Part 6 · Capstone: Design Your Own Subsistence Farm
The Brief
Write the fixed constraints of your site and household as a one-page brief before any plan is drawn.
A design that starts with a wish ends as a wish. The capstone starts with a brief: the constraints your site and your household fix, written in numbers, before anyone draws a plan. The brief is the set of facts the design has to obey, and nothing else. Every lesson from here to Lesson 610 hangs on this one page.
What you produce
One page. Three parts: twelve constraint fields, two questions, one signature line. Nothing else. A field you cannot fill from a measurement or from a document you actually hold gets the word unknown and a date you will find out. An unknown is allowed. A guess is not. The whole point of the capstone is to find out which of your assumptions were wishes, and you cannot find that out if the wishes are already hidden inside the brief.
The method is the capstone method set out in the doctoral curriculum: design, calculate, attack, revise. The brief is the constraint half of the first step. You cannot attack a design against constraints you never wrote down.
The exact format
| Field | Unit |
|---|---|
| Land area | sq ft and acres |
| Climate zone | USDA zone, first and last frost dates |
| Annual rainfall | mm or inches |
| Soil texture and pH | texture name, pH number |
| Slope and aspect | percent, compass direction |
| Household | number of people, ages |
| Available labour | hours per week, your honest number |
| Starting budget | money you have, money you must borrow |
| Tools on hand | list |
| Livestock on hand | list |
| Purchased inputs you will allow | list, or none |
| Storage you have | cool dry room, freezer, root cellar, none |
Then two questions, answered yes, no, or not yet. Then your signature and the date. The signature is not decoration. It is you agreeing that these are the facts, so that when the design later fails, you can tell whether the design was wrong or the brief was.
The two questions
So question one: will this land repay the hours and the money the brief lists. Question two: is the location healthy, meaning water, slope, frost, and the soil's pH. Both are answerable only after Lessons 602 to 606, so on the brief you mark them not yet and you carry the two questions through the whole capstone.
Worked example at the 10,000 square foot scale
Our worked site for these ten lessons is a bench of 10,000 square feet, 0.23 acre. It is a temperate south-facing slope of twelve percent, the house analog of the autonomous land design book. Filled in, its brief reads:
Land 10,000 sq ft, 0.23 acre. Zone 6, frost dates 15 May and 5 October. Rainfall 700 mm, the rain our reference farm ran on. Soil clay loam at pH 5.0, which the vault records as the West Virginia topsoil median and sits exactly on the pH 5 line below which rhizobia will not live. Slope 12 percent, south aspect. Household two adults. Labour four hours a week, an honest two hundred a year. Budget nothing at the start, one hundred dollars a month after. Tools a spade, an A-frame, a sickle, a scythe, a hoe. No livestock. Purchased inputs allowed: none. Storage: one cool dry room, no cellar.
Read that brief plainly and three constraints already stand out. The labour is small. The pH sits on a gate. The budget is near zero. A design that ignores any of the three will pass on paper and fail in the field, which is the expensive way to be wrong.
The test
The brief passes if a stranger who has never seen your site could price the design and know whether it is feasible. That means every number carries a unit. It means plenty of land, good soil, and lots of rain fail the test, because a stranger cannot use them. It means the labour figure is the hours you will actually give on a bad week, not the hours you dream of on a good one. And it means the two Varro questions are present, even if unanswered.
Exercise
Write your brief
Fill the twelve fields and sign it. Time every field you can with a tape measure, a rain gauge, or a soil test rather than an opinion. Where you cannot, mark unknown and set a date. Then answer the Varro questions not yet and keep the page where you will see it for the rest of the capstone.
Fieldwork
Walk the boundary
Walk your whole boundary on foot and record the distance. Note the point where water enters the property and the point where it leaves. You will need both in Lesson 602, and most people have never actually looked.
Failure mode
The failure mode is a brief written to make the design easy. If you set the labour high, the budget deep, and the land big, every design will pass and none will be built. The brief is the place a farmer is honest and a marketer is not.
