I’m trying to bulk up seed. I want to know yields so i can figure out how much to plant. Navazio’s ‘Organic Seed Farmer’ is silent. My other go-to, Dan Brisebois’s excellent ‘The Seed Farmer’ has great info, but only refers to yields per ‘bed-foot’. I grew up with imperial measurements, so i get the foot part. But how wide is the bed? A one foot long stretch of my 1 metre wide bed is going to yield twice as much seed as a one foot long stretch of a bed that is only 50cm wide.
Is there a universal standard bed width in North America that is so well-known that no-one (apart from metric southernhemispherites) needs to be told?
(And no, I don’t mean the little stick things that keep your mattress off the floor, or the end of your sleeping platform opposite the pillow.)
I’ve reached out to Dan but no response so far. And to his credit, he does use metric measurements as well. He just doesn’t tell me how wide his beds are!)
I wonder if 30 inches is how wide the tractor-formed beds at Tourne-Sol are? Pictures in the book look to be in the range 30-40 inches, but a bit hard to tell, since there are narrower beds as well.
Bed foot gardening is a crop planning metric used primarily by market gardeners to visualize field space and calculate profitability, distinct from the residential Square Foot Gardening method. A single bed foot represents a one-foot-long slice of a specific growing bed, allowing growers to track plant density and revenue per linear foot without accounting for pathways.
Key aspects include:
Calculation: One bed foot equals the number of plants in a one-foot length of the bed (e.g., if lettuce is spaced 1 inch in-row with 3 rows per bed, 1 bed foot = 3 plants).
Financial Target: Market gardeners often aim to harvest and sell at least $5 per bed foot per crop succession, which can yield approximately $40,000 per acre on a 5-foot wide bed.
Abbreviation: The metric is commonly abbreviated as BF (or bedft) in crop planning spreadsheets to streamline calculations.
Distinction: Unlike Square Foot Gardening (invented by Mel Bartholomew), which uses a 4x4 foot grid for home gardens, bed feet are used for larger-scale intensive farming and rotation planning.
Sorry to copy-paste AI. I searched out of curiosity of this discussion and the answer does seem relevant.
Nothing wrong with using AI as long as you verify the source. I always instruct the AI to include links to sources of its claims.
The majority of published research papers now involve extensive use of AI. It’s mainstream in the scientific community. AI is a tremendously valuable tool. The structure of the prompt you give it will greatly affect the quality of its output. I generally think that people who claim that AI produces trash are likely unaware of prompt optimization techniques.
I think of it as somewhat analogous to a human conversation. The quality of the conversation is going to be distinctly affected by the content of what you say. This is more important with machines because humans are better at intuiting what you meant to say vs what you actually said. A machine struggles more with that.
In my opinion, wider beds are better only up to a point. That point is how far can you comfortably reach to access the center of the bed. Wider than that becomes problematic for your lower back. It’s ergonomics.
On small-scale market farms in the US, and on lots of larger industrial farms too, the standard is 30 inch beds with a 18 inch pathway, so each bed is 4 feet from center to center. Lots of equipment is standardized for this, but many smaller growers find a wider bed and/or narrower pathway is preferable, especially when not dependent on standardized equipment.
I just looked it up in Jesse Frost’s Living Soil Handbook, he confirms 30in/75cm is the norm, which is because of cultivation tools and not necessarily ideal in other ways. My farm has compromised by keeping the 4-feet but making pathways more like 8 inches to utilize a bigger bed.
As the AI thingy sort of said, bed feet is often used to describe number of plants in a given bed length, distinct from row feet. So if you have a 100 ft bed with onions in 3 rows at 6 inches, there are 100 bed feet, 300 row feet, 600 onions.
In general estimating seed yields is challenging due to the number of factors involved, including plant spacing. I’m guessing Dan lists the plant spacings he uses and is assuming a 30-in/74cm wide bed.
