Turnip Demand, Acreage & Prices: What the Data Actually Says

Turnips are almost never counted on their own. Statistical agencies bundle them with carrots, or with swedes, or with "other root crops", which means the first honest sentence in your business plan is that the category number is a proxy, not a measurement. Say so. A lender who has read forty farm plans will trust the one that admits where its data ends.

The bundled category is large and slow. The global carrots and turnips market was valued at $12.5 billion in 2025 and is forecast to reach $15.78 billion by 2031, a 3.96% CAGR (Mordor Intelligence, 2025). Asia-Pacific took 42.05% of that in 2025 and is the fastest-growing region at a projected 6.74% CAGR through 2031. None of that is a reason to start a turnip farm in Ohio or Herefordshire. It is context — the category is not shrinking, and that is all a category number can tell you.

US acreage is drifting down while yield climbs

The number that should shape a US plan is not the global category — it is the acreage trend. US carrot and turnip harvested area fell to 26,000 hectares in 2022, down 7.2% year on year, while average yield rose 8.1% to 54 tonnes per hectare. Total production recovered to 1.4 million tonnes after two consecutive years of decline, having peaked at 1.5 million tonnes in 2019 (IndexBox, 2022).

Read that pattern properly. Fewer acres, higher yield per acre, roughly flat output: that is a category consolidating into fewer, better-equipped growers. It is a bad shape for a commodity entrant with no cost advantage and a good shape for a grower who can get paid for something other than tonnage — a variety supermarket buyers cannot source, a delivery window nobody else can hit, a wash-and-bunch presentation a chef will pay for.

The UK number, and the trend behind it

UK production of turnips and swedes was reported at 90,919 tonnes in 2017, down from 93,632 tonnes in 2016 (CEIC / Defra, 2017). Current-year detail sits in Defra's horticulture statistics, where field-vegetable area, production and value by individual crop appear in tables 13 to 16 of the underlying dataset. If you are writing a UK plan, pull that table rather than citing a rounded figure from a blog — a bank's agricultural desk will know the source and will notice if you did not.

The UK picture matters for a second reason that most turnip guides have not caught up with: the subsidy line is gone. More on that under licensing, but do not build a UK forecast that assumes otherwise.

Price is the only market number that pays you

Category size does not appear on your invoices. Prices do. On the USDA AMS Atlanta Terminal Market report for May 2026, turnips in 25 lb film bags traded at $23.00–$26.00, with Georgia Purple Top medium mostly $24.00–$25.00. That is roughly $0.92 to $1.04 per pound gross, before freight, before the packer's cut, before shrink.

Hold that beside the bunched fresh-market channel, where a single bunch of salad turnips with clean greens attached sells for a few dollars, and the entire strategic question of a turnip farm resolves itself: you are choosing which of those two prices you are building a business around, because the equipment, the labour calendar and the customer are different in each case.

Three businesses, one crop

Guides on this crop almost always describe a single generic "turnip farm". There are three, and they compete for your capital:

• Fresh-market bunched salad turnips. Hakurei and similar F1 salad types, harvested young, sold with greens on, to chefs and market customers. Short crop, high touch, high price per pound, labour-heavy. Cash cycles fast.
• Storage roots and greens. Purple Top White Globe and its relatives, grown to size, sold in bulk bags into the terminal market or a packer. Lower price per pound, mechanised, storage-dependent. Cash cycles slowly and is exposed to the terminal price.
• Forage and cover-crop turnips. Grown as grazing feed or as a soil crop, often under contract, sold as seed or standing feed rather than as produce. Different buyer entirely: cattle operators and seed houses, not grocers.

Each one has its own yield assumption, its own equipment list, its own regulatory exposure, and its own margin. A plan that describes all three at once describes none of them. Pick one as the primary and name the others as staged expansion with a trigger — "we add the storage block once the wash line runs at 60% capacity" is a sentence a credit committee can evaluate. "We will also do storage turnips" is not.

