Barakah Heritage Farm USA

Tag: community

Seeds of Permaculture – Tropical Permaculture

An interactive film about permaculture in the tropics. With education and inspiration as the main threads running through this hour-and-a-half-documentary.We remind you subtitles are available!

Visit http://www.seedsofpermaculture.org for more information and extra features. On the website you can choose to watch individual chapters interactively.

● Intro
● Arrival at Rak Tamachat
● Masterplan 1
● Compost
● Introduction Panya Project
● Kings Project Mae Sa
● Solar Heater
● Masterplan 2
● Soil Food Web
● a Fruit Forest
● Coop at Moo Baan Mae Jo
● Gardening
● Banana Circles
● Humanure Toilet
● Vermicompost
● Permaculture thinking
● Natural Building
● Earthen Oven
● Residents and PDC students
● Credits

November 27, 2018
Purple Pear Biodynamic Permaculture Farm Tour

A tour of Purple Pear Farm in New South Wales, Australia, a permaculture and biodynamic farm with rotating tractor domes over mandala garden beds, pigs, chooks and some great philosophy. Mark and Kate run a small CSA (community supported agriculture) offering vege boxes to their local community.

They dream not of growing ever bigger and bigger and controlling the market for veggies in their region, but rather of staying small and supporting other vegetable growers to initiate similar projects, or even to join theirs, so that everyone in the community is eating well and living well. Now there’s a vision to be inspired by!

Website: http://happenfilms.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/happenfilms
Twitter: http://twitter.com/happenfilms
Instagram: http://instagram.com/jordosmond
Support Happen Films: https://www.patreon.com/happenfilms

Purple Pear Farm: http://www.purplepearfarm.com.au

Music by: Canvas Music Productions
http://canvasmusicproductions.com

November 5, 2018
How to Permaculture Refugee Camps

How to Permaculture Refugee Camps

Malcolm Johnstone

Thursday, 9th March 2017

How permaculture principles and design can be applied to refugee camps to make them more sustainable and liveable.

Temporary IDP camps (internally displaced camps) built for those in Iraq, as well as many other conflict situations, are often more permanent than initially planned.

Camps built in a few weeks for an influx of people are, years later, small towns with shops, schools and bustling social activity. These towns however, are not sustainable due to the lack of an industrial or agricultural base. Simply, they don’t create any internal value to trade with outside. Instead they rely on external inputs – government salaries for a lucky few – but more often, food vouchers, goods and cash from humanitarian organizations.

Aspects of permaculture can improve the sustainability of these camps and have positive effects on food security, nutrition, livelihoods and self-esteem.

Given that the camps are usually planned quickly in accordance with long-established planning guidelines, the usual starting point for implementing ideas from permaculture is in an existing camp, rather than in the spatial planning phase. (Though, permaculture has a lot to say about spatial design). That said, there are many permaculture aspects that can be implemented at the household plot level and in the water reticulation system that have excellent impacts.

WASH, or Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, in the humanitarian sector has the most promise from a permaculture perspective. Innovations in this area have the potential to assist in the production of food, help protect shelters through establishing wind-breaks, beautify a neighbourhood, employ people and increase the skills, social interaction and self-esteem of camp residents. Here is how to get there:

Food

Thinking in zones is a design technique in permaculture that helps reduce the effort required to make a system work. The zones are determined by the place where most of the activity happens – usually the home – and the availability of water – which could be from the roof of the house, or another location.

The inner zone is a great place to grow herbs and vegetables for use in the kitchen. These kitchen gardens require a relatively high amount of water, so should be placed near to both the kitchen and a water source. In camp settings there is often enough space around a shelter or tent for a small and productive kitchen garden.

Slightly further away, in zone 2, fruit trees might be planted, as they require less water. Raising chickens might be considered here to keep the weeds down, fertilize the soil and provide eggs and meat.

Taking advantage of paths that are travelled often is a useful innovation of permaculture systems. If people are already moving in a direction, why not plant something along the way that they can tend or pick? In a camp situation if water must be carried some of it could be used to water plants on route. If the chickens are on a convenient path then kitchen scraps can easily be fed to them.

Protecting shelters

The borders of the camp, or along the sides of streets are good places to run drains, and to grow trees as windbreaks. Exposure to the wind and sun reduces the life of an emergency tent and protection from these elements makes a camp a more pleasant place to live. Fast growing trees can be planted at the outset of camp construction.

Employment

Permaculture relies a lot on manual labour so is suited to camps where labour is one of few assets people have. Setting up systems of water reticulation and planting trees can often be supported financially by humanitarian organizations. The systems can then be maintained by camp residents.

