Gabrielle Work Plan
Contents
2013
Month 1, 2012
Abstract: First month involves creating a detailed site survey + general land stewardship plan (Site Plan). It also involves startup of a summer garden and beginning of responsible animal husbandry - starting with dairy cows in a mob grazing scenario. Documentation work involves creating a resource list of local agriculture stock + skill resources. Learning involves basic fabrication up to the skills required to maintain and modify tractor and implements.
Tasks:
- Maintain Factor e Farm Agriculture Resources wiki page
- Take charge of organizing ag tools
- Gabi Shopping List for manual and powered tools
- Create a Factor e Farm Agriculture Resources wiki page
- Create a Management Plan for Dairy Cow by Saturday standup meeting
- Include materials, costs, ergonomics of milking and pasture, health, grazing plan, shelter, scale, milking infrastructure, reproductive timeline, food supplements, medicine
- Budget and sourcing of stock and materials
- Survey - 2 weeks
- Conversation with Dan Shellenberg - Saturday - sourcing equipment + basics of technique
- Review the online video, post on, and create Surveying 101 wiki page
- Source open source GIS and mapping software
- Pasture, berming, long term planting (hazelnuts + chestnuts) ponds master plan
- Garden Plan
- Review Monday standup meeting
Learning Plan
- One month
- Fabrication - weld + torch - DONE
- Rationale: all skills required to fix a tractor or modify agricultural equipment - DONE
- 10 hrs welding - DONE
- 10 hours torching - DONE
- Diagramming, graphics software - DONE
- Project ideas: sketchup site plan, preliminary designs for dairy milker & combine
- Three Months
- Site plan - File:Siteplan.skp
- CAD up to Fabrication Drawings - sketchup learned, but still would like to learn AutoCAD
- Dairy Milker and Combine - IN PROGRESS (12/12)
Month 2, 2012
Month 2 involves continuation of agriculture operations, to be determined in detail after results of month 1.
- Propose a replicable, economic sustainability model for Factor e Farm Neosubsistence Agricultural operations
- Produce a Vision Statement for Factor e Farm open source agroecology
Milestones
Full, year round diet for 12 people
- Greenhouse built (14” wall, 6” space with 4” bricks)
- Single spade plow tested and implemented - deemed best for draft power
- Double spade plow tested and implemented - deemed best for lose, deep soil, Lifetrac's wheels compact the soil too much though
- Keyline subsoil plowing 2012
- Edible fence planted (N line, S line, 3 acre pasture on NE corner)
- Pond dug
- Fish stocked
- Shallow dam dug with LifeTrac (toothbar bucket)
- Horto Domi fully functioning (water hookup, planted, worms)
- Bees
- Root cellar/storm shelter/shroom house dug
- Open Source Combine
Pig
- Fence built
- Water infrastructure
- Shelter
- Pig sourced
Dairy
- Cow shelter dug and built
- Second cow bought
- Dairy Milker prototype
- CAD
- Bill of Materials
- Fabrication
Hay
- Mower refurbished, adapted to LifeTrac, implemented - we paid Gary to mow instead
- Rake refurbished, adapted to LifeTrac, implemented
- Baler adapted to LifeTrac and implemented
Accessibility
- Road connecting back through front, passing pond
- Terraces around HabLab dug and planted
- Terraces on hill dug and planted
Planning
- Site plan finalized - File:Siteplan.skp
- Scalable, replicable model rewritten to reflect a full growing year
- Documented: crop, acres, yield in pounds
- Season summaries
etc
- Bat Houses
- Mushroom propagation
Ongoing Work
In addition to:
- planting
- setting up pasture
- research and planning
- construction
- site clean-up
- production runs
- planning
- irrigation/water infrastructure
- food processing/fermentation
this is what I do every day:
2012 Review
- What you have accomplished this year?
- What worked?
- What didn't?
- What have you learned?
- Based on your learnings, what do you want to do differently?
- Concentrate on fewer projects at one time
- Limit prioritized tasks unrelated to agriculture (less time spent trenching HabLab's water line, for example)
- I have more experience at prototyping, and am able to produce hardware more effectively