Questions Growers Ask First

These come up in every early conversation about this crop. Short answers here; the numbers behind them are worked through below.

How much do turnips yield per acre?

For commercial production, budget 10 to 15 tons of roots per planted acre, and 5 to 9 tons of greens per acre (Purdue University New Crop Resource). Forage plantings are measured differently — dry matter rather than fresh weight — and run about 3 to 4 tons of dry matter per acre when grazed roughly 90 days after planting, with up to 12,000 lb/acre of dry matter achievable in good conditions (USDA NRCS, Illinois Grazing Manual). Do not mix the two units in one forecast. It is the single most common arithmetic error we see on farm plans, and it inflates revenue by a factor that a lender will catch in about ninety seconds.

How long do turnips take to grow?

A full-size turnip is roughly a 55-day crop; a baby bunching turnip is ready in 40 days or less (Hobby Farms). Small-scale growers commonly describe three months from seed to harvestable maturity when overheads and field prep are included in the cycle (Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Institute for Sustainable Food Systems). That 40-versus-55 gap is not trivia. It is the difference between three and four successions in a season, and it is the closest thing this crop has to a lever on working capital.

Is turnip farming profitable?

At the crop level, yes, modestly and reliably — but almost never on tonnage alone. Published per-acre profit figures for turnips are thin and mostly non-US: one widely-cited Indian benchmark puts profit near Rs 43,700 per acre on around 105 quintals of yield with production cost near Rs 61,000 per acre (Agri Farming). The transferable lesson is not the number, it is the ratio: on commodity turnips, cost consumes most of the revenue. The growers who clear a real margin are being paid for handling, variety and reliability, not for roots. Our worked example below shows the same 12 acres netting 22% in the bunched channel and roughly 11% in bulk.

When should you plant turnips?

Turnips are a cool-season crop, grown in spring and autumn (UC IPM). Regional sowing calendars vary widely — Asiatic types are sown July to September and temperate European types October to December in some growing regions (Agri Farming), while UK and northern US growers work spring and autumn windows. Early-maturing forage varieties can be ready to graze around 70 days from a spring sowing (University of Nebraska, UNL Beef). Your plan needs a real, dated planting calendar for your county, not a season name — the calendar is what drives the labour budget and the cash-flow curve.

Do I need a food safety licence to sell turnips?

In the US it depends entirely on your sales volume and channel, and turnips are explicitly in scope: turnips, roots and tops, are covered produce under the FSMA Produce Safety Rule. Below roughly $25,000 in average annual produce sales you are outside the rule; below $500,000 in average annual food sales you may qualify for a qualified exemption if more than half your sales go to qualified end-users (FDA). Full detail, plus the UK and Canadian positions, is in the licensing section.

What It Costs to Get 20 Acres in the Ground

A turnip operation is cheap to plant and expensive to sell. Seed is a rounding error; the money goes into the equipment between the field and the customer — the seeder, the washer, the cold room and the van. Most first-draft plans we see have that backwards, with a lovingly detailed seed budget and a single line reading "packing shed".

A realistic all-in launch range for a 20 to 40 acre commercial turnip operation is $38,000 to $240,000 (£30,000 to £190,000). The spread is that wide because it spans two genuinely different builds: a lean fresh-market market-garden model leasing land and hand-bunching, versus a mechanised storage operation with a wash line and a cold room. Both are real turnip farms. They are not the same business.

