Build Your Own Farm Tools

Build Your Own Farm Tools
Author: Josh Volk
Publisher: Storey Publishing, LLC
Total Pages: 429
Release: 2021-08-17
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 163586321X

Josh Volk, author of the best-selling Compact Farms, offers small-scale farmers an in-depth guide to building customized equipment that will save time and money and introduce much-needed efficiencies to their operations. Volk begins with the basics, such as setting up a workshop and understanding design principles, mechanical principles, and materials properties, then presents plans for making 15 tools suited to small-farm tasks and processes. Each project includes an explanation of the tool’s purpose and use, as well as the time commitment, skill level, and equipment required to build it. Projects range from the super-simple (requiring a half-day to build) to the more complex, and include how-to photographs and illustrations with variations for customizing the finished implement. Along with instructions for building items such as simple seedling benches, a mini barrel washer, a DIY germination chamber, and a rolling pack table, Volk addresses systems design for farm efficiency, including how to design an effective drip irrigation system and how to set up spreadsheets for collecting important planning, planting, and market data. This publication conforms to the EPUB Accessibility specification at WCAG 2.0 Level AA.

The Complete Guide to Building Classic Barns, Fences, Storage Sheds, Animal Pens, Outbuildings, Greenhouses, Farm Equipment, & Tools

The Complete Guide to Building Classic Barns, Fences, Storage Sheds, Animal Pens, Outbuildings, Greenhouses, Farm Equipment, & Tools
Author: Tim Bodamer
Publisher: Atlantic Publishing Company
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2012
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 160138372X

With their classic barns and fences, American small farms, and the buildings that support these farms, serve a much-needed purpose as much today as then have in the past. Even with the advent of new technology frequently used on farms, these buildings have changed relatively little and are still used to house the animals that so many small farm owners work with and the feed, supplies, and equipment needed to maintain those animals. Every well-meaning farmer or property owner with livestock, small animals, or farming equipment has need of a barn or a series of outbuildings. Unfortunately, many farmers now rely on expensive contractors and construction companies to do a job many farmers traditionally undertook themselves. Knowing how to build these structures is not only a lost American art form, it is also a skill that can save you thousands of dollars. This book has been designed to ensure everyone who has ever thought of building their own barns, outbuildings, or animal pens knows exactly what is entailed-from inception of the design to the final construction stages. You will learn exactly what you need to start building outbuildings, barns, farming equipment, and farm supplies. For each of the structures showed within this book, you will learn the required dimensions and extra space you might not have previously considered, including space for your motorized Machinery, a workshop for maintaining your equipment, and loft space for hay bales, feed, and farming equipment. Regardless of what you need for your small farm or property, you will have a complete list of detailed building design plans. You will learn which building materials are best for creating your needed items as well as the best designs and methods of buildings. The companion CD-ROM contains design plans in PDF format for all the structures shown in the book plus bonus plans. Each design plan offers detailed instructions, supply lists, and diagrams. This book offers plans for building barns, storage structures, animal pens, storage sheds, and greenhouses. It also offers plans for building gates, fences, wagons, farm equipment, and other structures and equipment necessary for the success of your small farm. If you are looking to save thousands of dollars by building your own farm structures and equipment; this book will walk you through every step of the design, preparation, and construction process, ensuring success and capturing the lost art of small farm self-sufficiency.

The New Farm

The New Farm
Author: Brent Preston
Publisher: Abrams
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2018-03-27
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1683353021

This “must-read” memoir of human-scale agriculture offers an insider’s view of today’s food system by a leading voice in sustainable farming (Daniel Boulud). After years of working at the ends of the earth in human rights and development, Brent Preston and his wife were die-hard city dwellers. But when their second child arrived, the shine came off urban living. In 2003 they bought a hundred acres and a rundown farmhouse, determined to build a farm that would sustain their family, nourish their community, heal their environment—and turn a profit. The New Farm is Preston’s memoir of a decade of toil and perseverance. Farming is a complex and precarious business, and they made plenty of mistakes along the way. But as they learned how to grow food, and to succeed at the business of farming, they also found that a small, sustainable, organic farm could be an engine for change, a path to a more just and sustainable food system. Today, The New Farm supplies top restaurants, supports community food banks, hosts events with leading chefs, and grows extraordinary produce. Told with humor and heart, The New Farm is a joy, a passionate book by an important new voice.

Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn

Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn
Author: Thomas C. Hubka
Publisher: UPNE
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2004
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781584653721

The twentieth anniversary edition of the classic architectural study of the development of the connected farm buildings made by 19th-century New Englanders, which offers insight into the people who made them.

