The Hidden Work Before We Built: Researching and Designing Our First Farm Project
For a few weeks now, I have been sharing my journey in developing our regenerative farm.
We started by trying to find our vision, only to discover that we had far too many possibilities.
This taught me that everything didn't need to be done at once. We could work in layers.
Once we started looking at the farm through that lens, we realized that infrastructure needed to be our top priority. It is easy to look at all the infrastructure projects and think they are equally important, but when we started prioritizing them, we found our first foundational project: the Centralized Animal Feed Barn.
To learn more about the process we followed to come to this conclusion, see my previous blog, Why We Chose Our First Major Farm Project: Learning to Build Our Regenerative Farm One Layer at a Time.
When the Design Started to Change
Now onto our next realization: how do we make this project come to life?
We had chosen the project. I could see it in my mind. I knew why it mattered. But there was one small problem—I had no idea how to get from the vision in my head to an actual structure on the ground.
I knew we didn't have the funds to build the full structure this year, or even next year. And I had so many questions:
How big should it be?
Where exactly should it go?
What do we actually need?
What can we afford?
What can we build ourselves?
What needs to happen first?
What do we need to know before we start tearing things down?
Again, I felt the overwhelm creeping in. Thoughts of, Am I dreaming too big?
So I sat myself down, took a deep breath, and went back to the vision of what this project was supposed to do for our farm.
What was its mission for our farm?
Yes, I had figured out why it was important, but that wasn't quite what I needed anymore. I needed to understand what this project actually needed to accomplish. What animals would it serve? What would need to happen inside the structure? What features would it need?
I needed to see the hidden part of the project.
It is easy to jump right to construction when you can already see the finished project in your mind's eye. But if I wanted to stop the overwhelm, I needed to slow down and unearth all the small pieces behind the project that nobody sees.
Before a shovel hits the ground, there can be weeks or months of research, conversations, measuring, sketching, comparing options, pricing materials, reconsidering ideas, and asking more questions.
I have said this before, but I guess it hadn't really hit home with me yet. I was learning again that I needed to step back, slow down, and go back to the foundation of the project.
We knew why the Centralized Feed System was important, but that wasn't quite the question I needed to answer anymore. I needed to understand the true problem this build was going to fix.
This barn would be the key to easier winter feeding, protection for all our animals year-round, and a secure, weatherproof place to store hay. As we began looking more closely at what this project needed to accomplish, we could see several immediate problems it would help solve:
Keeping all our animals warm
Storing our winter forage for all our animals
Cutting winter feeding time in half
Saving money by reducing wasted hay, particularly with the goats
But the more we looked, the more we realized this project would affect things beyond simply feeding the animals.
It would help us determine where to place water tanks and water spigots. It would give us a way to build up compost through the winter for our future gardens. And it would make the future layout of the farm easier to figure out.
By looking at the project from this vantage point, we found that the bigger question this building needed to answer was:
How do we make winter animal care more efficient, protect our resources, reduce waste, and create infrastructure that supports the rest of the farm?
Research: The Missing Pieces of the Vision
With that in mind, I started with the question that felt the most immediate:
How big did this barn actually need to be?
I couldn't simply pick a barn size that sounded big enough. I had to work backward from what the barn needed to do. That meant starting with the animals, the amount of feed they would need, and the space they would need to eat and shelter.
I started by figuring out how many animals would eventually be fed in this structure and how much hay they would need for one winter. That meant researching the approximate amount of hay needed for each type of animal and then multiplying it by the number we planned to feed.
For six goats, I estimated about 3 tons of hay. Six pregnant cows would need around 12 tons, six weaned calves about 5 tons, and our three horses another 5 tons. Altogether, that meant planning for roughly 25 tons of hay for the winter.
Then I had to figure out what 25 tons actually looked like inside a barn.
Our hay comes in 1,200-pound round bales, so I would need about 42 bales. For now, those bales would need to be stored in a single layer because we don't currently have the equipment to stack them. Each bale is approximately 5 feet wide, 5 feet tall, and 5 feet deep.
When I started laying those bales out, I realized I would need a center hay-storage area roughly 35 feet wide by 40 feet long. I also needed to leave additional space around the hay so there would be room to move and so I could access and feed from each side.
But hay storage was only part of the question. This barn wasn't going to be a hay shed. It also needed to give the animals a place to eat under shelter.
So I started looking at how much space the animals would need while they were feeding. The larger animals would need roughly 3 feet by 10 feet each, while the smaller animals would need about 2 feet by 5 feet. With 15 large animals and 6 smaller ones, that added approximately another 520 square feet.
And then there was one more piece I hadn't considered enough when I first pictured the barn. I wanted it to provide a place where the animals could get out of the weather and have room to lounge, not simply a covered place to stand while they ate.
For that, I estimated about 10 feet by 10 feet for the larger animals and 5 feet by 5 feet for the smaller ones. That brought the shelter area to approximately 1,650 square feet.
When I put all of those measurements together, I could finally see the basic shape of the barn.
The center would need to be about 35 feet by 40 feet for hay storage, with 10-foot lean-tos along each side so I could keep the different animal species separate and give them room to feed and shelter.
And honestly, it was bigger than I had imagined.
What did I discover from all this research?
First, the barn was going to be bigger than I originally thought. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that if I could feed all of our animals in one centralized place, winter chores could become much easier for one person to manage. The size suddenly made more sense when I looked at what it could accomplish for our daily life.
Second, the design in my head had to change a little. I hadn't realized just how much space would be needed for hay storage. We already store that much hay each year, but right now it is spread out in different places all over the farm. Seeing the actual numbers helped me understand that hay storage was going to be a much bigger part of the design than I had originally pictured.
