Big Land and the Economy of Scale

​Understanding design for larger scale projects

Whether you have multiple acres or just a tiny urban space, it helps to understand how the concept of scale can influence your design decisions. All too often, and especially on larger sites, the roles and relationships associated with the outer zones tend to be marginalized, and we focus all of our attention on that which supports our daily, human, lives. But we must also expand our design to include the needs of non-human species. No matter how big your land may be, the ideas in this module will help you understand how the inner and outer zones connect into your whole system design.

What Do We Mean by “Big Land”?

The answer to a lot of questions, when it comes to living systems is, “it depends,” and this is often because of scale. We can all probably agree that 100 acres and bigger could be considered big, and that an apartment balcony or a tiny urban patio is small, but of course it’s much more complex than that. It’s not just about the size of the land, but about the scale and intensity of the projects being undertaken, the amount of people involved, the boundaries framing the design, and much more.

We would like to drive home the point that, while some designers own large properties and there are certainly unique considerations that pertain specifically to acreages, “Big Land” thinking can be applied in many different contexts. The true purpose of this module is to demonstrate how zone and sector mapping is different on a large site versus a small scale, and to show you how to apply strategies that seem like they’re only for large sites to your small site, and vice-versa.

​Zooming into the outer zones: the size and relative location of your zones will look quite different on large vs. small sites.

Zones on a large site versus a small one: what shifts?

As you learned in the Home System module, “zones” are patterns of human use, and are organized by how productive they are, how much maintenance they need, and the resources such as water, materials or energy that they require. 

In the Home System module, you met the zones and looked in particular at zones 0: your home and yourself, zone 1: the domestic zone, and zone 2: the orchard zone. In this module we zoom into zones 3-5.

The outer zones are not all about owning lots of land. Zones are simply a tool to help you work out the best place for things in your design. They reflect how frequently you need to work in a particular part of your site, or how often you visit it, so even on a small plot you may have, or be able to create, outer zones. For example you may have a couple of logs inoculated with mushroom spores (zone 5) in amongst a food forest on what used to be your front lawn (zone 2). Alternatively, you can use the wider community, including parks, wild spaces, incubator farms, or your neighbors’ gardens for these zones.

Zones can also be used to reduce carrying heavy things further than you need to. For example, the fruit trees in the orchard zone don’t need tending every day, but when the fruit is ripe, having it near the house is a huge advantage and means the crop is more likely to be enjoyed to its full.

Zone Three

Zone 3 is called “the farm zone,” but this could also be (varies widely according to context):

• Your local community garden where you volunteer regularly and harvest some seasonal produce. 
• A guerrilla garden that you look after whenever you are passing by. 
• A bed of perennials in a corner of your garden that just needs occasional weeding.
• The fields away from the house. Livestock grazing in these fields will still need to be checked regularly, but they don’t need tending individually every day or have food or water carried out to them.​

Zone Four

Generally called “the forage zone,” Zone 4 tends to be seasonal in use. This could include:

• A community woodland where you can practice woodland crafts from coppiced wood.
• The hedge out on the perimeter where you gather herbs and flowers. 
• A hillside nearby where locals go to pick berries.
• Nut trees or a foraging area you nurture in a far corner of your garden.
• Hedges throughout the farm where you pick blackberries.​

Zone Five

These are the wild areas, where you may still go but generally don’t try to change or control. This could include:

• The spider webs that you leave undisturbed in the windows or on the balcony to catch flies.
• The footpath by the canal or the cycle path along the old railway track.
• An abandoned factory or unused plot on the industrial estate where you work. 
• A shady corner in a back alley where you collect mushrooms once a year.
• A pond or woodland on your land or in the park where you go to meditate and watch the birds.

​Zone usage fluctuations and livestock

Not having to visit the outer zones so often is partly what defines them. However, at certain times of the year, this changes. Your design will need to take into consideration these seasonal variations and annual cycles and balance busy times and dormant periods in different zones.

