When we were originally looking to purchase land, we were looking at purchasing about 20 acres. ~13 acres of pasture and hay field, 5 acres of trees and enough space for the house, barn and veggie garden. We’d have a couple of horses, some chickens, maybe a milk cow and a pig. We’d look after our little corner of the world and eat the things we grew on our own land.

When we discovered we could purchase the 60 acre block adjacent to family we jumped on it and at that point it seemed obvious that that much land needs to be looked after and worked and that it would provide so much more than we could use on our own. I’d read a bunch of Joel Salatin books and was familiar with some aspects of permaculture design and had many opinions on good horse facility design, but figuring out how to plan a productive farm that provided for all our needs, improved wildlife habitat, increased soil fertility, increased resilience, and provided some saleable products was fairly overwhelming.

Many hundreds of thousands of words later I found a few resources that really helped shape what this farm will look like.

Allan Savory’s Wholistic Management helped define what our goals for the land are. We’re still refining this, but essentially we want to build something that continuously improves the lands ability to support life, while still having lives of our own to enjoy.

The physical design at a large scale was heavily influenced by Yeomans Scale of Permanance. This essentially ranks elements on a farm based on how permanent they are - how much effort it would take to change them and how long they will last once created. This writeup is a good overview of how to use the scale.

With this decision making framework in hand I started collecting data, starting with the more permanent end of the scale.

Climate - Indiana gets cold in winter, hot in summer, gets rained on a bunch all year round. Sometimes there are tornadoes.

Landshape - Indiana is mostly pretty flat. We have a whopping 70’ of elevation change on our place. Patrick says this is “hill country.” (He also thinks a mountain is a hill big enough you didn’t build it with a backhoe. He’s from Illinios.)

Water - This is where we start getting into things we can influence with good design.

Roads/Access - What makes for good road placement?

Trees - Much of our tree planting plan was constructed following the excellent advice of Mark Shepard and Grant Schultz.

Structures - When you buy a quarter acre suburban lot it’s pretty obvious where the house should go. On 60 acres though… where do you even start?

Subdivisions and Fencing - They say good fences make good neighbors, so the one between us and my in-laws had better be really excellent. Do we need internal fence lines? Where should they go?

Soil - What makes good soil, what are we starting with and how can we make it better?