How we built a farm that pays for itself — and the process behind it
Less than an acre in Guatemala that feeds our family, the people who come to study here, and a farm-to-table restaurant. This is the design process behind it, including the failure that cost me a fortune before I understood what I was getting wrong.
20 minutes. If you would rather see the farm first, the full tour is on our YouTube channel.
Three things I understand now that I did not understand then
Secret one
Relationships matter more than systems
The chicken tractor, the soldier flies, the biochar, the food forest — you can learn any of them from a video. Collecting them is not designing. What matters is that the chickens sit downhill of the kitchen and uphill of the garden, and that their feed grows twenty metres away.
Secret two
You work from the most permanent thing down
Climate, landform, water, access, trees, structures, subdivision, soil. The cost of a wrong decision is proportional to how high on that list it sits. Get the soil wrong and you lose a season. Get the water wrong and you pay for decades.
Secret three
A course and a team beat either one alone
Courses on their own do not change much — people leave inspired and it evaporates in a month. Design services on their own do not scale — you sell hours. Put them together and you get a hub: a demonstration that pays for itself, with a team that can go and build it somewhere else.
Reading the Land
The masterclass moves fast, because it is a tour. The guide moves slowly, because it is a reference — 33 pages carrying the whole framework, with the survey and design plates from a real client project placed at the stage each one belongs to.
- The full design process, from vision to a finished master plan you can build from.
- The scale of permanence — all nine layers, and the reasoning behind the order.
- Why water is the leverage point, and why access comes immediately after it.
- The six steps, and why the part everyone starts with belongs dead last.
- Sector analysis and zones of use, worked through on real client land.
- How to mark a contour line with a frame you can build this afternoon.
- Survey plates from a live client project, shown in the order the work happens.
Nothing is held back. Everything in the guide you can take and use on your own land this weekend.
Send me the guide
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Three things you cannot do on your own
You cannot see your own water. Reading hydrology properly takes contour data, elevation modelling and an eye trained to know what a subtle break in slope means. It is the step people guess at, and everything below it depends on it.
You cannot check your own reasoning. Every landowner I have worked with, myself included, falls in love with a decision early and then bends the entire plan to justify it.
You do not know what you do not know. The expensive failure is never the bad decision. It is the option you never considered, because nobody told you it existed.
It starts with a conversation, not a checkout.