Red Team Your Own Design

A design that cannot be made to fail has not been tested. This is the lesson that makes the course a design course and not a wish. The ninth deliverable is a red-team report: your own plan attacked on eight fronts, and a written record of what broke and what survived. You are not defending the design here. You are hunting it.

What you produce

A red-team table, one row per attack, and a revised design. Each row records the attack, what it breaks, what survives, and the change it forces. The revised design is the real deliverable. The table is the proof you did the work.

The exact format

| Attack | What it breaks | What survives | Change forced |

The rule is that each attack must land at least one real hit. An attack that breaks nothing was too weak, and the honest response is to sharpen it, not to cross it off. If your drought attack leaves the design untouched, your drought was not dry enough. A design that survives every attack on the first pass is a design you have not attacked.

The eight attacks

Run each against the whole design, and use the plan and the ledgers from the earlier lessons as the target. Water: a drought that cuts rainfall by half, and a storm that arrives in one day. Calories: a year in which the grain crop fails. Fat: a year in which the oil crop fails, which is the attack the calorie ledger says matters most. Labour: an illness or a harvest that lands in the one month the household cannot spare. Money: a repair, a purchase, a bad year when no surplus sells. Pests: an outbreak on the single crop the design leans on hardest. Weather: a late frost in the flower, a wet harvest that rots the grain in the field. Health: the two weeks the farmer cannot work, and the calcium gap the reference farm left at 80 percent of the daily need.

The ancient red team

Worked example at the 10,000 square foot scale

Attack the bench, hit by hit. A drought that halves the rain: the staples are rainfed, so the grain and the fava yield near half and the protein column falls with them. The hazelnut block on the south face survives, because the trees root deep, but the sunflower on the same ground does not. The change forced: the oil block splits between the deep-rooted hazel and the shallow sunflower, so one dry year cannot take both.

A year with no oil: the calorie ledger's fat column falls from a third of a person to near nothing, and the household cannot keep warm in the cold. The change forced: the two-year store from Lesson 608 holds a full year of oil before a single tree is relied on, and the store is not sold.

The grain crop fails in a wet harvest: the field rots, the year's calories for the household are gone. The change forced: the grain is grown as a maslin, wheat and rye together, and cut in two passes, so a wet week takes half the block rather than all of it.

The June labour crash: the grain harvest, the threshing, and the garden all land in one month and the household is ill. The change forced: the oil and nut harvest moves to September, away from June, and the garden succession is spread so no week carries two jobs.

The pest on the lean-on crop: a blight on the potato block, the calorie crop. The change forced: the potato shares the rotation with the legume and never returns to the same ground two years running, and a second root, the turnip or the parsnip, holds a share of the calorie column.

The calcium gap: the reference farm met every need except calcium, at 80 percent. The change forced: the design names a calcium source, whether the hens' shells, a mineral-rich leaf, or a stated exception in the ledger.

Pests, weather, and health each break something and each forces a change. The revised design carries the hazel and the sunflower split, the maslin grain, the stored oil year, the spread harvest, the shared root block, and the named calcium. It is no longer the design you started with, and that is the point.

The test

The report passes when every attack lands at least one hit, and when the revised design shows what each hit changed. A table with eight clean rows and no changes has failed the lesson, because it means the attacks were theatre. The last test is the systems test: the design must not carry a reinforcing loop that runs downhill on its own. The soil-mining spiral and the debt spiral are the two that sink small farms, and the revision is not finished until neither one is live in the design.