Back to: Farm Design
There are three different but related concepts you’ll see shown in the Farm Design Tool that describe the area of your farm: Site Area, Minimum Site Area, and Gear Area. As you start thinking about the size of your site, make sure you understand the differences.
The total area of your site—what you would use to apply for a lease or permit; or, if you already have a lease, the total area of your site.
The minimum amount of area required to implement your farm design. This is either the same dimensions as your gear area or your gear area plus a 50-foot buffer on every side. You can add or subtract this buffer in the Tool by selecting or deselecting Regulatory Marker Buoys.
The area demarcated by the footprint of your anchors on the seafloor when they have been fully installed at the proper scope. The buoys of your farm, visible from the surface of the water, will show a much smaller area than the actual gear area your arrays take up under the surface. Gear area does not include any additional ‘buffer’ area created by regulatory marker buoys around the edges of your farm.
A Note on Site Area: In the introductory questionnaire to the Farm Design Tool you are asked whether you have a site in mind. If you select yes, you are prompted to enter your site’s area. Once you enter the Tool, you can manually update your site dimensions at the top of the Site Factors tab. You will receive a warning message if any of your gear exceeds the site dimensions you have specified. If, in the introductory questionnaire, you say that you are “just exploring,” the Ocean Farm Design Tool will not assign any fixed dimensions to your site. Instead, you will see the Minimum Site Area required to implement your farm design.
Once you’ve decided which type of array you want to use and how many arrays you hope to build, you might be wondering how to get them to fit within a given footprint. Or, in other words, how many acres should you lease in order to achieve your farming goals?
At the bare minimum, your Minimum Site Area will be the footprint of your anchors.
But we really recommend giving yourself a small buffer around your gear, which will mean your site area is slightly larger than your gear area.
If you’ve input your farm design into the Farm Design Tool, it will tell you how many acres you need to site in the top right banner of the tool. For example, this farm of four single-line arrays, with a 50-foot buffer on all sides of the gear, requires a minimum site area of 8.76 acres.
If you’re still a little fuzzy on how these concepts relate or how big your farm will appear in real life, watch this short video lesson to understand how the area seen from the surface relates to the overall area of your site and how this is related to site depth.
The recommended length of line between the source of the drag force (such as your array) to the properly embedded anchor on the bottom. It’s calculated as a ratio of length to depth; the deeper your site, the longer your scope. And the longer your scope, the larger your gear footprint, site area, and ultimately lease fees will be. Learn more about scope in course on Gear Selection in the lesson about Anchors.