Thursday 14 November 2013

Farm Design - Design One (Ver 4.0)

In our Agriculture for Everybody blog series, we are going to see the Design One (Ver 4.0).


We have already analysed why Roads are very important in the Farm Design in one of our previous blogs.

In this blog, we are going to see the actual design in action and how we are going to utilize even the space allocated to roads to our advantage.


Note: The maximum width of the road vehicle in India is not more than 10 ft and hence we will keep this in mind while allocating the space for roads.

At the minimum, we have to allocate 15 ft or more for roads in our farm.  This is only required for the main roads as well as the entire border roads in our farm and may not be applicable for the roads in the interior of the farm.  This space is required so that the vehicle does not get into the crop areas of the farm and hence prevent the damage to the crops in the farm.

If you want the bigger vehicle to travel to the inner parts of the farm also, then 15 ft is required for all the roads.  Otherwise, you can allocate very small area for smaller vehicles (depending on the vehicle width and add 1 or 2 ft extra).  This way you can transport the goods to the bigger vehicle by using the small vehicle.

If you want only a single road, I think 15 ft is enough.  But if you want double roads (two-way roads) as depicted in the picture, it is better to allocate 20 ft for each of the roads.  This means you will be allocating 40 ft.

You can plant big trees (bigger crown area) like Coconut, Fig, Tamarind, Jackfruit etc in this Trees Space.  This way you are productively using the entire space allocated to the road for other purposes as well.  This type of planting is applicable only for the East-to-West direction road only.

For the North-to-South direction road, you need to align the trees as per the Trees Space alignment.  Otherwise, the Open Space area will have shadow and hence the growth of the crops will be affected.  If in case, you want to utilize the Open Space area as well, you need to grow only those crops that does not grow beyond 4 to 5 ft in height. 

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