Fantastic Farm Enterprises Mission Statement
Our mission is to promote and support farmers and gardeners by providing financial and production planning tools designed to help them create and maintain sustainable vegetable production operations.
Fantastic Farm Enterprises Production and Financial Planning Tool Suite
The Fantastic Farm and Garden Calculator was created by Tracy Sweely as a way to make it easier to plan HeartEye Village CSA Farm in Lafayette, Colorado. After a great deal of time spent compiling the data that makes up the Fantastic Farm and Garden Calculator, and seeing what a useful tool it was for planning a vegetable farm, CSA, or garden, we decided to make it and all of our production and financial planning tools available to others. There is a small fee to use either the stand-alone Fantastic Farm and Garden Calculator or the Grow Your Own CSA tool suite. Proceeds are being directed toward research and development for usability upgrades to the Calculator and the entire tool suite.
Fantastic Farm Enterprises is operated and administered by BizKeepers.
About Tracy Sweely
Inspired by The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, Tracy Sweely co-founded Colorado Local Sustainability with Jim Sincock in 2007. The organization’s purpose was to contribute to the local food movement by promoting farms and ranches in Colorado. While engaging Colorado’s farmers, Tracy observed that the rising costs of distributing produce seriously undermined the financial sustainability of farming operations. Over the next couple of years it became clear that Urban Farming, the production of food in the same location where it will be consumed, was a promising market driven response to this situation.
Simultaneously, Tracy was working for HearEye Land Trust, a company engaged in promoting a progressive, community-oriented, sustainable residential development with an on-site agriculture component. Moving forward with the agricultural component of the Silo neighborhood being built by Cornerstone Development in Lafayette CO, she helped co-create HeartEye Village CSA micro-farm in 2009 as a pilot study farm and has been the Farm Manager until the close of the study in 2014. As a result of working on HeartEye Village farm Tracy created the Fantastic Farm and Garden Calculator, as well as other planning tools and templates, to streamline production planning. In 2012 Tracy founded fantasticfarm.org to assist gardeners and beginner farmers in establishing sustainable urban and peri-urban farming operations.
Tracy has a Masters degree in Anthropology, specifically Archaeology, focusing on the social relations of ancient Mayan agrarian households.
What was Colorado Local Sustainability and Landshare Colorado?
Colorado Local Sustainability (CLS) was an organization co-founded in 2007 by Tracy Sweely and Jim Sincock. CLS was created to promote sustainable farms and ranches in Colorado primarily through publication of the print and web versions of the Rocky Mountain Growers Directory. Although a popular site, CLS dissolved in 2012 when Tracy began focusing on Fantastic Farm Enterprises and Jim began expanding his fine art photography business.
Landshare Colorado was originally started by Colorado Local Sustainability to help connect gardeners, farmers, and ranchers with gardens or agricultural land that was not being used. While working on the Rocky Mountain Growers Directory, we had met many new farmers, ranchers, and gardeners who were looking for affordable land to grow their own food. Unfortunately, we were unable to manage and control the amount of spam that was being funneled into our land sharing web forms. While our emphasis has shifted to supporting the planning activities of new farmers, we are directing inquiries about land sharing options to www.sharedearth.com.