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#9785 Forest garden scheme

Forest garden, agroforestry, intercropping, companion planting, forest farming, permaculture, edible forest gardens, silvopasture (I'm sure this list goes on and on) are all ways of using your farmland for more than one product. I like this idea for a few reasons.

  1. It creates more diverse products which should reduce the amount of travel for each one.
  2. It's more humane to animals than being raised in a small space.
  3. It apparently creates more stuff then each product alone (synergistic).
  4. There's apparently 10 times as much sun coming down at midday as any plant needs.
But it requires a lot of skill and basically in this era of specialization, you gotta know everything there is to know about corn/cows/whatever to complete. 

So here's my scheme. It's a little bit like a shopping mall.

I buy a bunch of land. I put a fence around most of it. I then make lots on the edges. I lease the edge lots to different farmers with know-how. The farmers come plant, maintain, harvest and sell their crop while paying me their lease. (Or manage their herd of whatever animal.) They focus on their crop and I do this:
  1. Negotiate the lease with each farmer to make sure it is profitable for both of us.
  2. Make sure each farmer only harvests her leased crop (ie no stealing).
  3. Decide on the overall design including which areas are kept separate, which overlap, access paths, etc.
  4. Manage the interaction between crops.
    1. Maintain fences where needed.
    2. Make sure goats don't eat the beets.
    3. Take advantage of waste of one to benefit another.
    4. Can use some technology for this as well.
  5. Keep out pests.
  6. Maintain organic status or other statuses (if desired).
  7. Maintain collective insurance fund so each farmer is sustained by the whole conglomerate in case of crop failure.
  8. Manage tours, promotion, recreation or whatever else (wedding reception venue?)
My motivation is to maximize the number of products and the yield for each product so I can charge more for each lease. In the end, the one plot of land supports more farmers, yields more food, is greener, kinder to animals
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