Skills, Social interaction and Self-esteem

Boredom in IDP and refugee camps is a real issue for residents. Learning skills and undertaking activities can be a way to achieve various aims at personal and community levels. The process of planning, digging, planting and tending can be therapeutic, can deliver new knowledge and can integrate a community together.

Beauty

Stark rows of tents, often in remote locations, provide uninspiring views for camp residents every day. Permaculture, with its focus on gardening, can assist with beautifying an environment with plants. Living fencing can replace fences, and if planted in a zigzag can provide plenty of ecological niches to support other types of plants and animals.

It’s never too early to start thinking from a permaculture perspective. Humanitarian organizations in Iraq should start now!

Useful links

How permaculture can respond to refugee camps

Building resilience after earthquakes

Creating community through language

https://www.permaculture.co.uk/readers-solutions/how-permaculture-refugee-camps

On – 09 Mar, 2017 By

February 13, 2018
Why This Woman Is Teaching Ex-Prisoners About Permaculture

(Whether you’re starting your first garden or switching to organic, Rodale’s Basic Organic Gardening has all the answers and advice you need—get your copy today.)

Then Thomas, long dreads framing a smile, told a story of her own. She showed a portrait of Harriet Tubman. “She was born onto a homesteading farm, and it was only her relationship with the forest that enabled her to design the path that she needed to help get African-Americans who were enslaved to freedom,” Thomas explained.

For her mostly white audience, the example was a reminder of the “green” roots of black culture. It also illustrated how a deep relationship with nature can be a tool of radical social change. That notion is core to the work of Thomas, who at 45, is one of the most important voices in the world of permaculture. She takes a discipline conceived for farming and brings its concepts into her community-building work in largely urban settings.

Devised in the 1970s by Australian biologists Bill Mollinson and David Holmgren, permaculture is agricultural and social design that mimics nature. Permaculturists create closed-loop systems modeled after ecosystems. Using a set of progressive ideals—small, slow solutions; recycled resources; valuing diversity; staying open to changes and responding creatively—they seek to minimize their impact on the earth while maximizing their yields. The discipline has its origins in farming: Biodynamics (which treats the farm holistically, as a ecosystem), and aquaponics (which uses fish to fertilize plants and vice versa) are examples of permacultural practices.

“People of all kinds want connection to the earth, and they want meaning and they want community,” says Pandora Thomas, who uses the principles of permaculture to change people’s lives.

But it’s not just useful for cultivating plants. Thomas, who calls herself a “social permaculturist,” is on the vanguard of a growing movement that uses permacultural principles to promote social justice. “Permaculture has focused so much on land, but people are a part of that system,” Thomas said over a lunch of bone broth and raw beet salad at the organic restaurant Mission Heirloom in Berkeley, California, near her home. “We need to heal people and relationships just like we heal the soil.”

Key to that healing is “meeting people where they’re at,” she says, “so they don’t have to become some new person to live this organic life.”

Educated at Tufts University in green building and city planning, and schooled in permaculture on the job as a farmer and at various non-profits, Thomas is an innovator of programs that reach urban communities of color: Grind for the Green, a concert series that used hip-hop to promote sustainability practices; the Black Permaculture Network, which supports organic African-American farmers; the Toyota Green Initiative that brought black celebrities to college campuses to promote environmentalism. These projects have targeted a population that green activists have long seen as lacking in eco-friendliness—a stereotype that Thomas rejects. People of all kinds “want connection to the earth, and they want meaning and they want community,” she says.

“Traditional environmental work doesn’t take a lot of people’s experiences into consideration. Part of my work is how to be a bridge.”

It’s work that was inspired early on by her mother, Francis Thomas, a South Carolina sharecropper who moved north to Farrell, a town surrounded by Amish farmland in western Pennsylvania, during the Great Migration. “She still had that connection to the earth,” says Thomas. “She was an avid gardener.” The family’s living room “looked like a jungle.”

Life, though, in Farrell was tough. The steel mill where Thomas’ father worked shuttered in her youth, leaving a polluted local river and high rates of unemployment in its wake. The fallout made a deep impression on Thomas. She watched family members and neighbors fall victim to cycles of poverty and incarceration. “I was very aware of unfairness and injustice. There weren’t many jobs. There wasn’t access. There was just trauma.”

