If you don’t know what it costs you to grow one single thing, you are not really running your farm as a business! You cannot price your products, or make financially sound business decisions without understanding your full cost of production. Ellen Polishuk of Plant to Profit will walk participants through how to calculate your cost of production for farm products, and explain why it matters for decision making. Glen Young of Cold Springs Organics will provide working examples of his own cost of production and how he uses that data to make production and pricing decisions on his farm.

This webinar is supported by funding from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Northern Ontario.

If you are a farmer or aspiring farmer in the north, please use code COST26 to register for free!

About Ellen Polishuk

Ellen is a biological farm consultant and teacher. Ellen worked for 25 years as one of three owners of Potomac Vegetable Farms (PVF). She managed the Loudoun County location where they cultivated 20 acres of land using organic practices: 10 acres of vegetables and herbs, 10 acres of soil building crops. PVF in total attended six farmers markets, had two roadside stands and served a 550 member CSA in the Washington DC metropolitan area. In 2010, while still farming, Ellen started her consulting business, working with local growers and land owners to develop fertility and production systems. She retired from farming in mid-2017 and now coaches farmers on production practices, labor management, soil testing and fertilizer recommendations, and marketing. She also works with families and non-profits to assess their land resources for possible agricultural enterprises. For many years she has presented workshops at conferences and meetings around the country on numerous agricultural topics including: composting, marketing, weed control, farm business management, soils and fertility, and labor. She has worked closely with the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (SSAWG) to develop and present Growing Farm Profits, a two day intensive workshop to educate growers and service providers on how to keep records, how to use them to analyze farm profitability, and how to change management strategies to increase farm profits. You can learn more about her at Plant to Profit.

About Glen Young

Glen Young is the owner of Cold Springs Organics, a certified organic vegetable farm in Port Hope, Ontario, serving customers from Cobourg to Toronto through a thriving CSA program, farmers’ markets, and prepared foods. Drawing on a professional background in information technology and business process design, Glen has developed practical, data-driven systems to track farm costs, measure profitability, and streamline operations—bridging ecological farming values with sustainable business management.

At Cold Springs Organics, Glen applies detailed cost of production analysis to guide crop planning, pricing, and decision-making, and implements high-tech labour tracking and farm automation tools such as Zapier to save time, improve accuracy, and increase profitability. Passionate about knowledge sharing and committed to a future with many successful small farms, he combines hands-on farming experience with technical expertise to help other farmers adopt efficient, scalable, and resilient systems.