RELATIVE LOCATION

The Lean farm Handbook does a fabulous job showing how to apply relative location to your workspaces and the relationship between your growing areas and your packing shed.  I won’t repeat that here.  What I want to discuss is how to start to develop ecological relationships between the species of your farm.

Got a systems diagram of your farm?  Now… put those elements near each other in your design!  Relative location is the easiest way I’ve had to show students how to put elements in the system in relation to each other.  The overwintering spaces for pigs and chickens on my farm are near the gardens where the bedding will go in the early spring or the following fall, depending on the window that I need for pathogen control.  I reorganized all the fencing on my farm so that it’s easy to move pigs from one orchard or pasture to another.  The pigs moving through the orchard understory naturally fertilize the trees.  Further, I spread chicken manure from the nearby summer coop in the dripline of the tree rows, which boosts soil life, which means the pigs nose around in the dripline looking for worms and disrupting scab life cycles and insect pests.  Even more than five years after an application of chicken manure, the pigs are still interested in the places I put it, showing the lasting effects of improving your soil biology.

Think energy savings too.  My winter chicken coop is next to the mom pens for the pigs in the barn.  When I bring out the pullets in the early spring and add them to the flock, I have to spend less energy because the body heat from the pigs keeps that whole corner of the barn warmer.

I keep my produce for the winter CSA in a root cellar in my house basement.  The cellar is on a northwest corner of the house, which keeps it colder in the shoulder season, and it has a window to the outside that I can open to draw in cold air as needed.  I keep a thermometer in the cellar and check it regularly to adjust the temperature.

My livestock guardian dog patrols the lanes of the farm.  Rather than having a lane for him around the perimeter, we have lanes that look like the veins of a leaf, so the dog can get to most areas of the farm while still being separate from the animals (especially the chickens.  Yup, we failed at training him to leave the chickens alone.)  Most especially, he can get to the piece of the perimeter on most sides so he can bark at anything approaching the outer fences.  We have seen bobcat tracks in the snow where the bobcat sauntered into the farm one night and then turned and bolted back to the forest because our dog got wind of him.