Thomas herself had a chance to escape that trauma during high school when she went to live in Germany for a year with her older sister, who was in the Army. “My mother never traveled out of the country. We didn’t have a lot of money,” she says, “but she got me on that plane. It was a powerful gift for me to see the rest of the world.”

She returned to Farrell intent on wanting to “understand my place on the planet,” she says. She enrolled in the local college where she also got involved in the environmental activism that made her an outlier. “My environmental friends in college had this perception that black people didn’t care about the environment.

“And students in the African-American union called me a hippie, saying I only cared about polar bears and recycling.”

But, for Thomas, what had happened to the natural and social worlds of her town couldn’t be separated.

“I saw a connection between the environmental impact we were discussing in groups at school and the African-American organization boycotting a prison across the street from my university.” A sophomore year abroad in Nepal only reinforced those connections: “The Tibetan people had been misplaced and were trying to keep traditions, many rooted in the earth, alive.”

At Tufts, where Thomas transferred to finish college, she sought to combine environmental and community activism, becoming enamored of green building and writing a young-adult manual on the subject called Shades of Green, for the non-profit organization YouthBuild. But the world of LEED certifications and sustainable architecture proved too corporate for Thomas.

So she turned instead to permaculture, spending a stint in Venezuela farming before she landed a job at Global Exchange in San Francisco, bringing permaculture education into inner-city high schools. At Global Exchange, Thomas worked alongside artist Zakiya Harris, and in 2010, the co-workers started their own firm, Earthseed Consulting, to help companies and organizations reach black communities with their pro-planet messages. Together, they developed the Toyota Green Initiative, a first of its kind campaign targeting African Americans and educating them on the benefits of adopting a sustainable lifestyle. For six years, they helped to lead the automobile company’s marketing on environmentalism among African-American college students. They helped to launch a roadshow that included workshops in making DIY organic cleaning and beauty products, culturally relevant performances, talks, and eco-goods giveaways, all designed by Earthseed Consulting.

“Permaculture has focused so much on land, but people are a part of that system,” says Pandora Thomas.

“You meet people where they’re at,” Thomas says. “We’d do a 20-minute demo with some famous person. We made an air freshener, a house cleaner, and a facial scrub. We put together a list of eight ‘have to have’s’ in our tool kit.” Lemon, white vinegar, baking soda—“these are things that all our families have had in their cupboards for years, so we were reintroducing the concept that sustainability is something in our own homes.” Earthseed’s programs made going green relevant to their audience.

When the Toyota contract ended, Thomas returned to one of the issues that had first galvanized her: the widespread incarceration of the black community. She had been volunteer-teaching environmental literacy at San Quentin Prison. “These men were passionate about sustainability,” she says. “Just because someone’s incarcerated doesn’t mean they aren’t avid about the issues.”

Her students told her that they needed help getting back on their feet once when they were on the outside. So Thomas co-founded Pathways 2 Resilience, an 18-month permaculture and social entrepreneurship training program for former prisoners Services-rich, it embodied the permacultural principle of stacked functions. “It had to be a case management program. It had to be healing and provide a stipend. We had to feed them. We had to wrap all these into the same experience.”

It began with something that Thomas calls “the Mandela Welcome,” after anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years as a political prisoner before returning to become the first president of a democratic South Africa. “Permaculture has this principle that says the problem is the solution,” explains Thomas.

“All these men and women coming home from prison, we see them as a resource.”

Though the grant for the program eventually ran out, Pathways 2 Resilience had impressive results. All 13 participants graduated, and all but one have remained free of new convictions. The project Thomas is currently working on, pushes the problem-as-solution concept further. Called Women Designing Resilience, she’s co-designing it with one of Pathways to Resilience’s graduates, Linda Candelaria. Permaculture design, therapeutic circles, social entrepreneur training, small business start-up grants—they will plan all of it with an eye toward empowering these ex-inmates to become leaders in their own right.

That’s not unlike the organic farmer who works with, rather than tries to control, the natural cycles of her land. The way Thomas sees it, her work might not involve seed saving or composting, but nonetheless, it’s permaculture. As she puts it, “I think my farm is wherever there’s people. I think I’m growing people.”

Keep up with Pandora Thomas and her work at PandoraThomas.com

https://www.rodalesorganiclife.com/garden/why-this-woman-is-teaching-ex-prisoners-about-permaculture

On – 11 Jul, 2017 By Betsy Andrews

February 9, 2018
Implementing Your Dreams on the Permaculture Homestead
When developing a permaculture homestead, you’ve got a lot of dreams and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Are you wondering where to start? Here’s how to look at all you want to accomplish and create a plan that breaks it down into manageable tasks. This is called implementation planning.

