How do you budget for a food forest?
We have been working on this topic for years. Together with the Food Forestry Foundation, we developed four food forest themes in 2018, including budgets that are still downloaded daily by a lot of people looking for data to budget with.
The real answers still need to emerge in time. Food forests slowly come into production from their 5th year. Production reaches serious proportions from the 10th year onwards and then it really only begins. And so almost all brand-new food forest owners have an exploitation problem, which almost all of them also solve by some kind of side activity.
If that is the case, then the excels of Welna estate are not useful to calculate and play with. We have thereforedeveloped , within the Business Plan module of the annual training course, anExcel budget tool with which our course participants, but from now on also you, can very easily play with possible scenarios.
We base the harvests on the 2018 production feed forest and, for a good comparison, also include a tab with an example of standard fruit cultivation. What you immediately see is that the model for Welna estate is not too optimistic in terms of harvest prognosis, but rather very cautious. Many people questioned the high kilogram prices from that model. In this excel you can play with the prices and then everything adjusts automatically.
In the video below, Marieke Karssen quickly explains the tool. And if you like it, you can request the tool below for free. It will then be delivered to your mailbox.
Request the Food from the Forest budget tool
Tip
The HAS has also developed a budget tool. It is much more detailed and complex, less of a game plan, but still very interesting because it has evolved in terms of revenue.