[PureHarvest]

I would always have at least some tunnels with heirloom tomatoes. I am surprised by his putting all of his eggs in one basket.
As far as cash flow, it can't be disregarded, but in my context, it is minor. I think if you are a farmer with lots of debts and, therefore, monthly payments, you need cash flow. That's stinks. How many times have we all read/heard how so many farms don't even show a profit! Service the debt, pay other bills, buy food, acquire some toys, and repeat.
But on the garlic, consider your biggest cost at start up is seed cloves at $15/lb.
The next cost is labor.
Eventually you are using all your own cloves, so that is a huge boost to the profit.
I read about all these guys that spend tremendous hours hand weeding. Maybe i got lucky or I'm missing something, having used fabric.
Anyway, I'm not aspiring to do the acreage of that dude. Heavy is the head that wears the crown.
So the cost of the fabric is spread over many years. I buy a ton tote of organic chicken manure based fert from the plant down the road, and about $40 worth of drip tape.
If I scaled up, my FIL would weld be some kind of undercutting bar to put on their small tractor so I would not have to hand dig that many plants.
The labor of bunching, tying, hanging, cleaning and grading is something I'd be happy to pay because it is just a seasonal cost to get product to market. Plus my wife and 3 kids helped me with that on the first bed we dug. We had it all tied and hung in 20 minutes (3 rows 100 feet long). Obviously that time would increase as our planting did, but they all enjoyed that time together in the barn. My son sorted and made bunches. My wife tied them. And my girls carried the bunches to me to hang on the strings. Nobody complained because they all liked the job they had. This is not usually the case. Somebody is typically bent out of shape because they did not get the job they wanted. I have tried many endeavors here on the farm with the hopes one or more of the kids would take to something. This was really the first thing they all unanimously gravitated to. They helped plant about half the cloves last fall too without complaint.
Anyway, I have the space and infrastructure for drying and storage and crop rotation etc.
It's all still comes back to the biggie of: can I sell my harvest?
I will be working up a crop budget for 2017-2018's crop and share it here when I am done.