Line by line

• Land lease, first year: $8K–$36K (£6K–£28K). The KPU Institute for Sustainable Food Systems turnip costing charges annual land rent at $400 per acre as overhead. Twenty acres at that rate is $8,000 — trivially affordable, which is exactly why nobody's turnip plan fails on land.
• Bed prep, precision seeder, cultivation tooling: $9K–$54K (£7K–£43K). Turnips are direct-seeded and unforgiving of a rough seedbed. Stand uniformity is what makes a mechanical harvest possible; a bad stand means hand-grading, and hand-grading is where the margin dies.
• Wash-pack line: $7K–$38K (£6K–£30K). Barrel washer, spray table, bunching bench, scales. This is the line item that decides whether you can sell bunched at a premium or only bulk at terminal price. Under-spend here and you have structurally chosen the low-margin channel.
• Cold storage and hydrocooling: $6K–$42K (£5K–£33K). Turnips hold at near-freezing with very high humidity. Cold storage is not a convenience, it is your selling window — it converts a perishable crop with a price you must accept into a stored crop with a price you can choose.
• Refrigerated delivery vehicle: $4K–$40K (£3K–£32K). Only if you are going direct. If you sell to a packer, this line is zero and so is most of your margin.
• Irrigation: $3K–$14K (£2K–£11K). Moisture consistency drives root quality; irregular watering gives you woody, pithy roots that a chef will reject on sight.
• Seed: $2K–$11K (£2K–£9K). Genuinely small. F1 salad types cost multiples of open-pollinated Purple Top per unit, and it still barely registers against the wash line.
• Food-safety compliance: $1K–$5K (£1K–£4K). PSA grower training, water testing, recordkeeping. Small in dollars, large in consequence — see licensing.

The number that decides your build

Everything above collapses to one question: are you buying a wash line or not? Buy it, and you can bunch, brand, and sell direct at multiples of the terminal price — but you have taken on labour, food-safety exposure and a delivery route. Skip it, and your capital requirement halves while your ceiling drops to whatever the packer pays. Write that decision into the plan as a decision, with the number attached. Vagueness at this fork is the most common reason a farm plan reads as amateur.

Seed, Varieties & Named Suppliers

Variety selection is channel selection. Choosing Hakurei rather than Purple Top is not an agronomic preference, it is a decision about who your customer is, what your labour bill looks like, and whether you own a cold room. Name your varieties and your seed houses in the plan; it is one of the cheapest credibility signals available to a first-time grower, and its absence is conspicuous.

The varieties that matter commercially

• Hakurei F1 — the reference salad turnip. Smooth, flat-round white roots, matures early, best harvested young at up to about 2 inches diameter (Johnny's Selected Seeds). Sweet, crisp, sold with the greens on. This is the chef variety.
• Purple Top White Globe — the traditional American turnip. Bright purple shoulder, creamy white below, near-round smooth roots growing to about 5 inches across, white interior (Johnny's Selected Seeds). Heirloom, open-pollinated, cheap seed. This is the bulk-bag and greens variety, and the one the Atlanta terminal quotes.
• Scarlet Queen Red Stems F1 and Hirosaki Red F1 — coloured salad turnips (Johnny's Selected Seeds). Their commercial function is differentiation: a market stall of white turnips is a commodity, a stall with red-stemmed bunches is a photograph.
• Tokyo Cross F1 and Tokyo Silky Sweet — Asian hybrid types available from True Leaf Market and Territorial Seed.
• Forage Purple Top — sold by the pound into the grazing market by Southeast AgriSeeds and Deer Creek Seed. Entirely different buyer.

Seed houses to name in your procurement section

• Johnny's Selected Seeds — the widest commercial salad-turnip range: Hakurei, Purple Top White Globe organic, Scarlet Queen Red Stems, Hirosaki Red. Trial-plot data and organic options.
• Territorial Seed Company — Hakurei, Purple Top White Globe, Tokyo Silky Sweet.
• True Leaf Market — Asian turnip range including Tokyo Cross hybrid.
• Douglass King Seeds (San Antonio) and East Texas Seed Company — bulk Texas Purpletop, sold by the 50 lb bag. This is where a storage or greens operation buys.
• Ferry-Morse and Georgia Seed & Garden — regional retail and small-lot organic supply.

Who you are actually competing with

Name real operators in your competitive section. In the US southeast, Baker Farms LLC of Norman Park, Georgia is a grower-shipper of leafy greens that has pushed into value-added root packs — its "Rootables" line is one-pound serving-sized bags of prepacked, washed turnip and beet roots. Grower Network, LLC of Lake Park, Georgia ships vegetables and citrus at scale. These are the operations setting the shelf price your bulk crop competes against.

