Land Restoration & Holistic Management
Land costs too much for guesswork.
Before you buy a place or start spending money on one, know what you need it to do, read how the land is put together, and figure out what comes first.
Start with the decision in front of you
What are you trying to decide?
Own or Manage Land
Something is wrong, or you are deciding what comes next.
Maybe water is running off, pasture is not recovering, brush is closing in, or you are looking at an improvement and are not sure whether it should come first. Sometimes nothing is broken. You just need help figuring out what's next.
Start with a $395 Land Health WalkBuyers & Investors
Evaluating land to buy
You are deciding whether to buy.
The listing tells you acreage and what improvements have been made. We need to know what the water, soil, access, infrastructure, and management history mean for what you plan to do with the place. The listing already has the pretty views covered.
Screen a Property Before You Buy
Bear Shaw · Firstground · Granbury, Texas
The field has to match the plan.
I spent about 25 years in industrial construction, project management, and operations. About 15 years ago I started studying Holistic Management. That led into Holistic Planned Grazing, ecological monitoring, the Regrarians Platform, Keyline land planning, soil ecology, and the work that eventually became Firstground.
Industrial work made sequence hard to ignore. Put something in the wrong order and there is a good chance you pay for it twice. I look at land the same way.
After the first read
The next step depends on what we find.
That may mean a deeper assessment, planning, implementation, monitoring, another specialist, or nothing further from Firstground.
Assess
Read the whole and the ground. Separate what we know from what still needs checking.
Plan
Put the work in the right order before money gets committed.
Manage
Keep people, contractors, money, and field conditions from pulling the job apart.
Monitor
Watch for the response we expected.
Adjust
If it isn't working, change it.
Firstground Field Notes
Field Notes from the work.
I write about land, management, methods, and the decisions behind them. The newest three are below.
Start with a conversation
Tell me what you are trying to do.
What is happening on the ground? What are you thinking about spending money on? What still does not make sense? Send that, and I can tell you whether a walk, a deeper assessment, another specialist, or nothing further from Firstground makes sense.
Start a Conversation →Based in Granbury, Texas, with work across North Central Texas and farther when the work makes sense.