Curriculum · Module 01
Reading the Land You Actually Have
The course opens on the land, not the livestock. You place your farm in a biome, veld type and rainfall regime, learn the habit that protects you from bad numbers, start the farm file that every later module writes into, and — so that nobody waits blind — run a first pass of the five-gate enterprise test on the animals you came here to learn about.
- 01 Land First: Why the Ground Comes Before the Animal Settles why this course runs land-then-animal, and shows every learner exactly which module their animal lives in. Locate the module and lesson that teaches the animal you came here forState the three-legged scorecard this course uses to judge whether a farm is improvingExplain why the abattoir rule, the LSU arithmetic and refugia are taught once rather than fourteen times 11 min
- 02 The Seven Principles as Constraints, Not Slogans Settles what each principle actually forbids and permits on South African veld, including the seventh that SA conditions force. Restate each principle as a test that a specific management decision passes or failsIdentify two places where two principles genuinely conflict on a South African farmExplain why rainfall variability rather than rainfall average is the seventh principle 12 min
- 03 Your Site: Biome, Veld Type and Rainfall Settles how to place your farm in a biome, veld type and rainfall regime, and what each one predicts about your year. Place your own farm in an SA biome and Mucina & Rutherford vegetation unit using published sourcesClassify your veld as sour, sweet or mixed and state the seasonal consequence that followsPredict how many usable grazing months your veld type gives you, and budget the gap 14 min
- 04 Where Did That Number Come From? Settles the habit that protects a farmer from bad advice, taught on real errors found inside this course's own research. Apply four provenance questions to any number put in front of youDetect a unit mismatch that changes a budget by more than ten percentExplain why an official document that contradicts itself is teaching material, not a scandal 13 min
- 05 Build Your Farm File Settles what you must go and find out about your own place before any later module can be applied to it. Assemble the six site facts every later calculation in this course depends onName the authoritative source for each of those six factsExplain why an unresolved site fact makes every stocking-rate answer an upper bound 13 min
- 06 Which Enterprise? The Five Gates Settles a first-pass decision on which two or three enterprises are worth carrying through the rest of the course. Run the five-gate sequence on a candidate enterprise and stop at the first honest noApply the Meat Safety Act s7 test to a species before costing the enterpriseSeparate a farming enterprise from an input-selling scheme with one structural question 14 min