Labour and Calendar

Every farm comes down, in the end, to the bodies that work it. The seventh deliverable is a labour budget and a twelve-month calendar: the design costed in hours and fitted to the months, so that the work lands when the household can give it and not when it cannot.

What you produce

A labour budget that totals the year's hours, and a calendar that spreads them across the twelve months. The budget answers how much work the design asks. The calendar answers when the work arrives, because a design that needs eighty hours in the one week the household is away is a design that has already failed.

The exact format

The budget, one row per task:

| Task | Hours a year | Month(s) | Who does it |

The calendar, one cell per month:

| Month | Main work | Hours | The hinge |

The month table is the working skeleton. It has two hinges and a steady turn between them. The autumn hinge plants the cool staples, the grain and the fava and the maslin, and puts the perennial to bed. The spring hinge sets the warm crops, the bean up the corn and the vegetable garden. Between the hinges the work is the steady maintenance of a living thing: the mulch laid, the water moved, the weeds held down, the harvest brought in and dried. The design goal is the light hand, the year the system runs on its own and the farmer's hand is for the harvest, the planting, and the few emergencies.

The arithmetic of hours

The house design carries the honest number. The reference farm ran a complete diet for one person on about 96 hours a year, 12.5 days, on 740 square metres, and the work concentrates in the June grain harvest. The labour intensity is about 8.1 minutes per square metre per year, and that figure is transferable: scale the area and you scale the hours.

That is one person with a standing system and no livestock. A family on a hill, building the system and keeping animals, spends more, and the building years spend most. The honest number for a family of five building is a season's worth in the building years, then a working, and then, once the store is full and the terraces are built, the light hand.

Calories per hour is the other half of the arithmetic, because labour is the scarce coin and the crop that yields less per acre can still be the right crop. The engine ranks the staples by calories returned per hour of work: wheat about 71,000, potato about 49,000, fava about 43,000, olive under 9,000. Olive is last and olive is not negotiable, because it carries the fat, and fat is what the calorie ledger cannot find anywhere else. Labour productivity is one criterion among several, never the whole picture.

The old calendar

Worked example at the 10,000 square foot scale

Our bench is 10,000 square feet, a little larger than the reference farm's 7,965. Scale the labour by area: 96 hours times 10,000 over 7,965, about 121 hours a year, roughly two and a third weeks of work spread across the year.

Spread that by the reference breakdown and the June crunch shows at once. Two days in June for the manual grain harvest and one and a half more for threshing and storage, four days across the year for the eight garden plantings, a day for the nut or oil crop, a day for pruning and compost, a day of general maintenance. June carries about four of the 121 hours in one concentrated block, which is the whole harvest of the grain. The brief in Lesson 601 set the household's labour at four hours a week, two hundred a year. The design asks 121. It fits, with margin, and the margin is where the household absorbs a bad year or a bad back.

The test

The budget passes when its annual total fits the available hours written in the brief, with margin for the year the weather goes wrong. The calendar passes when the grain harvest lands in a month the household can spare, and when no single month carries more than about a third of the year's work. A design that fits the hours but piles them into one impossible week has not passed. And the last test is the aging body: the work must come downhill to the living quarters, so the day ends level or descending, and the design must still be workable when the hands that built it are old.