In my experience, every new farmer goes through stages of learning in building their farming knowledge and expertise. Lisa and I completed Land Stewardship Project's Farm Beginnings class in 2001. We learned much in this class which was organized to help beginning farmers get started. Even with this advantage, we had a significant learning curve to make the transition from growing on a small scale (literally gardening in our back yard) to taking the first steps into the commercial market place on a scale that is 10 or even 100 times the size of our starting operation.
I am going to organize these stages according to our recent experience. The farm calendar typically operates on a seasonal basis and whether you are growing vegetables like we are, or growing row crops and small grains, or livestock, the stages are similar. I have provided links to other articles on our website VegetableFreak.com for more in-depth information on certain topics
