The first steps are getting water, getting electricity, putting in a drain system, a driveway, and concrete slab for the RV, not necessarily in that order. Last week I met with a well drilling company. Ouch! Wells are expensive. I suspect that the rest will be expensive, too. Welp, in for a dime, in for a dollar, right? Multiply that many thousands of times.
Here's a photo of ERN looking NNW:
The buildings belong to friends Julie and George Gorveatt. They got us into this land thing by inviting us to help with several 4H Workshops at their farm. They just happened to mention that this property was for sale. Almost 2 years later it was ours! Almost 2 years after that, we're finally starting forward. :-) The house, orchard, arena and assorted other buildings will be in the trees on the upper left.
I located ERN on Google Earth. Wowee! If you haven't tried Google Earth, do it. Do it when you have lots of time to look, and look, and look. If you don't have high speed internet, go to a connected friend's house or go to the library. Prepare to be amazed.
Google Earth's view shows ERN in the dark lines (dark lines courtesy of Paint Shop, not Google Earth). This view is looking North. Gorveatt's farm is on the upper left. This parcel is 20 acres! Enough for a lot of sheep. Plus!
Now, this was fun. We layed out the farm on paper for our Farm Business Plan. I then layed it out in AutoCAD (whee!) and saved it as a jpeg file. Playing with the Google Earth images in Paint Shop (layer properties, cut, paste, more layer property adjustment, more cut and paste), then adjusting the image sizes and merging yielded this beauty! It's now oriented with the house and outbuildings in the upper left (SW corner). There is a main barn and 6 satellite barns, each in its own 2.5 acre pasture. The driveway goes full length of the property in the middle. Up near the house are the arena, shop/studio (and first temporary residence), paddocks for quarantine, lambs and special care animals. Dream big, eh?
How do you eat an elephant?
One bite at a time.
How do you build a farm?
One step at a time.
- Franna
1 comment:
Yup. Needs sheep. ;)
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