You will not beat them on cost per pound and you should say so explicitly. What Baker Farms cannot do is deliver 200 bunches of Hakurei with the greens still turgid to a restaurant forty minutes away on a Thursday morning. That sentence — the honest statement of where scale wins and where it cannot follow — does more for a credit application than three pages of market growth charts.

Where the Money Comes From

Turnip revenue is not one number multiplied by a yield. It is a channel mix, and the channels have margins that differ by a factor of two.

The three revenue channels

• Bunched fresh-market, direct. Salad turnips with greens attached, sold to restaurants and at farmers markets. Restaurants especially favour small root crops such as baby turnips, and market customers respond to bunches with good-looking greens (Hobby Farms). Highest price per pound, highest labour, fastest cash.
• Bulk wholesale. Storage roots in 25 lb film bags into a terminal market or packer, benchmarked at $23–$26 per bag on the Atlanta Terminal Market, May 2026. Price-taking, volume-dependent, storage-dependent.
• Forage and contract. Standing feed or contracted seed into the grazing market, priced on dry matter rather than fresh weight. Low headline value, but it uses shoulder-season ground and it is the only channel with a buyer who does not care what the roots look like.

Worked example: 12 acres, two ways

Take the same 12-acre block and run it through both channels. This is the arithmetic your plan needs — not a growth chart.

Bunched Hakurei, 40-day turn. A 40-day baby-bunch crop supports four successions in a season. At 900 saleable bunches per acre per succession and $3.60 per bunch: 12 acres × 4 successions × 900 bunches × $3.60 = $155,520 gross. Direct cost — seed, harvest and bunching labour, rubber bands, waxed boxes — runs near 48%, leaving $80,870 gross profit. Deduct $46,000 of overhead (land rent at $400/acre, insurance, vehicle, compliance, a part-year second employee) and the block nets roughly $34,870, a 22% net margin.

Bulk Purple Top, storage. The same 12 acres at 12 tons per acre — mid-point of Purdue's 10–15 ton commercial range — is 144 tons, or 288,000 lb. At $0.96/lb equivalent (the midpoint of the Atlanta 25 lb bag range) that is $276,480 gross: a headline figure nearly double the bunched block. But the harvest is mechanical or heavily manual at volume, the wash and bag load is far larger, freight is on you or discounted out of your price, and shrink in storage is real. Realistic net lands near 11%, or about $30,400.

Nearly the same profit. Nearly double the revenue. Roughly triple the capital. That comparison is the strategic heart of a turnip business plan and almost no competing guide performs it, because performing it requires committing to numbers rather than describing a market.

Margin ranges to plan against

Gross margin runs 30–55% on bunched fresh-market and 12–22% on bulk wholesale. Blended net for a mixed operation lands in the 8–20% band. If your forecast shows a commodity turnip operation at 30% net, you have either found something remarkable or omitted a cost — and a lender will assume the second.

The value-added question

Baker Farms' washed, one-pound "Rootables" packs are the visible proof that processing is where this category adds margin. For a small grower the same logic scales down: a washed, bagged, labelled turnip carries a price a field-run turnip does not. That is also where you exit the produce-safety exemptions and start looking like a food business rather than a farm. It is a real strategic option. Cost it properly before you write it in.

Farm Credit: FSA, Microloans & UK Routes

Turnip growers are usually financed through USDA farm credit rather than the SBA 7(a) programme most small-business guides default to. If your plan opens by asking for a 7(a) loan for a produce farm, you have told the reader you have not researched agricultural lending.