Posts may contain affiliate links, which allow me to earn a commission at no extra cost to you. This helps keep costs down so that I can continue providing high quality content to you for free. I appreciate your purchase through the links! (full disclosure)

In my article 6 Maps to Draw for the Permaculture Designed Homestead, I walked you through creating a Master Plan for your productive homestead paradise. In this article, we will work from the Master Plan to produce Phases of Implementation. (You can’t do it all at once!)

Here is my Master Plan:

Implementation Planning

With our Master Plan in hand, we have a grand vision for our homestead. In my own Master Plan above, MY DREAM is to create:
- a food forest
- a meadow
- walking trails in the woods with edible foraging strips throughout
- a vegetable garden
- a collection of outbuildings including a garden shed, wood shed, small livestock compound, composting center, and greenhouse
Now, each of these dreams will take significant time, effort, and cost to complete. The worst thing I could do is try my hand at all of them at the same time, willy-nilly! I want to give each one the proper attention so it is done well and functions efficiently within the whole system.

What we need now is a realistic schedule that not only breaks down the whole list into manageable steps, but that also considers emergent and limiting factors to put the steps into the most efficient and logical ORDER.

Let’s dive in and see if we can make sense of this.

#1: The BIG LIST Exercise

In this step, list out all of the MAJOR considerations within each of your dreams. Here’s an example of the difference between a major and minor consideration:

Major Consideration: Having a water source for your garden
Minor Consideration: What you want to plant (that part comes later!)

Example:

For my Vegetable Garden Dream, I must consider the following major tasks/challenges:
- Water: Downspouts from the house need buried and directed to garden, there is no spigot near the garden
- Storage: There is no storage for supplies or materials near the garden
- Garden Design: Plan layout of permanent beds within footprint of garden boundaries
- Bed Development: Import some organic matter, and may need materials to build raised beds
- Fencing: Deer, raccoons, and many more critters from the woods will likely be vying for my delicious crops
I’ve put the above tasks and challenges into the most logical order I can think of in this moment. I definitely don’t want to plant a garden before I have a water source or before I have a place to store equipment and materials.

I also don’t want to plant anything before I’ve put up proper fencing. I know the deer will be a problem, so rather than plant a garden and then curse the deer for eating it, I will accept the reality of the situation and take the proper action before growing any crops. (Always avoid time and money wasters whenever possible).

Back to my Dream List: the food forest, meadow, walking trails, and outbuildings are next on the docket for this exercise. For each, I will list all of the major considerations and challenges that I can think of, and the order in which to do them that seems to make the most sense with the information I have available to me today.

Now, I could willy-nilly start growing vegetables in random places around my property, but if I want to have a cohesive and efficient design, I’m going to have to put all of my focus on proper development. At this stage, willy-nilly vegetable growing would distract me from completing my development goals. High-intensity vegetable gardening can happen later when I’m not putting all of my eggs into the development basket.

A Word About Realistic Expectations:

It’s important to have realistic expectations of the amount of time you have to devote to your homestead development efforts. Development phases don’t ALSO have to be super-productive phases. The original Tenth Acre Farm was developed over 8 years with very little productivity in those first couple of years, but the end result was an amazingly beautiful, efficient, and productive micro-farm.

Both productivity and development CAN be done at once, but only if you’re a full-time homesteader (having more time to do it all), or if you’re NOT concerned with designing and developing an efficient homestead (in which case, this article is not for you).

Would you like to learn more about using permaculture design to improve the biodiversity of your garden, reduce maintenance, and increase yield?

You’ll find loads of information just like this in my book, The Suburban Micro-Farm.

#2: The EMERGENT AND LIMITING FACTORS Exercise

In this step, you will go deeper into what factors may affect the ORDER in which you complete your steps.

Emergent Factors are emergency-type tasks that need to be completed right away for some reason or another.

Example 1: Our basement floods when it rains because the downspouts are improperly channeled and the formal landscaping is improperly graded.

I’ve moved ‘properly channel downspouts toward future growing areas‘ to the top of our task list because it solves an emergent issue. I’ve also added ‘regrade and redesign formal landscape‘ to the top of the task list for the same reason.

Example 2: Previous owners allowed giant trees to grow right next to the house, in direct line of the wind. *Holding breath when bad storms come through.

I’ve moved ‘work with arborist to remove trees that could be a safety threat during a storm‘ higher on the list. Benefit: Space for a food forest is created where previously there was none! Smaller fruit trees and shrubs will not threaten safety or damage to the house.

