Goals for the Farm

In creating our plan for the farm, we’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about what we want our farm to provide.  Essentially, we’ve been answering the question “What should our farm do?”  After a lot of debate, here’s where we are on it right now.  Please understand that all things are evolving as we go on this journey – this list may very well change over time.  Also, many of these will take many years to happen – please don’t expect to come to the farm right now and see much of any of this!

Our farm should:

1.       Be Home.  Home is the place that puts you at peace and renews your energy.  The farm should be laid out in a way that encourages us to slow down, notice our surroundings and feel grounded.

2.       Be sustainable.  We plan to use appropriate technology, organic growing and sustainable building practices to create our farm and maintain it.  This is an important point and drives many of the other goals for the farm.  It’s also the most challenging element to do.

3.       Grow Food.  Our farm should provide us with all that we need to eat otherwise it isn’t a farm!  We want to have a varied and healthy diet from what we grow – fruits, berries, vegetables, milk, eggs and some meat.

4.       Provide an Income.  We want the farm to be a working farm that provides our primary income.  The income earning parts of the farm must be integrated into the whole in a way that maintains the overall property’s sustainability. 

5.       Have multiple living spaces.  We recognize that most people of our generation will have their parents and their grown children living with them at some point in their lifetimes.  Our property should provide for this in a way that lets all parties have privacy and community at the same time.  We also want to be able to host friends and family who may want or need to stay with us for a while due to changing economic circumstances.

6.       Be educational.  We feel that helping others learn what we have learned (and are still learning) is an important part of the work that we do.  We want to create spaces, both indoor and out, that facilitate teaching and learning so that we can continue this part of our work.

7.       Require minimal maintenance.  Using permaculture principals, we want to set up our farm such that most things happen as a natural course without our intervention.  The goal is to get our part of keeping the farm going down to something we can do when we’re 70.

8.       Age with us.  We will get old and be less mobile than we are now.  The farm should be set up so that we can do that while still providing for our own livelihood.  We also want it to be something that can be handed down to the next generation.  The greatest gift we can give to the next generation is a working farm.

9.       Be robust to climate change.  We recognize that weather will get both more extreme and more variable.  Our farm should be designed to handle both serious drought and consistent drenching rain.  The challenge of designing for the unknown is huge but critical to our long term success.

10.   Involve animals.  We don’t know yet what animals we will want to have – both wild and domestic – but we know they are a key part of the farm ecosystem we are trying to create.

That gives you a flavor for what we’re trying to accomplish.  The next step is figuring out what each of these require and how they interact.  What features combine to satisfy these goals?  How should we arrange them?  How do we balance the different goals so that each one is satisfied without dominating the others?  These are the questions we’re working on now.  Stay tuned!

Looking west from the garden bed at sunset