For example:

• Harvesting times for nuts and berries in the foraging zone.
• Winter work on hedges and in orchards and woodlands.
• Summer grazing on common land or high pastures.​

This is especially relevant on farms with livestock. During the warmer months, sheep can graze in the open fields located in zone 3. This changes in the cooler season and during lambing. At lambing time, you may bring the sheep into a shed or to a field closer to the house. Alternatively, you can design a system so that checking them out in a field throughout the day and at least some of the night is manageable. 

Some types of livestock, such as cattle, may be brought indoors or kept outdoors during winter and there are design considerations to be made for both scenarios. In mid winter, if your animals are outdoors and you are feeding them, then ideally they will be in a field adjoining the barn. However feeding them in one place all winter can result in the area becoming too wet and muddy. 

Whether you are building a barn or have a barn already in place, your design needs to consider the practicalities of winter feeding. A mini or temporary zone map within your larger design, with the barn or the lambing field acting as Zone 1, can help you to work out practical solutions for busy times of the year.

​Big land can magnify your sectors: pest management

On a large scale, challenges that might seem relatively easy to handle on a small scale become magnified, including pests. Even when you build in diversity and use integrated pest management as described in the Animals, Birds, and Bees module, the system takes time to establish the intricate relationships that prevent one pest from wreaking havoc on your system. This might mean that parts of your system suffer badly for a season or two. This is when it’s important to remember that ecosystems don’t always work on ‘human time’.

The 2018 documentary, The Biggest Little Farm, was filmed over 7 seasons and documented how one couple turned a 200 acre property from a degraded, mono-cropped site to a thriving biodiverse organic farm by building soil and ecological diversity. Along the way, they were faced with many challenges: a plague of snails, huge flocks of hungry birds and gophers eating their ripening produce, coyotes maiming and killing their chickens, and much more. 

Luckily, their mentor reminded them that:

• Every “pest” also plays an important ecological role in the system, which needs to be recognized and valued (e.g. snails are duck food, coyotes balance gopher populations, gophers aerate soil etc.)
• A well-designed system will become more productive each year as resilience and ecological relationships grow and develop over time.
• Carefully observing and responding creatively to the feedback of the system is an important skill that also takes time to cultivate.

​If you are managing a large scale project, it’s important to build in redundancy and to have the wherewithal to zoom out and look at the big picture when faced with immediate challenges.

​Managing the outer zones

Whether you own land yourself, are renting it or are managing it as part of a community group, there are significant differences to managing land on a big scale. It’s worth taking the time to think through the challenges and design a system that works for you and/or for the group.

The good news is that there are a wealth of traditional and Indigenous practices we can learn from, adapting ideas to suit current circumstances. New terms appear regularly for “new” sustainable approaches to farming but they are usually a re-packaging of traditional and Indigenous ideas and practices.

If you’ve recently purchased land as a “blank slate,” in a community you aren’t from, please take a moment to read this article, about Why My Farm Isn’t a Permaculture Farm.​

In general, managing more land does take more time. But you can stack functions and harness flows in ways that radically reduce the inputs. For example, if you have to walk across the farm every time you need tools for the garden in your front yard, it makes more sense to have a second tool shed, close to home, than it does to spend the time walking back and forth. On a small site, this extra effort would be a negligible amount of minutes per year. But on large acreage, it could add up to several hours a year.​

So the larger you get, the more you have to account for things like travel time and relative location.

​Outer Zone Temporal Cycles

As you know, the outer zones are visited less frequently than the inner zones. They operate on longer cycles that are determined by factors including usage and species composition. It’s important to plan ahead for how these management cycles will sync up with the wider project design well before implementation.

For example, traditional woodland management is based on long cycles. The length of the cycles depends partly on the type of trees:

• Hazel: 7 year cycle 
• Sweet chestnut: 15-20 year cycle
• Willow: as little as 1 or 2 years, up to 15

If you are planting a new woodland for coppicing (periodic harvesting of tree or shrub growth to encourage new shoots), or taking on the management of a woodland, knowing the different coppice cycles, and knowing what area you or your community group can realistically work each year, is an important part of the design.

