This is where I collect spare notes / thoughts / titles for posts that I would like to write on in the future. There may be a little explanation here, and when I have more time I’ll flesh the topics out into full posts.

How to learn farming in your spare time with a dozen 5 gallon buckets

There are a lot of things a farmer has to do successfully to earn a living. But when people think about farming, they typically focus only on planting, watering, and harvesting crops. But that is only a fraction of it! If you want to start a “real” farm in the coming years, one of the best things you can do is start doing all the steps of farming, on the scale and with the time you can afford. Crop selection, processing and storage, relay planting, pest control, market research, record keeping, seed saving, marketing, selling, taxes, finances…

If that all sounds intimidating, well, it is. That’s fine! That merely means it is wise to start small, and start NOW. If you learn and put into practice a couple of those skills each year, in a few years you will have gained a lot of experience. You can move in small pieces so by the time you are ready to start planting thousands of square feet, or acres, you’ve got a lot of pieces comfortably in place already. In a full post later I’ll write more about how to actually start doing and learning these things on a small scale.

In all history, 2017 is the best year ever to start a farm

For a bunch of reasons: anybody can find affordable or free land enough for a farm, the combination of modern science and ancient practices has made it easier than ever to tend a farm with human labor, there is almost no monetary investment needed to get started, there are practices for getting incredible yields from small areas, in most places in the United States at least there are hot markets for local food, it is easy to tap into a wealth of knowledge and assistance online, libraries have free books upon books that can help you get set up, people have been paving the way for sub-acre farm model and it is now pretty well demonstrated.

What happens when you treat soil like dirt?

What the soil food web does for us, why we kill it, and what happens when it dies.

Arranging access to land

How to find a landowner willing to let you farm on their property, and what you need to do to get set up properly and maintain a good relationship.

Our initial crop plan for the 2017 growing season

A map of the bed layout, which crops will go in which beds, when, why, and how much we estimate we will sell the harvests for.
Farm goals: food

Business success, affordable access to food, nutritionally dense food, variety of food that matches sensible diets, regeneratively grown.