Regenerative Land Design:
Our Philosophy
The privilege of land ownership comes with the sacred responsibility of land stewardship. Without a good understanding of the dynamics of natural resources and forces acting across your landscape, land ownership can become an overwhelming and costly endeavor. However, with a comprehensive site analysis and land design, you can harness and direct these same natural dynamics. This can result in lower your input costs and higher land productivity. It can also marry beautiful forms with beneficial functions that will pay dividends of healthful benefits of current and future generations. This is the essence of Permaculture Design.
Certified Permaculture Designer
Jamie Somma received his Permaculture Designer Certification in 2014 from one of the leading Permaculture Instructors in the world – Geoff Lawton, Director of the Permaculture Research Institute. Permaculture is an ethical and holistic design methodology that works with natural processes and available natural resources to encourage the greatest productive effect from the lowest hanging changes in the landscape. Its goal is to help provide a permanent agriculture based on closed-loop and whole-systems approaches, creating resilience and abundance by assembling a diverse mix of multiple natural elements performing multiple ecosystem functions, leveraging symbiotic relationships between various plant and animals, and leveraging a balance of mutually beneficial perennial and annual guilds for food, fiber, and structure.
Methodology, Tools & Deliverables
- Holistic Goal Mapping – developing your Holistic Goal to guide the design process
- Existing Site Assessment – understanding current state of the site in terms of Climate, Topography, Water, Access, Trees, Fencing, Structures, and Soil
- Proposed Site Design – mapping out the future state of the site to maximize the opportunities in terms of Climate (& micro-climates), Topography, Water, Access, Tree Systems, Fencing, Structures, and Soil; showing how the design elements help to advance your Holistic Goal
- Phasing Recommendations – a recommended break-down of the design elements into logical phases to provide a roadmap for advancing to the desired future state, ordered by logical dependencies and looking for starting with the lowest hanging fruit
- Implementation Proposal(s) – if desired, any of the recommended phases of work can be estimated for implementation
Drone Mapping & Geospatial Services
We are FAA licensed to fly commercial drones to capture and digitize your site to produce orthomosaic images (2D) and digital surface and terrain models (3D). Using Geographic Information Systems technologies, we can integrate this data with many other data sources to feed into our Permaculture Land Assessment service for homestead, farm & ranch operations. Our Drone Mapping services can also be deployed during development to provide value by periodic Construction Progress Monitoring.
Homestead, Farm & Ranch 3D Model Example
Construction Progress Monitoring Orthomosaic Example
PROSPECTIVE PROPERTY or Existing LAND Assessment
Are you looking for some land to establish a new homestead, farm, ranch, or development? Not all land opportunities are equal! Find out what you’re buying as well as what opportunities you may be getting or missing between different properties. Do you already own a piece of land and wonder how it might support your goals? Get a property land assessment from the perspective of your family’s holistic goals and values. This offering includes: Holistic Goal Mapping, Existing Site Assessment for each identified property, and optionally a Comparative Property Assessment against your Holistic Goals. Based on the analysis in an Existing Site Assessment, we can also provide you a Proposed Site Design for any of the sites tailored to your goals to help you assess your property opportunities.
Farm and Ranch land Design
Increase the value of your family’s farm/ranch property for generations to come. Whether a hobby farm or a full-time enterprise, stewarding the land should be both profitable and result in an increasingly valuable asset. Find and build the opportunities for supporting multiple farm enterprises to support multiple family members for multiple generations. Depending on your goals, find ways to incorporate some of the productive elements among others:
- passive water harvesting and irrigation
- healthy stock ponds with productive aquaculture and recreation benefits
- forestry guilds for wind shelter belts, solar gain micro-climate, water cycling, multi-layered perennial food forestry, and wood lots
- no-till alley cropping between forestry belts
- multi-species holistically managed paddock grazing
- inexpensive and flexible reusable temporary fencing systems
- solar powered atmospheric carbon capture and soil carbon sequestration
- multi-way cover crop mixes for improved water infiltration, nutrient mining, solar powered atmospheric nitrogen capture, and healthy soil food web
- integrated cash crop, cover crop and animal grazing rotations
- productive biological brush clearing and control
- productive native grass and forb stewardship
- integrated natural pest management
- wildlife habitat and conservation
These and other elements should be designed with both natural beauty & passive maintenance in mind. Beauty creates a family value all its own. And a design that helps maintain itself greatly enhances that value for generations to come.
EXISTING HOMESTEAD LAND DESIGN
Your existing homestead is brimming with opportunities for helping advance your family’s values. We can help you identify them, from a home garden and perennial orchard, integrated small livestock, composting, water harvesting, home water treatment, grey water reuse, energy conservation, to solar photovoltaic, solar water heating, to general landscape design.
NEW HOMESITE LAND DESIGN
The best opportunity for homestead design is before your home is built. This allows you to maximize the opportunities on your land that most homebuilders and architects are not even considering. It is much cheaper to design regenerative and productive elements from the start than to have to retrofit them as an afterthought. Not only that, but many productive design elements can save you money year over year. Don’t miss the opportunity to pursue your family’s goals for your new homesite from the start!
Pocket Neighborhood DESIGN
Though not a new concept, the Pocket Neighborhood concept has been formally described and practiced by architect Ross Chapin in the Pacific Northwest. His book Pocket Neighborhoods describes the concept by the implementation of the following design elements:
- A cluster of about a dozen houses to create a more natural scale of community
- Oriented around a common open space (aka the Common Green)
- May include a common gathering structure (aka the Common House or Public House or Pub)
- Houses are designed and nested together in a way that creates a continuum from semi-public (oriented toward the Common Green) to semi-private (within the middle and/or more open side of the house) to fully private (toward the back and/or more closed side of the house).
- Parking spaces and structures are encouraged to be co-located on the periphery of the neighborhood at one end of the Common Green and near the Common House if applicable
- Foot traffic between houses and parking is encouraged to flow through the common spaces to increase the likelihood and encourage the frequency of social interactions