Know exactly what you're
buying, before you buy it.

I'm Jack Ford. These days I'm a stay-at-home dad and full-time homesteader — I run my own integrated farm with rotational grazing, the same 4-bed garden rotation this tool actually recommends, a selective sheep and goat breeding program, and a food forest sustained mostly by its own on-site fertility. Everything this tool suggests about pasture rotation, livestock, and garden planning, I'm doing on my own land, not just describing it secondhand.

Before this chapter: I led land stewardship on roughly 1,800 acres at the George Mitchell Nature Preserve, directing a team of 30–40 field specialists and volunteers on conservation, habitat restoration, and infrastructure work — including diagnosing a streambank erosion problem that was actively threatening a 50-foot bridge, and coordinating hydrologists and engineers to fix it before it became a real structural loss. Before that: infrastructure and irrigation diagnostics for the City of Mesa, field crew leadership through AmeriCorps, and building roads, fencing, wells, and water systems for the Bureau of Land Management.

Why this tool exists: Between that background and running my own place now, I've been the person who gets called after someone's already bought a property and discovered the problem nobody warned them about — the erosion, the water that doesn't drain right, the soil that won't do what they planned. Land Report exists to surface exactly that kind of thing before the purchase, not after. It's built from the same instinct that runs the rest of my work: read the land as one connected system, not a checklist.