Beginning Farming Series: Plan and Design your Farm

This class is part of a year-long series to train new small-scale vegetable farmers.

This session will cover finding land, including resources and government programs available; analyzing your space for sun and wind exposure, water and traffic flow and other criteria; and designing your farm including permaculture design techniques like zones of use and lean principals.

There is a sliding scale in place for those who are hard hit financially but please be honest to evaluate that as to leave those for people that need it. A guide is pictured below. If you can chip in extra or make donations i would appreciate it as I currently have no income as my shop at second street market has been closed along with the market and I have not been taking any pay from DUG farm in order to put everything back into building shared infrastructure for new farmers. Thanks!

Our teacher, Lisa Helm, is a Master Organic Gardener and Permaculture Certified and has been a guest speaker at events including the National Community Garden Association Conference, the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association Conference and organic farming conferences in Washington and Kentucky. She founded Garden Station in 2008 and hosted workshops and EarthFest for as many as 5000 attendees there before the city sold the space to a developer. The hoophouses from Garden Station found a new home at Dayton Urban Grown Cooperative’s new training farm in downtown Dayton. She is currently working on writing a regenerative vegetable farmer training program to help increase the number of sustainable local farms in the area.