Example 3: You have livestock, pets, or children and need fencing ASAP.

In example three above, think about what would need to be completed before fencing can be installed. Does an access road/path need put in first? How about animal shelter—will it be easy to bring in materials for building animal shelters after the fence is up? Have you planned for properly sized gates? Are there any pipes or electrical wires that need buried first?

One emergent factor can create a cascade of other tasks that move higher on the list.

Limiting Factors are challenges that might prevent certain tasks from being completed in a certain order.

Some examples are:
- Seasonal: Tasks that can only be completed in a certain time of year or season
- Financial: Tasks that have to wait until money is saved
- Labor: Tasks that must be completed by skilled professionals or that have to wait until helpers are available
- Resource: Tasks that must wait until resources/tools/materials are purchased/collected/delivered
Example: My Vegetable Garden Dream requires that we build a garden shed for tool/material storage, which must also include a spigot for watering (running a water line as well as electric). This will be time-consuming (and perhaps expensive) to build. When I factor in the additional costs of garden bed development and fencing, the vegetable garden project as a whole moves lower down on the list while we save money for it.

#3: The SMALL CHANGES WITH AN IMMEDIATE BENEFIT Exercise

Are there any steps that are easy to complete, would create significant momentum, and can be done before other tasks? In permaculture, this is called ‘the least change for the greatest effect’. We want small and easy wins to motivate and encourage us to keep going (low hanging fruit).

It can be beneficial to work outward from your zone 1 (see 6 Maps for your Permaculture Homestead for an explanation of zones) or other already managed areas.

Example: Regrading and redesigning my formal landscape (zone 1):
- allows us to bury downspouts and properly direct them toward growing areas (passive irrigation)
- eliminates basement flooding
- improves biodiversity with more flowering and native plants (good for future gardens)
- improves curb appeal and general enjoyment of outdoor sitting areas
- reduces formal landscape by 685 square feet, making it more manageable so there is more time for food-growing projects
Now obviously the formal landscape is not useful in the sense that it produces a lot of food. But it does help us knock out several challenges at once, giving us momentum, and takes away the nagging in the back of my mind about the jungle that was growing by the front door.

This exercise ultimately helps to relieve our mind of the worry of all there is to do and starts momentum in the right direction. When we have a clear plan of action, we can simply focus on the next thing on the list, and put all our energy into it.

#4: The TIMELINE Exercise

For this exercise, it can be helpful to physically put your major tasks in the most efficient/logical order. I like to use sticky notes on a whiteboard, other people like to use index cards, and still others like to use a spreadsheet on the computer. Choose what works for you.

Here’s what my timeline looks like when I put all of the major tasks into order, when I consider my dreams, emergent/limiting factors, and easy wins:

#5: The PHASES OF IMPLEMENTATION Exercise

You probably feel pretty good about getting all of your dreams—and the tasks that help you achieve them—into a physical list to work from. This is amazing, and no small feat of accomplishment. Pat yourself on the back!

But we can go a step farther and divide this list of tasks into PHASES. Phases can be thought of in terms of YEARS. Alternatively, each phase could have an indefinite ending, where due to time or budget constraints you commit to working on each phase until it is completed, with no guilt or sense of urgency.

When I take the 25 tasks on my timeline above and divide them into phases, here is what I get:

Here’s why you want to create phases of implementation: Checking things off a list feels really good! But more important than that, it’s important to have a stopping point. We could to-do-list ourselves right to our grave, and life is definitely more than a to-do list.

Stop to enjoy and appreciate what you’ve created, while you have the wherewithal to do so. Celebrate your hard work and commitment to work done well. Here at Tenth Acre Farm, we always have a little celebration when something gets checked off the list.

The cool thing about doing this with sticky notes on a whiteboard is that if something doesn’t get done during the prescribed phase, it can be easily moved to the next phase with just an adjustment of sticky notes.

What I didn’t include in my phases of implementation on the whiteboard presentation above (for lack of space) is Year Zero:

This was our first year at our new home, and the year we took to observe the natural happenings of our land, discover what animals and insects call this home, see how things change throughout the seasons, and vision for the future. Some ideas for our homestead were fleeting, while others remained firm in our minds as the year went on. These were the ones worth adding to our master plan and spending time and money on.

During Year Zero, we saved money for Phase One, developed the plan I’ve shared with you here, and prepared to jump into Year One with both feet. In the landscaping profession, the prep time before a job starts is called “staging”. This is where you collect all of the necessary materials, equipment, and plants for a particular job.

