A couple ponts of clarification....
'Active solar' usually means solar thermal panels, not solar electricity, which is photovoltaic or 'PV'. I think most of us are very positive on PV-grid tie, many members in here have PV systems, but you didn't say if you were open to it in your first post. @
jebatty was recommending PV AND active solar thermal panels to heat water, which would be stored in a large tank as a 'heat battery' to allow you to store that solar heat and release it in a controlled way as needed. 'Passive solar' is of course just sunlight coming in windows, and dumping heat into the space.
Sounds like you are interested in self-sufficiency, and wood heat with 40 acres is def a great way to go. Insurers will usually require a non-wood heating system to be installed also, and that will be nice to have if you have to travel away from the house in winter. Since you won't be running it much, for the backup system you care more about low up front cost than you do about fuel cost. This brings you back to a cheap propane furnace with a tank of propane that gets refilled very rarely, or an electric baseboard system. The first one is easier to integrate with central AC.
For wood heat questions you came to the right place. Bottom line: a single wood stove is great for delivering a certain amount of heat, depending on the size 20,000 BTU/h to 40,000 BTU/h. If your house is poorly insulated (like many existing houses) then you need a lot of heat, and you need to go through many cords of wood a season. The result is not great...you are stacking, storing and hauling a LOT of wood, you need a huge stove or multiple stoves, and the far end of the house away from the stove can get cold....distributing all that heat is hard. Conversely, if you are well insulated, your wood consumption and work gets reduced a lot, you can buy a smaller stove, you can reload/burn less often, and distributing the heat gets a lot easier so temps are a lot more even, even with a single heat source in one room.
**From a self-sufficiency POV, I would build a 'super-insulated' house with above code insulation and airsealing levels, the most cost-effective route being the PGH, pretty good house. The resulting house would use far less heat than any house you have ever been in (probably only 1/4 to a 1/3 as much), so you would have to adjust your thinking re heating bills and fuel consumption downward. HRVs are still still expensive, the cheapest ones recover 50-60% of the heat from the air streams. Ones that do 80-90% are available from European sources, but cost many thousands of $. You will likely get one of the cheaper ones, which as I said, are standard in new houses in Canada.
**I still think you would get ducts inside the structure, and the smallest propane furnace and central AC unit they sell, and both would still be a bit too large. You would get most of your heat from a simple wood stove, a point source of heat, and it would mostly circulate naturally due to an 'open plan' layout. IF you wanted to boost the distribution, your furnace blower would help with that (get an ECM blower motor for efficiency).
**You would get your electricity from a PV grid tie arrangement, and would design the house with a good roof for solar...having one roof plane facing South or nearly so, and not making it too shallow of a pitch, and design out any penetrations (vents, chimneys, etc.) from that plane. The steeper pitch will get you more power and better natural snow shedding. Having the roof under your panels fail and leak is a real PITA, so, you might want to get a metal roof at least on that plane, rather than shingles, and the panels and roof could last together for decades.
Your plan is doable with current building science and technology, but many things that folks figured out decades ago will not apply. While you will get some passive solar heat, you will not be building huge south facing windows and huge amounts of thermal mass....that approach is very tricky and seldom resulted in a comfortable house. You will be super-insulated, and design a more normal looking amount of south-facing glass, with overhangs so the sun doesn't cook your house in the Summer.
This is obviously a wood-burning board, and this and the other rooms will tell you everything you want to know about wood heating. In a super-insulated house a lot of the challenges of wood heat will fall away, and you will just be left with the many pleasures of it.
But for building a house, you need to read up about that somewhere else....I rec Green Building Advisor. They have a huge amount of info and blogs about all the tradeoffs and options we have discussed above, and invented the PGH concept. You will be unlikely to find a builder who knows this stuff...you will find conventional builders who will talk you out of any 'more than code insulation' options, or will happily upinsulate some areas of the house he can do easily, e.g. the attic, but not others, resulting in bad thermal performance. IF you hunt around, you might find a passive house builder who can deliver you a 'passive house' that can be heated by your body heat, for an eye-popping construction cost. You need to find someone who is experienced building energy efficient super-insulated houses, but who isn't seeing you as a bottomless pit of money. You need to be knowledgable enough only to find the right person, so they don't sell you a bill of goods. And that will be the hard part.
He has great experience with PV not far from you. He also recommends 'minisplits' for heating....I like that approach for heating, but I had assumed would be a no-go in your climate. I'm happy to be wrong. You should look into them, they would provide cheap heat and AC.
