The counter algorithm will run by automation, so it's not literally tallying produce as its picked -- but like McDonald's "billions served," or like the endlessly ticking tobacco death toll, or like google's ever-growing gigabytes of server storage, our Yield Tracker will approximate the constant progress of our continuous sub/urban harvest.

We will adjust the inputs regularly as our data gets more precise and as aspects of our service change.  As we have more and more garden square footage under management, as we experience seasonal shifts in yield lbs, and  as we hone our techniques, I expect our total to adjust upwards.

You'll notice we're not starting at zero. We didn't want to depress ourselves. Instead we picked a conservatively estimated yield rate of 2.5 lbs/sq ft and multiplied it out by the area of every garden we've maintained back to its first planting date, then we summed the results to find the total pounds we've harvested since we first started maintaining in Spring 2009.

One of our best-documented benchmarks for yield rate is the data from the organiponicos in Cuba, which we have found to be very similar in structure and technique to what we've developed. I've seen different yield figures at different times for the organiponicos, generally ranging between 3-5 lbs per square foot. Here's one academic source which records their average yields at about 4.14 lbs/sq ft if you convert out of metric (scroll down to page 19.) 

There are a lot of reasons I think we can outdo Cuba's figures by a wide margin, but that's for another post. Suffice it to say that with our new scales and the Yield Tracker tally, I hope to instigate a new "Space Race mentality" which is focused on maximizing the efficacy of sustainable urban food production. Without sacrificing produce quality, one of our core values at Farmscape, we'd like to treat the weigh-ins as a scoreboard to drive ourselves to outdo other market garden operations like the organiponicos.