With smaller-scale operations using primarily two-wheel tractors, you won’t really need large laneways and infrastructure. And you should plan buildings to easily house this same equipment. Your roads should be wide enough to easily pass with your tractor when carrying heavy loads or pulling laden wagons. When laying out and constructing roads, buildings and fields, always take into account the scale of your equipment. Consider the Scale of Your Equipment & Prioritize Access Rather, place the wash station as the first stop from the garden, then lay out roads to flow into the cold cellar and out easily to market. If produce from a garden is brought up to the barn area, processed and stored in a cold cellar, then picked up by a truck to go to market, it makes sense to build new infrastructure with this flow in mind.ĭon’t place your cold storage between the garden and the wash station. Make sure they link up in sensible ways for what actually moves between the zones. Connect These Themes by Design for Flow & MovementĬonsider how these different areas connect via roads and lanes, and the movement of energy throughout the property. Another circled area would probably work best as a back hay field, while an area circled for its good soil should serve as the garden. One area can serve primarily as the “farm center” where buildings will be located. Then create smaller, themed circles to help focus your intent. Make a larger, overlapping circle across the entire area (maybe 6 to 9 circles).
Give themes to these areas by employing a circle map technique.įirst, print an aerial view of your property. Make Sure to Make Themes for Your Propertyīefore you lay out major laneways, plots and buildings, look at the current common and environmental lines, and consider your intended use of different existing fields and areas. Read more: Grow more with less through farm efficiency. When we map and understand the environment of our property, we can plan our farm layout to avoid issues with snow accumulation on roads, woodlot encroachment into a garden and broken tractor implements from stones. Consider your hillside slopes, wetlands and drylands, edges of woodlands and fields, old gravel pits and areas with rockier soil types. You also need to work with the natural lines of the land. When you start to design the layout for new roads, lanes, buildings, plots and such, you need to work with the lines that already exist in your property: fence lines, municipal roads, edges of buildings, current laneways, etc.īuild out from these features to make your property easily manageable for tasks such as future mowing, plowing and fencing. On the other hand, raising a new building requires much more consideration to avoid placing in in the wrong location.Ī poorly placed building can dictate so much about your farm over the years. If you want to shift the balance of your sandy soil and increase organic matter, you don’t need a lot of forethought before deciding to amend the soil with organic matter. Understand That Permanent Features Need More Consideration at the Planning Stage Read more: Remove bottlenecks to improve farm efficiency. Strive to understand ways to channel the energy moving through the farm, and work with existing infrastructure. But you could modify your driveway to access your property at the best point for your farm layout.
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Understand How to Work with Permanent Features, Channel & Direct Environmental Flows On the other hand, you can more easily change the current vegetation of a field or shift the composition of the soil. Some aspects of your property are more easily changed, removed or modified than others.įor instance, you cannot change where the municipal road is or the direction of the prevailing winds. Here are some principles for property layout for small farms Understand the Levels of Permanence on Your Property One mistake in layout can result in repeated impediments to easy management every single year! The organization of roads, buildings, plots and other major infrastructure and field layout can be a major opportunity or constraint for the property owner for years to come. When starting a farm, it is important to follow some good principles for layout.
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