USDA Farm Service Agency — the actual route

• Microloans — $50,000 maximum, available as either an Operating Microloan or a Farm Ownership Microloan (USDA FSA). Managerial-experience requirements are modified to accommodate smaller operations and beginning farmers with no farm-management history. Critically, microloans do not count against the seven-year limit on FSA direct loan assistance — you can build credit and track record without spending your eligibility.
• Direct Operating loans — up to $400,000, carrying a 4.750% rate at the 2026 rate points reported. Direct Farm Ownership loans were quoted at 5.750% as of April 2026 (USDA FSA current rates). Rates are recalculated monthly and posted on the 1st. The rate charged is always the lower of the rate in effect at approval or at closing — a detail worth knowing when you time an application.
• Rate timing matters. FSA publishes lending rates monthly (June 2026 announcement). Build your debt-service schedule against the published rate for the month you intend to close, and state which month you used. It is a small thing that reads as competence.

Map that to the two builds above and the financing plan writes itself. The lean fresh-market operation at $38K sits comfortably inside a single $50,000 Operating Microloan — one application, modified experience requirements, no consumption of the seven-year direct-loan window. The mechanised storage build at $240K needs a Direct Farm Ownership loan for the land and cold store, plus operating credit for the season, and it needs a plan that can survive an actual credit review.

UK funding: the subsidy line is effectively gone

This is where most UK turnip guidance is now actively wrong. The Basic Payment Scheme in England has been replaced by delinked payments, and delinked payments are being run down fast. For 2026 and 2027, reference amounts of £30,000 or less are reduced by 98%, and any amount above £30,000 is reduced by 100%. The maximum payment in 2026 is £600, against a £7,200 maximum in 2025 (Defra / RPA). Payments are made as a single payment from 1 August each year.

A £600 ceiling is not a revenue line. If a UK turnip plan you are reading — or writing — leans on BPS or delinked payments to reach break-even, that plan is built on a number that has essentially been legislated to zero. Practical UK routes are commercial agricultural lending, Start Up Loans (up to £25,000 at 6% fixed), equipment finance or leasing on the wash line and cold store, and, for direct-sales operations, customer prepayment through a box scheme. Register your holding for a County Parish Holding (CPH) number with the Rural Payments Agency regardless — it is free and it is the identifier everything else hangs off.

Our market research and content package builds the lender-facing version of exactly this section, with your county's rent, your rate month, and your channel mix.

Food Safety & Licensing by Country

Turnips are not a lightly-regulated crop, and the reason is the greens. Because both the roots and the tops are eaten, and often eaten raw, they attract produce-safety rules that a purely-cooked crop would not.

United States

The controlling rule is the FSMA Produce Safety Rule, and turnips — roots and tops — are listed as covered produce: raw agricultural commodities generally eaten raw, subject to the rule's standards (FDA). Whether the rule reaches you depends on two thresholds:

• The $25,000 micro-exemption. Farms with average annual produce sales under $25,000, averaged over the previous three years, are not covered by the Produce Safety Rule. Important nuance most guides miss: this threshold is inflation-adjusted, and FDA publishes the adjusted cutoffs. Do not hard-code $25,000 into a five-year forecast (MSU Extension).
• The $500,000 qualified exemption. Farms with average annual food sales under $500,000 over the previous three years may take a qualified exemption if more than 50% of those food sales go to qualified end-users — consumers, or restaurants, grocery stores and other retail food establishments in your own state or Indian reservation, or within a 275-mile radius of the farm (FDA).

Read those two thresholds together and something important falls out: the qualified exemption and the high-margin channel are the same channel. The 275-mile local-restaurant sale that pays you $3.60 a bunch is also the sale that keeps you exempt. A grower who scales into national bulk distribution loses the exemption and the price premium in the same move. That is a genuine strategic fork, and it belongs in your plan as one — with the compliance cost of crossing it quantified, not as a footnote.

Alongside the rule: Produce Safety Alliance (PSA) Grower Training is the standard qualifying course, state departments of agriculture run produce-safety inspections under cooperative agreements with FDA, and your state will have its own application packet — Pennsylvania publishes a produce farm application packet that is a useful model for what yours will ask. Add standard business items: entity registration, EIN, agricultural water testing records, and workers' compensation where you employ labour.