Farming for Our Future

Farming for Our Future
Author: PETER H.. ROSENBERG LEHNER (NATHAN A.)
Publisher:
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2021-12-07
Genre:
ISBN: 9781585762378

Farming for Our Future examines the policies and legal reforms necessary to accelerate the adoption of practices that can make agriculture in the United States climate-neutral or better. These proven practices will also make our food system more resilient to the impacts of climate change. Agriculture's contribution to climate change is substantial--much more so than official figures suggest--and we will not be able to achieve our overall mitigation goals unless agricultural emissions sharply decline. Fortunately, farms and ranches can be a major part of the climate solution, while protecting biodiversity, strengthening rural communities, and improving the lives of the workers who cultivate our crops and rear our animals. The importance of agricultural climate solutions can not be underestimated; it is a critical element both in ensuring our food security and limiting climate change. This book provides essential solutions to address the greatest crises of our time.

Field Guide to New England Barns and Farm Buildings

Field Guide to New England Barns and Farm Buildings
Author: Thomas Durant Visser
Publisher: UPNE
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2000-10-01
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1611680654

A generously illustrated handbook for identifying and understanding structures that symbolize the region's unique cultural and historical landscape

The Lean Farm Guide to Growing Vegetables

The Lean Farm Guide to Growing Vegetables
Author: Ben Hartman
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2017
Genre: Gardening
ISBN: 1603586997

At Clay Bottom Farm, author Ben Hartman and staff practice kaizen, or continuous improvement, cutting out more waste--of time, labor, space, money, and more--every year and aligning their organic production more tightly with customer demand. Applied alongside other lean principles originally developed by the Japanese auto industry, the end result has been increased profits and less work. In this field-guide companion to his award-winning first book, The Lean Farm, Hartman shows market vegetable growers in even more detail how Clay Bottom Farm implements lean thinking in every area of their work, including using kanbans, or replacement signals, to maximize land use; germination chambers to reduce defect waste; and right-sized machinery to save money and labor and increase efficiency. From finding land and assessing infrastructure needs to selling perfect produce at the farmers market, The Lean Farm Guide to Growing Vegetables digs deeper into specific, tested methods for waste-free farming that not only help farmers become more successful but make the work more enjoyable. These methods include: Using Japanese paper pot transplanters Building your own germinating chambers Leaning up your greenhouse Making and applying simple composts Using lean techniques for pest and weed control Creating Heijunka, or load-leveling calendars for efficient planning Farming is not static, and improvement requires constant change. The Lean Farm Guide to Growing Vegetables offers strategies for farmers to stay flexible and profitable even in the face of changing weather and markets. Much more than a simple exercise in cost-cutting, lean farming is about growing better, not cheaper, food--the food your customers want.

The Resilient Farm and Homestead

The Resilient Farm and Homestead
Author: Ben Falk
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Company
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2013
Genre: Gardening
ISBN: 1603584447

The Resilient Farm and Homestead is a manual for developing durable, beautiful, and highly functional human habitat systems fit to handle an age of rapid transition. Ben Falk is a land designer and site developer whose permaculture-research farm has drawn national attention. The site is a terraced paradise on a hillside in Vermont that would otherwise be overlooked by conventional farmers as unworthy farmland. Falk's wide array of fruit trees, rice paddies (relatively unheard of in the Northeast), ducks, nuts, and earth-inspired buildings is a hopeful image for the future of regenerative agriculture and modern homesteading. The book covers nearly every strategy Falk and his team have been testing at the Whole Systems Research Farm over the past decade, as well as experiments from other sites Falk has designed through his off-farm consulting business. The book includes detailed information on earthworks; gravity-fed water systems; species composition; the site-design process; site management; fuelwood hedge production and processing; human health and nutrient-dense production strategies; rapid topsoil formation and remineralization; agroforestry/silvopasture/grazing; ecosystem services, especially regarding flood mitigation; fertility management; human labor and social-systems aspects; tools/equipment/appropriate technology; and much more, complete with gorgeous photography and detailed design drawings. The Resilient Farm and Homestead is more than just a book of tricks and techniques for regenerative site development, but offers actual working results in living within complex farm-ecosystems based on research from the "great thinkers" in permaculture, and presents a viable home-scale model for an intentional food-producing ecosystem in cold climates, and beyond. Inspiring to would-be homesteaders everywhere, but especially for those who find themselves with "unlikely" farming land, Falk is an inspiration in what can be done by imitating natural systems, and making the most of what we have by re-imagining what's possible. A gorgeous case study for the homestead of the future.