MicroFarm
A sandpit
An interest group met at the Green Shed and began formulating plans to develop the whole field as a group “sandpit”. The idea was for stakeholders to discuss and implement ways of cropping that may be outside the ordinary. Our intention was for the site to be cropped using conventional “farmer and contractor” equipment.
While full size commercial equipment is bigger than needed for this small site, the point was to use “real gear” so we can be sure the effects are easily translated to any other farming situation. We called it our “MicroFarm”. We asked the interest group to give us ten words that summarised their vision for the MicroFarm, maybe as a vision statement. We put all the responses into wordle.net and this is what we got.
Ten years or more later, we still think this is a fair representation of our activities. It is something we review at intervals: wordles is a very interesting way to review messy information!
We have even added a NanoVineyard (way smaller than the MicroFarm) so we have somewhere to test things on permanent crops.
NOTE: The MicroFarm is now a LandWISE managed activity. See more at www.landwise.org.nz