People ask what happens on the farm during the winter. The answer is a lot: planning, budgeting, and purchasing new equipment. Since Flynn Creek Farm is still so new to us, our planning is on two levels. The first is for the short term – what are we going to do next season? We are also in the process of imagining a decade-long Master Plan. Although such an undertaking feels like we are giving GOD a good reason to laugh while our faces hover over a map, stewarding 420 acres is a great responsibility and every change to the land we consider has many ripple effects and so to move forward with a single initiative, we must understand its effect on the whole.
For example, we built a greenhouse for transplants last summer. Its location is adjacent to existing produce fields but also determines the location of future produce fields. Those fields need irrigation, thus impacting the location of wells. Drilling one important well came with several challenges and we had to come up with a second-choice location. We chose a spot that would serve future infrastructure. Thus, the well location has determined the siting of a future wash/pack facility and livestock operation.
Our land has many hills and valleys and using gravity to direct water flow and natural irrigation is something we need to be intentional about. Knowing we may have more drought years like we just experienced, moving earth to create water retention ponds is important. But one large pond or several small ones?
We hope to plant an orchard on a south-sloping hillside and introduce more livestock. Both of these initiatives require substantial perimeter as well as interior fencing. Fencing is expensive, so the consideration as to where a perimeter fence goes is important both financially, as well as in terms of not wanting to chop up the farm too much.
This takes me to one of the most fundamental aspects of our planning, and movement – pathways, farm roads, and trails for both vehicles and on foot. Deciding the appropriate ingress and egress for commercial vehicles, for employees (read parking), as well as for visitors including future event attendees is one of the first things we had to consider. It’s also one of those things you can’t determine until you work and travel the land for at least a year. We are just entering a phase in which we can have a point of view.
So, we plan, keeping in mind what our consultant calls “degrees of permanence.” In my non-farming life, I refer to one-door or two-door decisions –all boiling down to whether or not you can take something back. Because in farming as well as in most small businesses, you need to leave room for experimentation, for failure, and for trying over. One of our business principles is to prototype early and often… not just with the crops we grow, but in terms of how we use the land and where we create enterprises on the land.
The experimental mindset means planting a few trees before a full orchard. Before you begin selling organic compost commercially, you need to experiment on your own farm. Before you bring in a herd of cattle, why not see how you do with a season’s worth of goats or sheep…. There is a tension between wanting a Master Plan and also wanting to be a laboratory, between feeling extreme urgency and not making permanent decisions too quickly. So many metaphors that the writer in me wants to grasp onto, but basically farming presents a keen ability to think things through. A great life lesson all around.