United Kingdom

• County Parish Holding (CPH) number from the Rural Payments Agency. Free, quick, and the identifier your holding is known by.
• Delinked payments — the successor to the Basic Payment Scheme. Single payment from 1 August annually; 98% reduction on reference amounts up to £30,000 and 100% above; £600 maximum in 2026 (Defra / RPA). Register, but do not forecast against it.
• Red Tractor Fresh Produce certification. Not a legal requirement, but effectively mandatory to supply a UK multiple retailer. Not needed for farm gate, farmers market or box scheme. Certification is therefore a channel decision with an annual audit cost attached, exactly like the US wash line.
• Employers' liability insurance — £5m minimum cover, required before your first employee.
• Food business registration with your local authority if you wash, cut, pack or otherwise handle produce beyond primary production.

Canada

Canada's structure is different again and catches people out. Under the Safe Food for Canadians Regulations, since 15 January 2019 CFIA no longer issues produce licences under the old Licensing and Arbitration Regulations. Instead, dealers trading fresh fruits or vegetables need membership of the Fruit and Vegetable Dispute Resolution Corporation (DRC) (CFIA).

Key exemptions for a grower: a person who only sells fresh produce they grew themselves is exempt from the DRC membership requirement. Also exempt are those selling only direct to consumers for under $100,000 annually, those trading under one metric ton per day, and registered charities. The trap: a DRC membership does not replace an SFC licence — the two have different purposes, and an importer typically needs both. A Canadian turnip grower who starts buying in other growers' product to fill orders crosses from "grower" to "dealer" and picks up the DRC requirement at that moment. Put the trigger in your plan.

Six Ways Turnip Forecasts Break

These are the failures we see repeatedly on this crop. Each one is cheap to fix on paper and expensive to discover in year two.

1. Planning one business when there are three

Bunched salad turnips, bulk storage roots and forage turnips share a Latin name and nothing else. Different customers, different equipment, different margins, different regulatory exposure. A plan that blends all three produces a forecast that describes no real operation, and any reader with sector experience spots it immediately. Choose the primary; stage the others with a named trigger.

2. Mixing fresh weight and dry matter in one table

Fresh-market turnips are measured at 10–15 tons/acre fresh weight (Purdue). Forage turnips are measured at 3–4 tons/acre of dry matter (USDA NRCS). These are not comparable units. Applying a fresh-weight price to a dry-matter yield, or the reverse, is the most common arithmetic failure on brassica plans, and it always overstates revenue.

3. Costing a 55-day crop and forgetting the 40-day one exists

Selling the baby variety reduces a 55-day crop to one ready in 40 days or less (Hobby Farms). That is your working-capital lever: it changes how many successions fit in a season, how many times your seed spend recycles, and how quickly a lender sees repayment. Most plans never model it.

4. Writing the Basic Payment Scheme into a UK forecast

Delinked payments cap at £600 in 2026 after a 98% reduction, down from a £7,200 maximum in 2025 (Defra / RPA). Templates and guides written before the transition still carry BPS as a revenue line. Delete it. A UK agricultural lender reads that line as evidence the plan was copied.

5. Treating the $25,000 FSMA threshold as fixed

The $25,000 cutoff set when FSMA was enacted in 2011 is adjusted for inflation, using the federal inflation adjustment; FDA publishes the current inflation-adjusted cutoffs (MSU Extension). A five-year forecast that hard-codes the 2011 number will put you on the wrong side of coverage in a year you did not plan for. Check the published cutoff for each forecast year.

6. Buying cold storage as equipment rather than as a selling window

A cold room is not a shed with a compressor. It is the mechanism that converts a crop with a price you must accept into a crop with a price you can choose. Plans that list it under "equipment" and never mention it again in the revenue section have missed what it does. If you have storage, your forecast should show you selling into a stronger part of the price curve than harvest week — and if it does not, you have bought a fridge you did not need.

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