Once I had a better idea of the size, another question naturally came up:
Where would something this large actually go?
At first, it would have been easy to look at the farm as it exists today and simply find a place where we could fit the barn. But that wouldn't necessarily mean we had found the right place.
We aren't just building for the farm we have today. We're building a farm that will continue to change over the next several years.
That meant I had to start looking beyond the current location of our animals and equipment. I needed to think about where the animals might eventually move, how future rotational grazing could work, where water would need to go, how hay would be delivered, and what other infrastructure we might eventually need.
I didn't want to build something that solved today's problem only to create another problem for us a few years from now.
This is where I began to understand another part of the hidden work of building a farm:
sometimes you have to make today's decisions with tomorrow's farm in mind.
By this point, I had a much clearer picture of what this project needed to look like. I knew the approximate size, what it needed to accomplish, and I was beginning to see where it could fit into the larger farm.
There was just one problem I couldn't research my way around:
We couldn't afford to build the whole thing right now.
I knew that from the beginning, but seeing the actual size of the project made the reality of that budget a little more concrete. The barn I had pictured in my head wasn't going to appear all at once.
So I had to ask a different question:
What can we build now, and what can wait?
I already knew we wouldn't have the full budget to build the entire project at once. But the research showed me something encouraging: we didn't have to.
We could build this project in stages.
We could start with the location. Some of the fences and hay racks are already in place, although they will need to be redesigned. We can eventually add hay storage coverage by creating a round-bale shed that protects the hay from moisture, but that doesn't have to be an immediate expense. And for animal coverage, we can continue using the barns we already have while we work toward the completed system.
Breaking the project into stages changed how I looked at it.
I didn't have to build the entire vision this year. I needed to figure out what needed to happen first.
I think this was another important part of the hidden work. A budget doesn't necessarily have to kill the dream. Sometimes it helps you build the dream more wisely.
It forced me to slow down, look at what we actually needed, and decide where our resources could do the most good.
The First Design Wasn't the Final Design
One of the things I didn't expect when I started this process was how much the design in my head would change once I started putting actual numbers and measurements to it.
I had pictured a barn, but I hadn't really pictured everything that needed to happen inside that barn.
Once I started working through the amount of hay we needed to store, the space the animals needed for feeding, and the shelter they would need, I realized that hay storage was going to take up much more of the building than I had originally imagined.
We already store this much hay every year. The difference was that right now, it is spread out in several places around the farm. I had never had to look at all of that hay as one part of a single building before.
Seeing the numbers changed the design.
And I think that's one of the reasons this hidden work matters so much.
If I had simply started building the structure I had pictured in my head, I could have spent a lot of money before realizing that the design didn't actually work for what we needed.
Research gave us permission to change the plan before we spent the money.
That doesn't mean the original idea was a failure. It means the original idea gave us somewhere to start.
Planning isn't about getting everything right the first time. It is about creating enough space to discover what actually works before you commit your time, money, and resources to it.
When Research Finally Became a Plan
Eventually, all of those questions started turning into decisions.
We had a much clearer understanding of what this project needed to accomplish. We had worked through the approximate size of the barn, how much hay it needed to hold, the space the animals would need, and how the building could fit into the larger vision for the farm.
We also had to acknowledge what we couldn't do yet.
We didn't have the budget to build the entire finished system at once, but that didn't mean the project had to stop. It meant we needed to separate the finished vision from the first layer we could actually build.
That changed the way I looked at the project.
It was no longer just, “We need a feeder and hay storage.”
It was becoming a plan.
We could see what needed to happen first, what could wait, and what pieces we could work on with the resources we have right now.
And that, for me, was a big shift.
The project that had originally felt overwhelming because it was so large was becoming manageable because I wasn't trying to solve the entire thing at once.
I was answering one question at a time.
What I'm Learning About Planning Slowly
This whole process has reminded me that research is progress.
Planning is progress.
Even changing the plan is progress.
Those things don't always look like progress from the outside. There isn't a new building to photograph. There isn't a finished project to show you. There isn't even a shovel in the ground yet.
But that doesn't mean nothing is happening.
Sometimes the most important work happens before anyone sees the finished result.
The research helped us understand what we actually needed. The measurements helped us see the size of the project. Looking at the future of the farm helped us think beyond today's needs. And the budget helped us decide what could happen now and what needed to wait.
Waiting isn't always a lack of progress.
Sometimes waiting keeps you from making an expensive mistake.
And changing the plan isn't failure.
Sometimes changing the plan means you learned something important before you committed to the wrong thing.
I'm also learning that I don't have to know everything before I begin.
I just need to know enough to make the next wise decision.
That may be one of the biggest lessons this project is teaching me.
When I first looked at the whole vision, I saw a huge project that I didn't know how to build.
Now I'm learning to look at it differently.
What is the problem we're trying to solve?
What does this part of the farm need to accomplish?
What do I need to know before I make the next decision?
And then I can take that next step.
That feels a lot like the way we've been learning to build this farm from the beginning.
We don't have to have every layer finished before we begin.
We have to be willing to put down the right layer at the right time.
The work we're doing right now may not look like much from the outside. There is no finished barn yet. No completed feed system. No beautiful finished farm to show you.
But underneath the surface, something is happening.
We're putting down roots.
We're learning to build slowly, intentionally, and with the future of the farm in mind.
And sometimes that is what faithful progress looks like.
Come See What Happens Next
The research and planning have brought us to the point where we can finally start doing some of the physical work.
The next part won't be nearly as neat.
We're going to start tearing down what is already there, working with what we have, and beginning to build the first layer of this new farm.
And I want to take you along for that part, too.
So come join me for the next part of this journey as we move from planning to building and see what happens when the vision finally meets the ground.
Have a blessed day,
Crystal
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