I'm Cam Incoll. I live and work at Mistwood, a regenerative farm on 35 acres in West Gippsland, Victoria. Fieldwalker started because I was standing on my own block trying to work out where to put my food forest.
I had done the reading. I had the principles, the ethics, the frameworks. What I didn't have was a decent base map. So I did what everyone does: screenshots from Google Maps, screenshots, overlays in Powerpoint and Keynote, then hours in a GIS package that was clearly built for someone with a surveying degree and a lot more patience than me. Days of work before I'd made a single design decision.
I was spending more time behind my desk, when I should have been out in the field planting.
That's the part that bothered me. All that effort went into the mechanical work of getting a map onto a page, and none of it went into the actual work.
Permaculture design is a practice of observation and iteration. If the overhead of producing a drawing is high enough, you only ever draw once, and the design stops being a living thing.
Fieldwalker exists to collapse that overhead. Type an address, get a base map with real contours from the best elevation data available for your region, let it automatically pick out the trees, buildings, dams and cleared ground, then spend your time on the design instead of the tracing.
A bit about me
I've spent about thirty years working where technology meets people. I started in code, moved through engineering management and consulting, co-founded a strategic design consultancy called Huddle and ran it for fifteen years, then led customer and product at Super.so. Alongside that I'm a qualified kinesiologist and I practise mind-body therapies.
The thread through all of it is helping people think clearly enough to make good decisions together. That's what a design process is for. It's also what a permaculture design is: a structured way of paying attention to a place until you understand it well enough to act.
Melis and I bought the farm because we decided that if we were going to help other people with regenerative design, we should be living it. Mistwood is challenging country. Wet, steep in places, cold in winter. Everything I've learned about what a landholder actually needs from a design tool, I've learned by getting it wrong here first.
You can read more about my broader work at camincoll.com.
Mistwood
Mistwood is a regenerative systems company that happens to own a farm. Melis and I run it together. We're building a financially viable regenerative farm from scratch on difficult land, and publishing everything we learn as we go, including the costs and the mistakes.
Mistwood does three things: regenerative property design for landholders, strategy and facilitation work for teams, and a growing set of things that come off the farm itself — plant kits, the build journal, and the planning tools we use ourselves.
Fieldwalker is the tool layer. It's the software that came out of doing this work, and it's what we now use for our own client design work.
What we're trying to do
There's a gap in permaculture education that I keep running into.
A Permaculture Design Certificate teaches the principles brilliantly. It teaches you to observe, to read a landscape, to think in systems.
What it doesn't teach is practice: how to produce a base map, how to move from a notebook full of observations to a document a client will pay for, how to present a design, how to iterate when the first version doesn't feel right.
Plenty of people finish a PDC full of conviction and then stall, because the distance between understanding permaculture and doing permaculture professionally is wider than anyone told them.
Closing that gap is the long game. Fieldwalker handles the mechanical parts today. Over time, Mistwood will add the rest — training, mentorship, and a way for designers to build a real practice. The tools come first because they're the part I can build.
How I think about Fieldwalker
Three things guide the decisions I make about Fieldwalker.
Ecology first. Everything sits inside living systems. A design tool should encourage you to understand a place before you change it.
The process matters more than the output. A design isn't a deliverable, it's a cycle. Observe, reflect, design, implement, observe again. Fieldwalker is built around that loop, which is why it cares as much about your third visit to a site as your first.
Build to learn. I ship, watch what happens, and change it. Fieldwalker is one person's work, which means it moves fast and it means your feedback lands directly on the person who writes the code.
Get in touch
If you're using Fieldwalker and something is missing, broken, or almost right, tell me. I read everything. You can use the chat bubble in the bottom right of the screen to message me directly, or book a conversation to talk with me directly.
My other businesses are here:
- Our farm: Mistwood Farm
- My product development business: camincoll.com