Wednesday 19 June 2013

Farm Design - An Overview

In our Agriculture for Everybody blog series, we will try to understand the basic requirements of the Farm Design and how to approach the detailed design using the basic requirements.

Keeping it very simple, we need to understand the basic requirements of the Farm in the first place and jot them down.  Please note that it is not required that each and every basic requirements needs to be made available immediately.  What we are trying to achieve is to provide the spacing in terms of land parcel and the placing of the requirement in the right place in the farm keeping in mind our overall design.

Please note that all the requirements mentioned below may or may not be required for each and every farm except for the Crops.
  1. Crops
  2. Fences
  3. Roads
  4. LiveStock
  5. Living Quarters

Once we have decided on the basic requirements, we can create a detailed design using the basic information as the basis.

The following detailed questionnaire will help us to finetune the detailed design.
  1. What type of Fencing is required for our farm?
  2. How much space needs to be allocated for Fencing?
  3. What model are we going to follow in creating the Fences?
  4. What type of crops will be grown? (Short Term, Medium Term, Long Term)
  5. How many crops will be grown?
  6. Where the Crops will be placed in the farm?
  7. Whether the Crops spacing will follow Generic Spacing or Specific Spacing?
  8. Whether the Crops will be planted Mono Planting or Poly Planting?
  9. How many Roads are required?
  10. Where the Roads will be constructed?
  11. How much space for Roads need to be allocated?
  12. Are we planning to have LiveStock?  If Yes, how much space needs to be allocated to them? (Cattle, Poultry etc)
  13. Where the LiveStock shed need to be constructed in the farm?
  14. Are we planning to have Ponds? If Yes, how much space needs to be allocated to them?
  15. Where the Pond needs to be constructed in the farm?
  16. Are we planning to have Living Quarters? If Yes, how much space needs to be allocated to them? (Owner Quarters, Labour Quarters, Storage & Drying Quarters, Eco Tourism Quarters etc)
  17. Where the Living Quarters shed need to be constructed in the farm?

3 comments:

  1. Dear Padmanabhan Sir,

    I must admit the questionnaire you have drafted here is really worth considering!

    I mean these 5 (Crops, Fence, Roads, LiveStock, Living Quarters) are building blocks of any farm design.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dear Padmanabhan sir,

    All the questions you posted are very useful. Also what is the ideal place to construct living quarters for a dairy farm ? Also is there a plan for tail-to-tail system or Head-head system for 20 buffalo ? Like a blue print? Your help is greatly appreciated.

    Thanks,
    venkat.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Even though I have not covered Dairy Farming in my blog, I will just address your questions which I know of. Tail-to-Tail is a better design compared to Head-to-Head design. The living quarters has to be a little far (beyond 25 Metres) from the shed or opposite to the shed to avoid cow dung smell, mosquitoes etc.

      Delete