Designing Sustainable Small Farms

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Working the design. Next, for each potential plan you devise, take yourself through the day-to-day farm activities to determine the relative ease (or difficulty!) with which they can be performed. See yourself feeding the chickens, applying the compost, harvesting the produce, and storing and distributing hay. This exercise quickly points up poor placement and identifies conflicting uses of a particular location. Change the design as needed and repeat the exercise until your design "works." At this point, go back again and reexamine your objectives and available resources. This last step often leads to further modifications. Rework the design as much as necessary until you have it right.

SPECIES AND SPECIFICS

Once the basic design is completed, you can move on to considering specific crops, species, cultivars, and breeds. (Although I'll limit discussion here to plant choices, you'll likely be selecting both plant and animal species.) If, for example, you have a functional requirement for a fast-growing deciduous windbreak shorter than 20 feet high, look for plants that meet this particular need, such as the willows.

Species selection. Choosing from a large number of candidate species can be a lengthy task. For each plant, you'll need information about its tolerances-to different types of soil, to drought, to browsing animals, and to temperature extremes-and its functions (as a nitrogen fixer, windbreak, livestock forage, and so on). The required functions are then matched with the site characteristics and species tolerances.

One design toot that can aid you with species selection is a plant species matrix. The Future Is Abundant, a text put out by the editors of Tilth (see the reading list), contains an excellent matrix that lists 300 plants and their characteristics. With such a chart, you can easily select plants by attributes. You can, for example, locate all the nitrogen fixing plants that tolerate cold winters, thrive on acid soils, and make good hedgerows. As the interest in permaculture systems grows' more and improved plant species matrices are being developed.

While you're choosing the proper cultivars for your property, you might want to consider the following suggestions:

[1] Orchards. The soil of your chosen site will dictate species and rootstock options to some degree. The climate of your area will further narrow the range of suitable cultivars. (If your region experiences early spring frosts, you'll naturally want to select late-flowering species.) Choosing only disease- and insect-resistant varieties will limit your possibilities as well: For example, Liberty, Priscilla, and Nova Easygrow apples have a reputation for disease resistance, whereas many of the common apple cultivars are more susceptible.

You'll also need to decide what the understory of your orchard will be. It could provide forage for geese and ducks; contain nitrogen fixing clovers; grow green manure crops; provide a habitat for predatory and parasitic insects; or even produce strawberries, raspberries, vegetables, and herbs. Photo 20 illustrates a peach orchard with an understory of nitrogen fixing white clover ... while in Photo 21, vegetables have been intercropped with the fruit trees. If you plan on using large equipment in your orchard, your understory options will obviously be reduced.

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