Standing trees for larger timber of course take a lot longer to grow, and cycles for these are upwards of fifty years. The Mayan Milpa Cycle is an example of a long cycle, still in use today, that combines growing trees with growing crops and rearing livestock. These types of systems are known as agroforestry, and different versions have been practiced worldwide for hundreds of years. The benefits of agroforestry include multiple uses and yields from the same piece of land. This is significant because it means you may not need as much land as you thought.

​Economies of appropriate scale

This section by Lucie Bardos

The term “Economies of Scale” refers to the fact that up to a certain point, the price per unit of production tends to go down when production is scaled up. Once the operation gets too big, however, the price per unit produced starts to go up again due to the operation becoming more complex and hard to manage.

Of course, there are many factors beyond financial cost that must be considered when determining the scale of a project.

​For this reason, we will use the term “Economies of Appropriate Scale”. This concept is useful when determining the scale at which you should design your project, or the size of land you could feasibly and sustainably manage.

Here is an example of how it works:​

Scenario 1: 

A hobby gardener grows edible flowers in her backyard and sells her blossoms to a local restaurant or two. Some of the boundaries defining her yields might be:

• the cap on how much she can produce is determined by the size of her operation and her ability to invest her own energy into the project, and/or
• the cost of producing one unit of flowers is quite high and the opportunity for making a decent profit is relatively low.​

Scenario 2: ​

If the same gardener were to have access to a couple of employees and a small acreage, her boundaries and yields could shift in the following ways:

• By accessing larger-scale appropriate technologies and hiring employees, the amount of output she could produce would increase. 
• At a larger scale, she may reap the benefits of buying materials at wholesale prices (paper bags, irrigation supplies etc).
• The cost of production overall would increase. 
• The cost of producing one unit of flowers would decrease. 
• At a larger scale, she could potentially cover additional costs while making a bigger profit than she could with her backyard operation.

So, what is “appropriate” scale?

​​This can be a useful analytical tool for helping you to design your right livelihood. It can help you determine the scale of your project in such a way as to avoid burnout while meeting your goals and utilizing your resources wisely. Here’s Lucie Bardos, explaining this concept a bit more in depth.

Economies of Appropriate Scale

Words of Caution:

Economies of scale are also the reason that the world is currently dominated by mega corporations who exploit people and the planet in order to keep their production costs low. We know all too well that bigger often isn’t better, and that the true costs of doing business tend to lie outside the monetary realm.

For instance, when prioritizing low-cost production above all, the agriculture industry often sacrifices the quality of the food itself, as well as the health of local ecosystems and communities. Large scale industrial agriculture is one of the most polluting industries in the world in terms of harmful chemicals and C02 emissions. What’s worse, those who bear the brunt of the pollution are ecosystems and already marginalized communities of people such as Indigenous folks and migrant farm workers.

On the world stage, researchers argue that the Global North owes an ‘ecological debt’ to the Global South due to the fact that richer countries have, through industrial production, exploited the resources of poorer countries in order to achieve a high standard of living at home, leaving poorer countries to deal with the negative ecological and social impacts of large scale production and extraction operations.

To apply the Economies of Appropriate Scale concept:

• Cross reference your plans with your personal goals, AND
• Check-in regularly with ecological ethics and principles, AND
• Accept constant feedback from the social and ecological systems around you. 

​In short, just because you can go bigger, doesn’t mean you should. But if you do, do it with a clear, detailed, multi-phase plan!

​Tips for Determining Appropriate Design Scale for Big Land Projects

Figure out the scope of your project.

Observing your site, determining your goals, understanding your boundaries and evaluating your resources will help you to understand what the scope of your project is. You’ll get much more familiar with these steps as you start to engage with the Design Studio.

To avoid making unnecessary investments and poor decisions, it is important to decide whether you want to make your design project into a livelihood project or a hobby project. You may also wish to think about whether it will be just yourself and your family on the site, or if you will be inviting others to live, work, and contribute. This is an important distinction to make and will determine how you go about designing and investing in your site.

