Back to: Plan for Growth

After you’ve analyzed last year’s performance, it’s time to set goals for the coming year. If you want to make more money than last year, your options are:

Depending on your business plan, and whether you have an interest in stabilizing or adding value to your crop yourself, you may choose one or both strategies. 

Grow More Kelp

First, refer back to how much kelp you sold last year, and compare it to how many feet of seed string you purchased. In our example farm, we purchased eight 200-foot spools of seed string, which is a total of 1,600 feet. We sold 10,648 lbs of wet sugar kelp, so dividing that by 1,600 feet we find that we grew approximately 6.6 lbs of kelp per foot. That’s a very good number, but we can’t count on next year necessarily being as good. We may want to use a more conservative number — say, 5 lbs per foot — for planning purposes.

Second, refer back to your customer feedback — particularly your larger customers — and come up with a best guess of how much more (or less!) kelp you’ll be able to sell next year. This is often estimated as a percentage of the previous year’s sales, e.g. “we expect to be able to sell 20% more this coming year.” In addition to your own customers’ feedback, you may also want to research what’s going on in the broader industry by reading market research and news articles or talking with farmers. 

Although seed string is a variable cost — it scales proportionally with the amount of kelp produced — remember that you will need to have enough cash on hand before the season starts to purchase it. In some cases, this may be a limiting factor for how much kelp you can plant. Depending on how much additional seed string you plan on planting, you may also need to update the design or footprint of your farm, which will require additional gear and possibly even revisions to your permit or lease. Make sure to take these factors into consideration when setting a target volume for next year.