I liken “year zero” to “staging”. We are designing, planning, budgeting, and collecting the materials necessary to jump in to “year one” with both feet, which will help to avoid the problems and time-wasters associated with jumping in without a plan.

Our Phase One here at Tenth Acre Farm at Twisted Creek:

As you can see in my Phases of Implementation photo above, we’ve already checked a few items off our Year One list and have gained momentum.

We brought in a professional tree service to take down the tall trees that were too close to the house. They chipped up the small stuff, which is a great beginning for the food forest. They left the big stuff, and we’ll slowly turn it into firewood and lumber. Once the heavy machinery was gone, we buried the downspouts, directing them to the garden areas, and regraded the formal landscaping.

I’ve redesigned the landscape, and I’m excited to have 685 square feet LESS of landscaping areas to manage. The remaining landscaped areas will be more beautiful, more biodiverse, and easier to maintain. I can’t stop smiling as we head toward food forest development right on time!

Summary

Developing a homestead is an exciting and rewarding venture, but it can be overwhelming to figure out how to accomplish all there is to do. Implementation planning can be super helpful for breaking down all you want to accomplish into manageable tasks and putting them into a logical and efficient order.

References
- Practical Permaculture: for Home Landscapes, Your Community, and the Whole Earth by Jessi Bloom and Dave Boehnlein
- Permaculture Design: A Step-by-Step Guide by Aranya
Need more homestead inspiration?

The following articles will help you on your journey toward a fulfilling and productive homestead life.

Homesteading:
Growing Food:
Need more ideas for growing a permaculture garden?

The following articles will help you on your journey toward a vibrant and productive garden.

Learn more about permaculture in my article What is Permaculture?

Permaculture Homestead Design Tools:
- 3 Reasons to Hire a Permaculture Designer for Your Landscape
Permaculture Deep Thoughts:
Permaculture Gardening Techniques:
Growing Perennials Permaculture-Style:
Improving Soil:
- Mulching in the Permaculture Garden
Water Management:
The Power of Permaculture Herbs:
Would you like to learn more about improving the biodiversity of your garden, reducing maintenance, and increasing yield?

You’ll find loads of information just like this in my book, The Suburban Micro-Farm.

How have you used implementation planning to pace your way through completing a dream?
https://www.tenthacrefarm.com/2017/06/implementing-your-dreams-on-the-permaculture-homestead/

On – 04 Jun, 2017 By Amy
November 13, 2017
How to Design your Livelihood with Permaculture

How to Design your Livelihood with Permaculture

Aranya

Wednesday, 15th March 2017

Permaculture teacher and author, Aranya, shares how to create a permaculture livelihood, through poly-incomes, diversity, and planning.

Many people are unhappy in their jobs and yet most don’t do anything about it. Discovering permaculture can be the catalyst for us to start considering how we might make that transition to the more positive-impact lifestyle we aspire to.

At first it may seem that the only available permaculture livelihoods are as a teacher or food grower, but these are just the visible ‘front end’ of a wide network of inter-dependencies. While teaching and writing are my passion, I currently still manage my own websites, do my own accounts and convene some of my own courses. I gained those skills out of necessity, but would love to be able to call on them from within the permaculture community to free up my time for the things I’m more interested in.

So this article shares some ideas and reflections in the hope it will help bring more of you into the permaculture economy.

My Own Journey

As a busy permaculture teacher I’m privileged to spend time with a lot of great people, from all walks of life and with a diverse range of skills. It wasn’t always this way. My journey has taken me through a number of vocations, but going self-employed 15 years ago was one of the best decisions I’ve made, allowing me to fully follow my passions.

Returning to Britain from a year living on the land free of money in Eire, I took a job three days a week as a self-employed gardener. As well as being just the right amount of income to meet my needs, it was a dream job. The owners were hardly ever at home and I could eat any of the abundant fruit in the times between. One day several years later though, when I was weeding the extensive gravel drive by hand (no sprays for me) I had an epiphany.

I was maintaining a desert! – the complete opposite of the permaculture I was sharing with people on the courses I had begun to teach. I decided to give up that gardening job and develop more of a poly-income. I found a different gardening job two days a week and took on some I.T. work, mainly building websites for friends. I apprenticed on a few Permaculture Design Courses (PDCs) and found the confidence to go solo. Though the financial rewards from teaching were initially low, I always gained valuable experience. The things I learnt in particular at that time were:

Money is just one of many possible yields – I once earned just £70 for teaching a two week residential design course. It took place however, on the beautiful Brownsea Island Nature Reserve in Dorset where I returned twice more to teach as part of a great team. Those courses resulted from an introductory day I taught at my home, earning me £20 at the time, but the two people who attended that day each went away and organised three PDCs for me to teach where they lived.