Consider Some Ideas Around “Going Big”

Ask not what the land can do for you, but what you can do for the land. If you have access to a large parcel of land, think about the ecological benefits of establishing big, thriving zones 4 and 5. You may consider establishing permanent wildlife corridors, rehabilitating degraded riparian zones, replanting native at risk species (with help from trained naturalists), or simply allowing nature to take its course and cultivate biodiversity and healthy soils through succession. The benefits of these decisions will be felt for miles around in the wider ecosystem.

It’s a chance to collaborate and build community. Think of the social, cultural, spiritual, experiential, and intellectual wealth that can be grown on a large parcel of land. This may happen through working with local artisans, non profit groups, Indigenous communities, schools, seniors centres, youth programs etc. The land could become a model of large-scale sustainable land management. If you own the land, then recognize that you are one of a very privileged few. It would be beneficial to think about what kind of responsibility you are willing to take on with regard to the “fair share” ethic.

You could design a livelihood in collaboration with the land. If planned and executed with care and forethought, it’s possible that you could make a sustainable livelihood through agriculture, probably coupled with other sources of income, such as running workshops and other offsite projects. 

At any scale, agriculture is hard work and requires planning, energy, perseverance, and drive. Your yields might come in the form of experience, exercise (a euphemism for sore muscles), community growth, or spiritual satisfaction before they come in monetary form. It’s important to ask yourself why you wish to pursue this path. To get some ideas, you can jump to the Economics module and start thinking about how your project might generate different kinds of capital at different scales of production.

Consider Some Ideas Around “Staying Small”

Biting off more than we can chew is a common occurrence with new, over-enthusiastic permaculturists. Especially when we get access to a large property, it can be tempting to work off of vague ideas or beautiful photos in magazines, then make poor financial decisions and end up disappointed in ourselves. Be honest with yourself and be realistic. If being realistic means not buying a large property or just focusing on designing a small garden patch in front of your house, then that is your appropriate scale.

Stay small at first. Scaling up isn’t always the best choice right off the bat. Even on a large property, you can scale down approaches like orchards, swales, and field crops and concentrate them in a small food forest garden that can be observed, learned from, and expanded at a later time if needed. You can try an approach called “design by chunking”. This means that we don’t need to plan the entire project in detail to begin with. We pick a small section and develop that first, before moving on with implementing other sections of our design.

​Smaller scale being more efficient is backed up by a UN study. The IAASTD report on the future of world agriculture was written in response to the question: “How are we going to feed the world?” It was expected to find out that the answer was biotechnology and agro-industry, i.e. genetic engineering and industrial scale farms growing monocrops. Instead, its main findings included:

• Women do most of the food production worldwide.
• Traditional and local knowledge is important.
• Small farms and gardens make more efficient use of the land. 
• Small farms and gardens are significantly more productive than industrial scale monocrops.

​Big land examples

Take a few minutes to visit each website and note what about their designs call your attention, what types of crops or infrastructure are being used, and if you come up with ideas from these examples, jot them down!This is by no means an exhaustive list of global projects. It is meant only as a sampler to show you a range of examples. As you explore, consider how everything you have learned about ecological design so far is different when applied to big land versus an urban or suburban site.

Nettle Valley Farm.  Spring Grove, Minnesota, USA. Woodland is the natural habitat for pigs. Having access to woodland means the pigs find most of the food they need from the wide variety of plants and grubs available. Rotational grazing means there isn’t a build up of parasites, so both the pigs and the pastures/wooded areas are healthier. The design for Nettle Farm, located in the Midwestern USA, incorporates rotational grazing for the pigs through both pasture and woodland.

