Creating Goals and Vision for Your Farm

Buying undeveloped land comes with a lot of challenges, but also with a whole lot of possibilities. The only thing dictating just what you can dream up are local zoning laws (haha, always have to keep that in mind).

While it’s wonderful to have so many options, it can be overwhelming. Like Pinterest and choosing a floorplan…the options are endless, but daunting.

That’s why it’s important to take a minute and decide what your goals and vision for the property are before you break ground. But don’t think of this list as a hard and fast plan. They should be more of a fluid guide, allowed to change with time and your ever changing needs and abilities. Creating goals and vision for your farm are an important first step.

When we bought Acadie Farm I had all kinds of ideas in my head of what we could create, but there were a few things that became a theme and eventually a vision for the property:

(1) We want the property to be a place that our community, including other local farmers, small-business owners and local creatives can come together and showcase what our community has to offer.

(2) The farm is the ultimate way for us to express our creativity in a myriad of ways, from building a business, to documenting the journey through words, photos and videos. We’re both creatives and this project will be a culmination of what are creativity can produce.

Some of our Goals:

(1) Creating a sustainable and eco-friendly farm- This is a hot topic right now, but it’s also something important to us for a myriad of reasons. We want to do our best to make choices that not only make the farm profitable, but also promotes the well-being of the the property, the nature that inhabits it, and the overall community. We’re not afraid to look outside the box to create something different.

(2) We want to create something unique that our family, friends and community can enjoy. We want to add value to our community and provide a place for people to create memories.

(3) We want to create an income from the farm that will eventually become self-sustaining. This will give us more flexibility in our schedules and lifestyle. I love to travel (my husband comes along for the ride, haha), and while I love traveling for the sheer fun of it, my husband does love the idea of more time to show our children the world and participate in missions.

(4) We want the farm to be a place we can raise our girls, giving them to experience nature on a regular basis, and learn how to care for our local habitat and our world.

While this is our beginning list of goals and visions, this list will evolve and change as we take each step to building the farm. Anytime you start something from scratch you have to learn to be flexible and be willing to make changes to your plans, because you’re inevitably going to run into roadblocks. If you’re too rigid in your goals, when you come up on one of those roadblocks, your more likely to quit. But if you brainstorm how your vision and goals can be molded to work through the roadblocks, you’re more likely to succeed and be happy with the results.