COLLECTION 01 / LAND · CROPS · KITCHEN
A place before a price.
Read a landscape, build a useful file and arrive at the next conversation with better questions.
A beautiful view is a beginning. The more interesting story is how the place works: the routes through it, the water that appears in a particular season, the history somebody remembers and the records that might support it. Start with attention, then make room for questions.
This collection moves from looking to keeping a file. Read a little, make a note and return to the same question with a different kind of evidence. It is a way to organize your enquiry before asking a qualified person to interpret the details of a particular property.
Farming Land
Begin with the landscape
The land journal gives working landscapes room to be considered as places. Choose the story closest to the question that brought you here, rather than treating a photograph as a property description.
Read this stop ↗Farming Land / Field journal
Keep an account of the visit
Use the journal to separate your observations from an account supplied by somebody else. A date and a specific next question make those notes easier to revisit when the season or your understanding changes.
Read this stop ↗Farming Land / Guide
Understand what you want to compare
Move from a general impression to a set of topics. Keep unlike questions distinct: a field layout, a document about access and an account of crop history do different jobs in a land file.
Read this stop ↗Farming Land / Workbook
Put the files alongside each other
The private workbook keeps notes, sources, dates and open questions across three files. Its counts describe your record keeping; they do not rank, value or assess land. Export a copy to continue later.
Read this stop ↗TAKE IT WITH YOU
A more useful land file has a clear trail from the observation to the source, and from the source to the next question.
Print this guide to keep a short record of your own reading. These prompts are deliberately blank.
- The place I want to understand is…
- What I observed, and when…
- What I was told, by whom and when…
- The record I want to find…
- The person who can help interpret it…
- The question for the next conversation…
ANOTHER CONNECTION