9 Steps: Launch Your Permaculture Farm with Yeomans Scale
TL;DR: Establishing a permaculture farm involves prioritizing permanent elements like climate, water, and access before more flexible components such as fencing and planting.
- Prioritize permanent elements like water and access.
- Yeomans scale guides design from fixed to flexible.
- Access roads dictate movement, establish them early.
- Retrofit existing structures instead of building new.
- Install planting systems after infrastructure is ready.
Why it matters: A systematic approach to permaculture farm design, focusing on the permanence of elements, reduces future rework and optimizes resource allocation for long-term sustainability.
Do this next: Map your property to identify existing permanent features and potential access points.
Recommended for: Anyone planning the design and implementation of a permaculture farm, from small homesteads to larger enterprises, who wants to ensure a robust and sustainable foundation.
Setting up a permaculture farm requires a systematic approach that considers the relative permanence of different landscape elements and the energy required to install and maintain them. The Yeomans scale provides a framework for understanding this hierarchy, with climate, landscape, and water supply at the top as the most permanent and energy-intensive elements, while roads, trees, buildings, fencing, and soils occupy the more flexible part of the scale. The concept of relative permanence helps determine the time-scale element for each factor and how much energy should be expended on each component. For instance, roads will last longer and consume more energy to install than subdivisional fences, so fencing is lower on the permanence scale and can be adjusted more easily as the farm develops. Defining access points is a critical early step in farm development, requiring the installation of access roads, tracks, and paths, all of which are permanent features in the landscape and must be considered early in the design process. The placement of access points defines movement patterns around the farm and is influenced by climate, land shape, and the water supply network developed in previous planning steps. On gentler slopes, the location of permanent farm roads is more subjective, but as terrain becomes steeper, the siting of farm roads becomes heavily dependent on climate and land shape considerations. Restoring existing buildings and introducing new structures comes after water and access have been addressed, allowing for informed placement of buildings and other structures. In most cases, existing houses, sheds, and yards must be retrofitted and adapted to meet the farm's needs rather than starting from scratch. Planting trees and crops represents the main systems establishment phase, occurring after soil and water supply have been prepared and the property has been made easily accessible. This stage involves establishing the primary production systems including savannahs, orchards, woodlots, farm forestry, pastures, and market gardens. The phased approach ensures that foundational infrastructure is in place before major planting investments are made, reducing waste and improving long-term farm productivity and resilience.