BROWN DOG FARM
nurturing art, craft & healthy soil on our Wisconsin sheep farm
Read the Land
A Farm Crawl Treasure Hunt · August 2025
Walk the farm. Find it, feel it, smell it, ask about it. Mark your square.
Five in a row — horizontal, vertical, or diagonal — wins a bingo. Find everything? You're practically a farmer.
B
I
N
G
O
✓
🪱
Find an earthworm — dig gently
healthy soil feeds the whole system
✓
🐝
Spot a pollinator at work
diversity means resilience
✓
🌱
Find something growing wild and uninvited
nature fills every niche
✓
💧
Spot water catchment — barrel, swale, or low spot
slow it, spread it, sink it
✓
🌿
Find mulched or covered soil
bare ground loses everything
✓
🦆
Find a duck — watch what it's doing
every animal has a job here
✓
🐔
Find a heritage chicken doing chicken things
moved often, land restored
✓
🥕
Find a vegetable, fruit, or flower you don't recognize
grow what feeds people and place
✓
🌻
Find a seed head or saved seed
saving seed closes the loop
✓
🍂
Smell the compost — earth or rot?
nothing wasted, everything returns
✓
🌾
Touch raw wool — feel the lanolin
fiber from land that grew the animal
✓
🐑
Meet a Shetland or Icelandic sheep — learn her name
named animals, known land
⭐
You made it to Brown Dog Farm!
welcome
✓
🎨
Find Rachel's art somewhere on the farm
beauty is part of stewardship
✓
🪵
Find something Ed made from wood
craft connects us to making
✓
🌿
Find layered plantings — tall, medium, and low in one spot
stacking functions, stacking yields
✓
🐦
Count 3 different bird sounds without moving
birds tell you how the land is doing
✓
🌱
Pick up dark crumbly soil — what does it tell you?
good soil is alive
✓
🐑
Find evidence of rotational grazing
the land rests, then it grows
✓
🪶
Find a feather — whose is it?
wildlife is part of the farm
✓
🌾
Find a fiber product from an animal you can see right now
provenance you can touch
✓
❓
Ask a farmer one question — any question
every farm is a conversation
✓
🍅
Eat something straight from the garden (if offered!)
the shortest supply chain
✓
🛒
Visit the farm store — buy something made here
shop local, keep farms farming
✓
🌱
Find bare soil — bet you can't
ground cover is ground care
What You're Reading
Pasture & Sheep — Shetland & Icelandic, fiber, rotational grazing
Garden — vegetables, fruit, flowers, seed saving
Free-Range Poultry — heritage chickens & ducks at work
Art & Craft — Rachel's paintings, Ed's woodwork
Soil & Land — earthworms, compost, cover, biodiversity
Water — catchment, slowing flow, keeping it on the land