Llananant Farm. Monmouthshire, Wales, UK. The nant (stream) from the farm’s name runs through the middle of the farm. Because the stream is a permanent feature that can’t be relocated, it made sense to create zone 5 across the middle of the farm. With help from an agri-environment scheme, a swathe of land either side of the stream has been fenced off and is now a strip of woodland. The advantages are that it provides shade, shelter and browsing for livestock in the fields on both sides of the woodland. The trees include alder, a nitrogen-fixer that is particularly nutritious for browsing stock, and willow, a natural source of salicylic acid (aspirin). The woodland also provides a haven for wildlife, increases biodiversity, and helps prevent flooding.

Vergenoeg Project. Namibia. Vergenoeg, Eastern Namibia. Anna-Marta of Namibia’s Vergenoeg Project talks in this video about how training opportunities can empower women. Vergenoeg is a village where the San people, or Bush people, were settled because cattle farming and colonial land ownership laws have made their hunter-gatherer lifestyle impossible. 

Sabina School. Uganda. Rakai, Southern Uganda. On a 110 acre site, Sabina School accommodates 600 children from the surrounding area, where HIV/AIDS has had a devastating impact. One result is that children may not learn essential skills from their parents. To address this, and to help make the school sustainable, an ambitious ecological design is being applied to the whole site, and part of the design is that it is integrated fully into the daily life and education of the children.​ ​

Palestinian farmers use design to challenge occupation. In this article, Sarah Irving looks at two farms in Palestine: Murad al-Khufash’s demonstration centre, which is now on his family’s farm, and Bustan Quraaqaa, founded by permaculturist Alice Grey who lived in Palestine for 10 years. The article looks at the particular challenges farmers face in Palestine and talks about how ecological design ideas and techniques can help farmers overcome these problems, at least to some extent.

Project Wadi Attir. Negev Desert, Israel. Lina Alatawna, a young, Bedouin woman, is the Director General of this initiative of the Bedouin community in the Negev desert. The Bedouin have thousands of years of experience living sustainably in the desert, but their nomadic way of life is under threat, and they are currently a marginalized and vulnerable community. Project Wadi Attir is establishing a model of sustainable agriculture in an arid area, illustrated in this interactive map of the project’s site.

Caring for our Country. Recording Indigenous Ecological Knowledge. Northern Territory, Australia. The Central Land Council represents Aboriginal people in Central Australia and supports them to manage their land, make the most of the opportunities it offers, and promote their rights. It emerged from the Aboriginal struggle for justice and land rights. Their Caring for our Country program is enabling people to record Indigenous Ecological Knowledge through making videos with older relatives. As well as being available in the communities, these videos are being shared with the wider world via their website.

This one is just…stunning:

How a farmer turned 90 acres of wasteland into a lush green forest in Odisha

Truly there is so much to learn here, but we picked just a few for you

The Precarious Status of Farmland

How do we navigate the topic of local food security when it is getting harder and harder to be a farmer? This short documentary explores the tension between flashy urban farms gaining media attention and praise while peri urban agricultural land, tied strongly to food security, gets slowly lost to price hikes and development in the city of Vancouver, Canada.

The Case of Australia

When European settlers first started colonizing Australia, they noticed that what they referred to as “the natural landscape” reminded them of parkland. Of course, this was in fact a carefully managed landscape. Pre-European Australia was inhabited by hundreds of different Indigenous groups who successfully managed the land under very harsh conditions. While Indigenous people in different parts of Australia have different languages and beliefs, every aspect of life and cultural practice was connected to the ecology and beings in their region. 

It is increasingly recognized that over the tens of thousands of years, Indigenous groups have collectively stewarded the ecology and production of the entire continent with a diverse range of practices.

In the book Dark Emu, author Bruce Pascoe calls for a reconsideration of the “hunter-gatherer tag” being applied to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. He presents evidence of Aboriginal food production, including grain production, the propagation of the yam daisy, and fire stick farming. 

​This article explores how settler era evidence such as paintings and journals were used to gain insight into the fire stick farming approach. This technique employs different types of fires to create mosaics of patches of land at various stages of succession. This ensures that certain plant species are available as well as providing habitat and hunting grounds for wildlife.