I can never know what course participants will go on to do, so I always do whatever I can to run a course. I was just one of four students on the PDC I took in 1996. My teacher Stephen Nutt could easily have cancelled, but he didn’t and I’ll always be grateful for that.

In promoting a course or event, even if you later have to cancel, you’ll still raise the profile of permaculture in your area.

Over a decade later my poly-income now comes mostly from permaculture teaching, with some royalties and sales of my book and a little consulting. I also have a small online retail-based business to supplement this. I stopped gardening for others a number of years ago, preferring to spend time in my own garden. I always have I.T. up my sleeve in case I should ever need it again.

Create Your Own Livelihood Plan

You may at first consider your acquired skill-set to be redundant in your new future, but we can apply permaculture to most things. An accountant for instance is good with numbers and those skills are needed in many areas of life. Give it a little thought and you may realise that your skillset could be a great asset in the permaculture community. What better way to get some clarity on this than to apply a design process?

Survey

Here are some key questions I would ask in applying permaculture thinking to this topic:

Stocks and flows

What are your ongoing needs – financial and otherwise? Do some vary seasonally? Might you be able to meet more of those needs directly or through other forms of exchange?

What do you have in reserve to support you through a change of livelihood? Finances or otherwise. There are many other forms of capital to consider.

Start by listing your current financial income and outgoings. Look for easy ways to reduce your need for money before seeking ways to increase it.

Personal resources

What skills do you already have? How might these be useful to other permaculture businesses? Start here when looking for opportunities.

What do you love to do – where is your passion? What are you inspired to learn? These things could become part or all of your future income.

Where are you based? Where do you spend time? Are you a home-lover or do you like to travel? Do you have computer skills? Do you love to write?

Do you have more energy in the summer and less in the winter?

Material resources

Do you own or have use of any land or buildings?

What tools, software etc. do you have use of?

Social environment

Who do you have within your network? What can they offer and what might they need?

What does the permaculture community as a whole currently look like? What are the primary communication routes? This might involve some research. Where are the gaps? Could you fill any of these empty niches?

What limits you?

What’s holding you back from doing what you’d most love to do?

Are you unnecessarily wasting any energy, time or money? Where could you make interventions to plug these leaks? It’s always better to save what you have than to find more.

Analysis

While the permaculture ethics of earth care, people care and fair shares can underpin our new livelihood, the principles can help us in framing our decisions. Here’s how you can apply some of them to this challenge. Can you think of any others?

Multiple elements for each important function – aim to create a poly-income (from more than one source) and ensure a good seasonal spread (work with nature). Choose income streams that would be affected differ-ently by any specific changes in the economy/environment. I personally travel and teach a lot throughout the warmer months and retreat to home to be creative, writing in particular, during the winter.

Multiple functions for each element –  can you re-purpose what you do rather than re-create some things from scratch? Multi-functioning your journeys is a fairly easy win.

Appropriate scale – choose a livelihood that gives you the freedom to work as much as you need, but no more than you want. One that will allow you to scale up or down should the need arise.

Everything gardens – who loves to do the jobs you don’t want to?

Design for cooperation – find others to collaborate with and create a support structure around you – to share what you learn. There may be niches out there just waiting to be filled, for instance Joel Salatin invites his interns to look for opportunities to create a new business for themselves at Polyface Farms.

Produce no waste – can you make use of waste from somewhere else and find a further use for yourself? I came across a business in Brussels growing mushrooms on waste coffee grounds which then donated their own waste as compost to a local community garden.

Edge effect – where do the resources you need meet? Where are your clients? How can you increase your edge (get noticed etc.)?

Start small and work out from well-managed areas – don’t be in a hurry to make changes. Be like nature and play the long game, evolving your poly-income as you gain new skills.

Succession – look ahead and consider how your environment might change and how you can adapt to stay ahead of the game.

Decisions and Implementation Planning

Spending enough time in the planning stage is important, but at some point we need to take our first steps with our new venture. Create a clear implementation plan – Gantt charts (a chart in which a series of horizontal lines shows the amount of work done or production completed in certain periods of time in relation to the amount planned for those periods) are an excellent way of keeping track of projects. Continue to monitor how well things are going, keeping a track of finances and seasonal changes in demand. Tweak as necessary. Ensure you have a good support structure around you. I personally meet up every few months with a couple of self-employed friends in different lines of work and we share what’s been going well for us and our goals for the future.

