How Much Produce Can You Get From a Milpa Plot?

0:00 People often ask how much produce can I expect to get off my little milpa plot that I'm putting out to be able to donate to people. And again, like everything else, that answer is it depends. It depends on a lot.

0:12 Of factors. One is going to depend on how good of a job you did getting the milpa seed to soil contact to get that plant started. Number two, how good a job are you doing in controlling the weeds.

0:25 Either from a thatch from a rolled down cereal rye crop or just natural weed control, putting effort into weeding it, whatever it may be, the competition from weeds is going to determine how much you get.

0:39 As well, the third factor like all farmers is going to be how much rainfall do you get. You know, if you're not able to irrigate your milpa, you're going to be dependent upon rainfall, and so that could make a huge difference.

0:51 Huge variance in how much produce that you're going to get. In a perfect world, let's say you got a good stand, you had good weed control, you had good rainfall.

1:02 The number of how much produce you can get is a big, big number, especially when you start looking at your melons and your squash and your pumpkins. Those things can really add up. It wouldn't surprise me if you could get

1:13 Eight to ten thousand pounds of produce off of an acre. If you were really out there picking and gleaning and harvesting at all now, that's probably not realistic because there's a lot of things, you know, farming.

1:36 Be out there picking every day. It's just not practical from a labor standpoint to do that, and so again that's going to reduce. I think it's very realistic to say that you could get two, three, four.

1:47 Thousand pounds, especially if your squash and your pumpkins and melons really take off. Cucumbers, you can get a lot of cucumbers, so I think that it could be significant amounts of those bigger vine crops.

2:01 Vegetable type crops the sweet corn. Sweet corn is new this year we're not exactly sure how well that's going to work and produce but that could be significant and then the thing that people often forget about because it

2:13 Does take a lot of work but you can get hundreds of pounds of leafy greens if you're diligent to be out there clipping on a regular basis. And again, that may or may not work out for how you're doing it, how you're working with it. At the very least, even if you're not clipping it on a regular basis and donating it, please go out there and clip it on a regular basis and eat it yourself, feed it to your family. It's going to be good, healthy, nutritious food.

2:38 And that all adds up. That's all part of the program we want to make your family healthy as well as help you make your communities healthy as well.