Venturopoly Farms

What a self-sufficient farm needs, anywhere

The checklist I use on every farm, for buying or leasing, at home or abroad. It's free when you join the V-Farms list, and it works on any farm you look at, ours or not.

What's in it

  1. 1

    Start with what the land is for

    A full-time home, a working farm, a guest farm, several households, a retreat, or a farm someone else lives on. Each one weighs the rest of the list differently.

  2. 2

    Grass comes first

    Animal units, feed days, and how to find a farm's carrying capacity from your desk.

  3. 3

    The systems, one by one

    Water, food, energy, heat, the house, buildings, security, hazards, access, the freedom to run it, and the title. For each: what good looks like, what to ask the owner, and what you can check yourself.

  4. 4

    Seven quick tests

    Checklists you can run on any listing, from the ordinary week to the grid-down month.

  5. 5

    Climate changes what fails first

    Cold, dry, wet, tropical, mountain and island farms fail in different places.

  6. 6

    Buying or leasing abroad

    Why residency comes before land, how foreigners hold farmland, and what 2020 taught about borders.

  7. 7

    Red flags

    The things that should stop you, or at least slow you down.

  8. 8

    Check it from your desk

    The free maps and databases for soil, water, flood, fire, dams and more.

From the report: grass comes first

On a grazing farm, grass is the engine. If the land can't grow it, you don't get the animal units, and everything after that gets expensive, because you're buying, hauling and storing hay instead.

Count animal units, not acres. One animal unit is a 1,000 lb (454 kg) cow with a calf up to 6 months old, eating about 26 lb of dry forage a day. Ten acres in western Oregon can carry more animals than a hundred in Nevada, so acres alone tell you very little.

In the US, the NRCS Web Soil Survey rates pasture soils in animal unit months per acre. Draw the parcel on the map and read the number. Elsewhere, ask local ranchers what land around there carries per hectare, and look at the land in its driest month.

V-Farms takes no money from sellers, developers or brokers, and no commissions. Readers pay for the list, and that's all.