Good seed garlic will cost $10 to $30 a pound (plus shipping) to get the cost down buy a small amount of garlic, say a pound of each type that you want to grow and plant that and save 100% of that garlic for seed (you should get around 45 to 60 cloves of each type) plant all that back and save 75% for seed and eat or sell the 25%. Now you should have around 330 of each type. Plant that back and the following year you should have around 2350 if each type. After that year you save 1/3 of your garlic for seed and that is how you get reasonably priced seed garlic-it takes 3 years but will save you thousands of dollars and allow you to find good garlic markets.

you can do this far faster by buying all the seed garlic you need for the first year and every year after save back 1/3 of your garlic for seed.

you should identify and know your market before you jump in. the markets i know have a big supply.

I agree, you will not find good garlic seed for less than $8/lb in my area (I don't go below $10).
If you're planning on jumping into farming with a large investment in seed garlic without ever have grown much before, I don't recommend it. My advice is to follow the other advice above: figure out your market (as randy said), and grow out your own seed stock over a period of years (as boulder said).

I'm sure that no matter what's said here, you'll do what you want regardless. Still, I'll offer some simple advise from my 20 years farming experience: Don't monocrop.
I grow a decent amount of garlic (350 lbs. planted this year), but I have lots of other things growing too. Even the best farmer can lose a crop for reasons beyond their control (ie. Aster Yellows) and no one wants to lose the farm over it.

-Mark

Oh, and I just checked your links, the first two are complete nonsense that remind me of a traveling salesman. The last one is a great story but doesn't take into consideration how saturated your local farmers market is.
It's good to be positive about your *potential* sales, but much better to be realistic.

This post was edited by madroneb on Tue, Nov 18, 14 at 23:10

Thanks all.

Actually, Garlic is just one potential crop we are considering. We would also like to start a nice organic asparagus patch, and a small apple grove, as well as a market garden. Eventually we hope to also offer antibiotic/ hormone free meats.

You can get it from small farmers for $10 per pound. If you grow softneck it will multiply much faster than hardneck

I've raised garlic my whole life and only bought seed garlic if I wanted to try new varieties. However, I've found increasing vicissitudes in the weather to be the greatest challenge. For two years in a row now, I've lost lost my stock and had to replace it. Already this year, we have had the earliest freeze I ever remember. As noted, there are the diseases which could plague you for years.

Organic asparagus is easily possible, but an apple orchard is not. People expect perfect fruit, and you won't sell apples covered in sooty blotch or filled w/worms. There are also hours of pruning, training, and thinning involved. You must protect from deer as well if they are present. Yes, organic solutions exist and are viable if you have a large crew to constantly tend and protect that orchard from the thousands of scourges out to plague your crop. Most small growers don't have the time or finances to grow fruit organically. Much of fruit growing depends on your location and the diseases and pests you can expect to encounter.

Selling meats is a whole other ballgame w/a myriad of gov't regulations that I wouldn't want to get into. Then again, there's the acreage required to pasture all those critters, then the structures necessary to house them and tend them, and there's the processing center to consider, not to mention coolers,freezers, vacuum packers, etc.

I'd start off w/the market garden. Asparagus will take 3 years before you get much for sale, and fruit trees can take up to ten. If you want tree fruit, plant just a few as a test before investing too much. That's a lot of time and real estate. Small fruits like berries are much more reliable and are always in demand. Blueberries are always wanted and are usually easy to raise organically. Getting the soil right can be tricky though.

As noted by the others, do some homework and make sure there are markets first and be willing to diversify.

I don't know about garlic for profit but we do eat a ton of garlic in my home.

Last year I planted 9 different kinds out of 15 heads of garlic- ended up with 72 "seeds" and a wee bit of eating. This fall after digging up and taking out a couple kinds and replacing them with about 6 more heads of garlic I was able to plant in 240 seeds. And a goodly couple of pounds of eating to boot.

So I would say start small and get good seed, and be patient with a couple years of growing out what you got.