Crop and Livestock Plan

A farm can feed a family or a farm can feed a ledger. This lesson sets the crops and the animals that feed the family, and it settles the two decisions that are hardest to take back: what grows where, and whether any animal earns its place.

What you produce

Two tables and one decision. A crop plan with a species, an area, a season, and a rotation slot for every crop. A nutrition row for each crop, so the plan carries its own calories, protein, and fat from the start. And a livestock line: either a justified animal with its feed land debited against the human food land, or a written decision to keep no animals.

The exact format

The crop plan, one row per crop:

| Crop | Area (sq ft) | Season | Rotation family | Yield (lb) | kcal | protein (g) | fat (g) |

The livestock line, one row per animal:

| Animal | Count | Feed from the site | Feed land debited (sq ft) | Return (food, fertility) |

The rule that makes the second table honest is the closed loop. An animal that eats grain you grew has to have that grain counted against the land that could have fed a person. An animal that grazes scrub the crop cannot use, or hunts pests in the orchard, comes in nearly free. The animals that stay are the ones that turn something you cannot eat into something you can, or into fertility the soil needs.

The trio is the plan

The trio is grain for the bulk of the calories, a legume for the protein the grain cannot supply alone, and an oil to carry the fat and the fat-soluble vitamins. Every culture arrived at it independently. For a temperate slope the honest trio is a maslin of wheat and rye, the fava for the cool season and the common bean or the pea for the warm, and the oil of the hazelnut and the sunflower and the flax, moving toward the perennial hazel as the years go on. The three together are what a person lives on through the cold, and stored dry and cool they hold for a decade.

Worked example at the 10,000 square foot scale

The 80 percent to staples that keep, the 15 to fruit and nut, the 5 to the summer vegetables. On our bench of 10,000 square feet, the crop plan lands as a grain block of 4,000, a legume block of 2,000, a root block of 2,000, an oil and nut block of 1,500, and a garden of 500.

The grain of choice is a maslin of rye and wheat, sown in October, because the maslin yields when the pure wheat would have starved, and the rye carries the cold shoulder and the dry hollow. The legume is field peas, 14 pounds per 1,000 square feet on loam, whose residue feeds the grain that follows. The oil block is hazelnut at 35 pounds per 1,000 square feet on loam once mature, and sunflower at 40 until the hazel bears. The root block is potato, 300 pounds per 1,000 square feet on loam, the calorie crop that stores in a cool room.

Read the numbers in the engine's crop table and the shape is plain. The fat column is where the plan is thin, exactly as the calorie ledger in Lesson 606 will show, because oil is the most land-hungry macronutrient by a wide margin. The hazel and the sunflower are not decoration. They are the design answer to that constraint.

For livestock, the same bench keeps six laying hens in a tractor that follows the potato block, turning the residues and dropping about 9 pounds of nitrogen a year, at the cost of no grain the household would have eaten. A dairy goat would need 0.5 acre of pasture, half again the whole site, and the ledger would show the goat eating land that was feeding people. The hens stay. The goat does not.

The test

The plan passes when the trio is complete, which means the harvest carries grain, legume, and oil, and not two out of three. It passes when every crop has an area and a season and a rotation slot, so the plan can be planted rather than admired. And it passes the animal test only if every animal feeds itself from the site or from a residue the household cannot eat. An animal on purchased feed fails, because the loop is open and the bill has begun.