Green Master Vegetables Business Plan — Crop Plan and Rotation
The crop mix, planting and harvest calendar, rotation discipline and how the schedule is built around the winter window.
Crop Plan and Rotation
Jump to section
- Overview & contents
- i. Important Notice
- 1. Executive Summary
- 2. Why Limpopo
- 3. The Market and the Commission Problem
- 4. Water: The Binding Constraint
- 5. Open Field Versus Tunnels
- 6. Crop Plan and Rotation
- 7. SWOT and Competitive Position
- 8. Route to Market
- 9. Unit Economics
- 10. The Five-Year Build and Its Gates
- 11. Funding
- 12. People and Operations
- 13. Certification and Compliance
- 14. Financial Projections
- 15. Break-Even
- 16. Sensitivity and Scenarios
- 17. Risk Management
- 18. Implementation Timeline
- 19. Returns
- 20. Key Performance Indicators
- 21. Key Assumptions
- 22. Conclusion
- A. Appendix A: Consolidated Financial Summary
- B. Appendix B: Capital Schedules
- C. Appendix C: Funding and Debt Schedules
- D. Appendix D: Risk Register
- E. Appendix E: Glossary
|
Element |
Approach |
|---|---|
|
Winter focus |
The highest-value plantings target the May to August window when Highveld supply thins. This is the location’s core advantage and the crop calendar is built backwards from it |
|
Staggered plantings |
Blocks planted every two to three weeks rather than all at once. This smooths labour, spreads price risk across several market windows, and avoids a single harvest hitting a single bad week |
|
Rotation |
No brassica or solanaceous crop follows itself. Rotation controls soil-borne disease and nematodes, and is cheaper than any chemical response to them |
|
Crop mix |
Open field: cabbage, butternut, onion, beetroot. Tunnels: tomato, sweet pepper, cucumber. No single crop above 30% of planted area |
|
Double cropping |
Open land carries 1.8 crops a year by Year 5, tunnels 1.9. Cropping intensity is as important to revenue per hectare as yield is |
|
Soil |
Annual analysis and a fertiliser programme built from it. Fertiliser is 11.6% of revenue and applying it by habit rather than by analysis wastes a material part of that |
|
Year 1 |
Year 2 |
Year 3 |
Year 4 |
Year 5 |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Open-field yield per hectare per crop, t |
24 |
26 |
28 |
30 |
32 |
|
Open-field crops per year |
1.4 |
1.5 |
1.6 |
1.7 |
1.8 |
|
Tunnel yield per hectare per crop, t |
80 |
85 |
90 |
95 |
100 |
|
Tunnel crops per year |
1.5 |
1.6 |
1.7 |
1.8 |
1.9 |
|
Total tonnes produced |
401 |
802 |
1 511 |
2 303 |
3 188 |
|
Tonnes per hectare per year |
50.1 |
55.3 |
63.0 |
66.8 |
70.8 |
Tonnes per hectare per year rise from 50.1 to 70.8 across the plan. Roughly half of that improvement comes from yield and half from cropping intensity, a hectare that carries 1.8 crops instead of 1.4 produces 29 per cent more from the same land, the same drip line and the same lease. Cropping intensity is the cheaper of the two levers and it is the one most often left unexploited.
6.1 The rotation discipline
No brassica follows a brassica; no solanaceous crop follows another. Rotation is the cheapest disease and nematode control available and it costs nothing but planning. The alternative, following cabbage with cabbage because the seedlings are ready and the block is empty, builds soil-borne disease pressure that no chemical programme fully reverses and that eventually forces land out of production entirely.
With 45 hectares and a four-way rotation the constraint is manageable. With 8 hectares in Year 1 it is tight, and that is precisely when the temptation to break it is strongest. The rotation plan should be written down before the first planting and treated as a fixed constraint on the calendar rather than as a preference to be traded against convenience.