or longer crop cycle, knowing the weather on market day is almost impossible, but as you get closer you can adjust your harvest strategy. A stormy market will mean less sales, and perhaps you reduce your harvest to save the labour costs of harvest and and packing product that just won’t sell.
• Seasonal patterns (e.g. holiday weekends, peak salad season)
  • Consumer preferences changes throughout the year and you may be surprised at when your sales peak each year.
• Event calendars in your region
  • Farmers markets compete and collaborate with other events for consumer attention. Keeping track of sales patteens can help you better predict sales dips and increases each season.

Use a simple spreadsheet to log each market day’s sales by crop and product format. Over a season, this will help you predict how many trays of each crop to grow each week.

Grow a Reliable Core + Rotating Specials

Build your weekly market plan around 3 to 5 reliable crops (such as sunflower, pea, radish, and a mustard mix) that have:

• Strong visual appeal
• Good yield consistency
• Broad customer appeal

Then each week, try adding 1–2 rotating specialty crops, such as:

• Red amaranth (color pop)
• Basil or cilantro (aromatic appeal)
• Purple kohlrabi (unique shape/flavor)

Rotating specials do three things:

1. Let you test new varieties with live feedback
2. Keep your display looking fresh and seasonal
3. Encourage repeat customers to come back and see what’s new

Work Backward from Your Market Day

Just like with restaurant crop planning, your “delivery” date is fixed: it’s market day. It’s usually best to harvest the day before market, so be sure to build that into your crop plan.

Build in Buffers and Backups

Farmers markets require flexibility. To avoid shortages:

• Sow 1–2 extra trays per week of your best-sellers
• Maintain a small stock of frozen ice packs, backup packaging, and promotional signs so you can shift displays as needed

These small steps ensure you can handle a surprise spike in sales or a tray that doesn’t mature on time.

But, if you’re a little short at markets that can sometimes be ok too. It may result in lost sales, but also encourages customers to come to market a little easier to ensure they get the products they want!

A favourite market saying: “It’s better to sell out than pack out!”

Track and Adjust

After each market:

• Record what you sold
• Log leftovers by crop
• Note customer comments or questions

Over time, this becomes a data loop that informs smarter sowing decisions, better display design, and even pricing adjustments.

Package to Order

If you package all your products ahead of time, you’ll find that you basically just sit around all market handing these packages to customers and doing little else. This has a few challenges:

1. It’s really boring and can make a market drag on forever
   • Packing to order gives you something to do at the market and can draw in customers who will see you moving around more than just standing around.
2. It means more work on harvest day that you can could be doing at the market – which you need to be at anyway
   • This can make your harvest day easier by shifting the packaging to market day, meaning you can harvest and bulk your market crops on harvest day instead on packing them individually
3. It means your product distribution is totally set ahead time and leave little room to adapt.
   • By packing to order you can suggest products and mixes that sallow you to move the crop that you may have excess of.

This method doesn’t work well for finer, more delicate microgreens like basil and amaranth, but is great for hearty crops like sunflower, pea, and radish.

Final Thoughts

The unpredictability of farmers markets makes them difficult to accurately plan for. But we have introduced several strategies you can use to make your market smore productive and lucrative!