​Today, Indigenous Australians are actively involved in both conservation and regeneration work as well as managing productive land – and it is often really big land. Home Valley, the fifth largest cattle station in Australia covers over 3,500,000 acres of land in the Northern Territory. The pastoral lease for Home Valley is owned by the Indigenous Land Corporation, an organisation set up to support Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander people in reacquiring and managing land.

Homework

Questions for Review

1. Does incorporating all of the zones make sense for your site? Is your project site large enough for a Zone 3 orchard and Zone 4 forest system? What about Zone 5? Can you make space for wilderness i.e. for areas you don’t mess with? If your site is smaller, could you use surrounding countryside or resources like parks and community food forests as your outer zones?
2. Will the way that you manage your outer zones change throughout the year, or over cycles of several years? How might this affect your design?
3. How would you describe the “appropriate scale” of your project? Might this change over time?

Recommended Hands-On

Pick two big land projects discussed in this module and note down a few concepts within these projects that you thought were especially interesting. On your current zone map, identify the zones in which you might integrate these concepts, or versions of them on a different scale. Also, note down which sectors they may interact with.

Second, identify ways in which these concepts are interconnected with each other and the wider landscape or community; make a note of how they make up parts of a whole system. Next, look at your work-in-progress design, and decide if it’s really feasible include these concepts. To help you make your decision, invite someone who is experienced in using the concepts you wish to integrate to advise on your project.

If you are planning to draw on techniques pioneered by people in the Global South, Indigenous or Aboriginal peoples, be sure to give credit, do your research, and work in solidarity and collaboration where possible.

​Student FAQs About Big Land Projects

Here are some of the most common big land questions that were generated by students in this course.

Theme: Coping!

Q : What are some strategies on how not to be overwhelmed by how much needs to be done/could be done. How can I apply “small and slow” to big land so I’m not burning myself out with all the work?

A: Be honest with yourself about how much you can do physically. Don’t make plans based on what you wish you could do, or think you ought to do.

Make use of the design process to create:

• SMARTER goals
• Phased plans over several years.
• Resilient plans and strategies.
• Alternative plans, i.e. your back-up support system.

If you are starting with livestock, or making changes in livestock management:

• Learn from local farmers and smallholders. 
• Find a mentor. 
• Restrict yourself to one new species per year. 

Start each new species by buying in young to fatten; don’t launch straight into breeding or milking.

If you plan to grow vegetables at a large scale:

• Do your market research. 
• Find a mentor. 
• Don’t assume people will want to help for free.

Theme: No livestock

Q: What are some examples of big land management without livestock?

A: There are a number of options for managing big land without livestock:

• Concentrate on growing vegetables. 
• Grow arable crops i.e. grains or field scale vegetable crops. 
• Rent out land for grazing out. 
• Sell hay, either in bales or as a standing crop (i.e. the buyer cuts and bales it). 
• Plant a woodland and/ or allow natural regeneration of woodland. 

Note: If you are growing vegetables at field scale without livestock elsewhere on the farm, you will need to consider how you will build and maintain the soil’s fertility.

Theme: Rural communities

Q: How can I build community engagement on a rural property and integrate with the local rural community? 

A: As with every other design, this starts with careful observation. 

Here are a few tips:

• Notice what is already there, and already happening. 
• How does the local community, or the local communities, work now?
• What is already going on? 
• How do people help and support each other and how can you become a part of this existing network in a mutually beneficial way?

Identify shared values by remembering that most people are just trying to do their best for their families, often with limited resources.

​If you have moved to a rural community, be aware that some places have had bad experiences of incomers from cities such as: 

• Making official complaints and getting things banned (e.g. cockerels crowing, livestock and tractors on roads, working dogs) that mean people have lost their livelihoods. 
• Bringing in trades people from the city instead of using local tradespeople.
• Renovating and extending the house out of the price range of local people, i.e. rural gentrification. People in such communities are understandably cautious about welcoming other people. Tune into what they are doing, and don’t buy a place expecting the neighborhood to conform to meet your needs.