Both of us enjoy good, well-made, well-maintained tools—a properly sharpened cooking knife; a Kubota mini tractor; and so on. We share a lot of happiness conceiving and designing and building projects on the farm. For this, we need good tools.
Sometimes we have no tool, or even no understanding, that fits what we want to do. We may go to first principles, or may study with a good teacher, or may do research. We may meditate on it.
Sometimes, an insight might arise about how to modify an existing tool. For example, Peter modified the bucket on the Kubota to enable him to carry a larger load of compost for our compost application under the California Healthy Soils Program. It sounds like a small thing, but this modification saved many hours of work! On November 27, 2018 Amy was a panelist in the Fibershed Carbon Farming Webinar. In the video for that event (25:25 – 36:40) you can see the particulars of how we did with compost application, at a nuts-and-bolts, tool-focused level.
Designing Tools
Peter loves to understand how things work, and has great mechanical and engineering skills and knowledge and intuition. For example, he bought his first car, an Austin Mini, in his 30’s and promptly took it apart in the driveway (over 3000 pieces) to get a handle on how it worked. Then he put it back together, hopped in, and (!) went for a drive on the freeway.
Amy did not realize that she was a designer until Toby Hemenway asked in a Permaculture Design Course, “What have you designed in your life before now?” But all her life, Amy has been reverse-engineering restaurant food to be able to cook it at home. And she loves going deep into thought about situations to find opportunities for better flow.
All this means that if what we feel called to achieve is not easily done, well, that’s no reason to stop. Sometimes we just need to design new tools.
Rotational Grazing Planning Tool
Our Rotational Grazing Planning Tool is the product of our many early failures and frustration. It took years to get here, but now we have a basic, clear understanding of the first principles and have built a tool that, for us, is simple and easy to use. We are glad to share it with you.
Rotational Grazing Planning Tool
We’ll post other tools here as we build them.