Totier Creek Farm

Eighty acres of working cattle ground on Totier Creek, southeast of Scottsville. The question the owners brought was how to keep the farm a farm while giving the creek back what a century of grazing has taken from it.

We started where we always start: reading the site. Soils, slope, the way water actually moves across the pasture in a storm rather than the way the contour map suggests it should, where the herd walks, where the bank is failing and where it is holding. That reading became drawings and maps — the base the rest of the work is argued from.

From it, two overlapping proposals. Riparian planting along the creek, fenced off the herd, to hold the bank and shade the water. And agroforestry in the pasture itself: trees in the grazing system rather than instead of it, for shade, for fodder, for nuts and fruit, and for the slow return of structure to ground that has been open a long time.