We ran our $95 Small Farm Systems Audit on a fictional farm, and I'm showing you the whole thing.
This is Havenstead Homestead — a composite of the small Michigan farms people describe to me in emails and comments. 8 acres in Kalamazoo County. 12 laying hens, two seasonal pigs, a quarter-acre market garden. The owner's goals: add sheep in spring, and — her words — "quit carrying buckets."
What a $95 audit actually is
Before the advice, the rubric. Every recommendation we ship has to pass seven tests:
- Specificity — names a place and an action. Never "improve efficiency."
- Mechanism — says why it works.
- Costed — materials and labor hours, or "unknown, get a quote."
- Sequenced — what it must come before or after.
- Boundary-flagged — where law, code, vet, or engineering lines are, and which professional owns them.
- Reversible-first — when evidence is thin, prefer the move you can undo.
- Owner-defensible — I'd say it to a farmer at the feed store and stand there.
Then we map the farm as a system — water, feed, animals, manure, people, equipment — before advising anything. The map usually does half the work: most bottlenecks are visible once you draw the movements honestly.
The five bottlenecks we found at Havenstead
1. Water is a hose problem, not a well problem. ~600 feet of hose-dragging daily; in winter the 250-ft pig line freezes and the owner hand-carries 35-lb buckets through mud. Four trips a day.
2. Feed lives in the wrong building. Every ration starts in the barn loft and becomes bucket-trips past the garden. Ten trips a day, twice as long in mud season.
3. The coop was placed for 2019, not for the farm being built. No laneway to a future sheep area — adding animals currently means new everything, because the systems don't connect.
4. Manure sits uphill and uncovered. Nitrogen and pathogens leach toward the garden; the pile freezes solid until April.
5. No winter chore loop was ever designed. The current route assumes bare ground. First thaw turns it into the property's only mud wallow.
Three recommendations (and the reasoning you'd be paying for)
R1 — Put water where the chores are. One new frost-free hydrant at the coop corner and a buried line to the paddock gate — one trench that also tees off for future sheep. Doing it once, now, while she's adding animals anyway, is three times cheaper than three separate fixes later. What we explicitly said not to do: run hose above ground "just for this winter." That's how the 250-ft freeze problem started.
R2 — Move feed to a small hub shed between coop and paddock. Converts ten bucket-trips a day into two, and becomes the natural future site for the sheep mineral station. Roughly $900 in materials, one weekend.
R3 — Fix drainage and access before any new building. The owner is tempted to spend the budget on a sheep shelter first. Our advice: gravel corridor and geotextile pad on the chore route first — because sheep in a mud wallow means foot rot, parasites, and miserable chores in year two. The drainage fix is what makes every later dollar work. This is the unpopular-true recommendation the audit exists to make.
The winter test
Design goal after these fixes: twelve minutes of winter chores, no bucket-carrying, on a dry path. If any farm fails these three — water under 5 minutes per group, feed within 20 steps, dry route — that's the fall project list.
How this was verified
Worth saying plainly: an AI crew does the drafting and mapping. Then a rubric grades it, an opposed critic attacks each recommendation, and I review every line that survives. Anything touching code or licensed work gets flagged to the right professional — the audit informs, it doesn't replace plumbers or vets.
The full Havenstead deliverable — rubric, red-team notes, 90-day plan, capital priorities — is what a real client receives, built from their own farm instead of a composite.
What it costs and what you get
$95, flat. Delivered within three business days of a complete intake — photos, a rough map, one page of goals. Capacity is five at a time because it's me reviewing every word.
If you have five or fifty acres and winter chores are heavy, the audit page has the intake list so you know exactly what you'd send.
Havenstead Homestead is a fictional composite created for demonstration. No real farm's information is shown.