SOIL AND VEGETATION
By assessing the living systems of the site, the soil and vegetation cover, you’ll ensure a better understanding of the farming potential of the site.
Keep in mind that although we can relatively easily influence our soil and the vegetation that grows there, compared to other site features, knowing what you’re starting with and what your limitations and advantages are matters a great deal.
To make an impact on anything you’ll need to put in the time, the work, and the resources. So if you put yourself in an unfavorable position where you are required to improve the degraded land or clear the site for farming first, you’ll spend the time and energy on that instead of farming. That’s not necessarily bad, but it might be avoidable.
When assessing the living systems of the site you look at:
- Historical land use
- Soil condition
- Existing vegetation cover
To perform the assessment, you’ll need to make direct observations on the site, looking at the soil condition up close and the vegetation that’s growing there.

Type #1 Risk Assessment:
It’s true that we can regenerate and repair every piece of land with permaculture techniques. However, if your goal is to produce something almost immediately from the land, then you are entering into type #1 error territory.
The restoration almost always needs to be done first, and that can easily be a decades-long project requiring an immense amount of work. It’s going to be hard to do both at once; the restoration and production, so make sure that you know what you’re signing up for if the land is degraded or else it might be a type #1 error.
Type #1 Risk Assessment:
Be cautious about the heavily wooded properties, they might represent a twofold type #1 risk. First, if the house is in a wildfire zone then the trees represent fuel from the fire and second if you plan on having farming operations that would require you to clear a whole bunch of trees.
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