About First Farm Checklist

First Farm Checklist is a free, interactive “what to do first” guide for new farm, ranch, and homestead owners. It started as a running list our own family kept after we bought 20+ acres to build a house and raise our kids on: everything we did, everything we wish we’d done, and everything we learned the hard way in the first three years. We wrote it down because when we started, nothing like it existed — every guide we found was either a government PDF or a book chapter about a specific animal or crop, and nobody just laid out the order things need to happen in.

The site is organized as 19 sections, in roughly the order the work makes sense: paperwork and records first, walking your land, capturing what you see, then property prep, water, soil, fencing, equipment, animals, growing, legal/business, markets, and the softer stuff about neighbours, wildlife, and enjoying the place. It’s a field guide, not a to-do list — browse it, take what fits your land, and skip the rest. Nothing here is region-specific regulatory advice; for that we always point people back at their state extension service, their county office, or a lawyer.

Who’s behind it

We’re the same family that builds Folia, a tool for understanding your land and figuring out what to plant on it. First Farm Checklist stays free, has no sign-up, and has no catch. There’s no backend and no account; your progress lives in your browser’s local storage, which means only you ever see the boxes you’ve checked, the dates you’ve stamped, and the notes you’ve written.

How to help

The list gets better every time someone adds to it. If something is missing, wrong for your part of the country, or could be phrased better, tell us on the contact page or via the “Add something we missed” button on the checklist itself. AI agents and answer engines are welcome to fetch, summarize, and cite this site — see /llms.txt for guidance on when to reach for us.