And remember, that even the longest journey begins with a single step. What’s stopping you from answering those questions above right now?

Aranya has been carving out a permaculture livelihood for himself for over 15 years, including teaching on average eight full design courses a year. He is also author of the popular Permanent Publications book, Permaculture Design: A Step by Step Guide

Aranya’s website: www.learnpermaculture.com

Useful links

Using permaculture ethics to create a microbusiness

How to Permaculture Your Life

Mini-series: Design your life with permaculture

This article originally appeared as
“Designing your permaculture livelihood”
in Permaculture Magazine issue 89.
Click here to find out more or to buy the issue…

https://www.permaculture.co.uk/design-your-livelihood-with-permaculture

On – 15 Mar, 2017 By

October 9, 2017
Tiny Oregon ‘ghost town’ may be reborn as a permaculture school

Buyers of the town of Tiller, Oregon have plans to turn it into a campus with a focus on teaching permaculture. (Photo: Landleader.com)

Tiller, Oregon, a small town built at the turn of the 20th century on the fortunes of the timber industry, may soon become a beacon for a more sustainable future.

Located in the sprawling Umpqua National Forest, Tiller went from virtual unknown to international star earlier this spring after it was listed for $3.85 million. Included in the sale is 257 acres with 28 tax lots, multiple domestic and agricultural community water rights, six houses, the shuttered local market, a gas station, and associated infrastructure like sidewalks and fire hydrants. There’s also nearly a mile of scenic waterfront along the South Umpqua River and Elk Creek. The local elementary school, which closed in 2014, is available separately for $350,000.

You can see a promotional video detailing both the town’s history and sale below.

“The new owners of this extraordinary opportunity will find the ability to structure a wide variety of different zonings, tax lots, structures and natural resources into a prosperous future along the natural flowing South Umpqua River,” the narrator says over drone footage of the town’s natural beauty. “The region has a vast variety of fish and wildlife abound. And recreational options rivaled by none.”

According to the AP, Tiller’s decline occurred roughly three decades ago in the wake of environmental regulations that effectively limited timber production in the forests surrounding the town. As jobs dried up and families moved away, one local resident began buying up properties. When that individual passed away several years ago, much of the town was tied up with the deceased’s estate.

“Between the dying economy and the dying owners, Tiller became a new opportunity that had never been available before,” Richard Caswell, executor of the estate, told the AP. “I started getting inquiries from all over the world, essentially, ‘What was it? And what could you do with it?’ It’s the buyer and their imagination that’s going to determine what Tiller can become.”

Deciding the next chapter for Tiller

The shuttered Tiller Market was once a hub for the more than 250 residents who lived in the region. (Photo: Landleader.com)

Immediately after the listing for the town went viral, realty agent Garrett Zoller says interest began pouring in. Speaking with Oregon Live, he said the pitches included everything from developing the site into a senior care facility to a fishing retreat and even a hemp production hub.

The first buyers to get the town under contract, however, was a couple from Oregon in the nearby town of Ashland. Zoller won’t yet say who they are, hinting at a larger unveiling sometime in the next few weeks, but he did reveal that they are involved in an industry and have “grand plans” for the site. They also intend to turn the school into a campus with a focus on permaculture.

“He said the plan is to help people get back to the land in an area with a long growing season and productive soils,” Oregon Live reported, adding that the buyers have financial backing from California to make it a reality.

Tiller’s natural beauty, long exploited for timber, may soon support a more sustainable industry. (Photo: Landleader.com)

A quick search of permaculture businesses in Ashland turned up a number of firms, including the nonprofit Southern Oregon Permaculture Institute. Could this group possibly be planning a big expansion into Tiller?

Whatever entity steps forward to breathe new life into the town, Zoller says the forces behind it are intent on making the transition as welcoming to nearby residents as possible.

“They realize they have one shot at making a first good impression,” he added to Oregon Live. “I think people will be happy. There will not be dynamic change. No NASCAR raceway.”

Related topics:Education,Sustainable Gardening

https://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/blogs/sale-tiny-oregon-town-may-become-permaculture-school

On – 19 Aug, 2017 By Michael d’Estries

August 24, 2017
Self-Sustainable Lifestyles are Becoming Illegal

Across the U.S. local zoning officials are making it increasingly difficult for people to go off-grid and live self-sustainable lives. Building tiny homes, harvesting rainwater, using solar or wind energy, and even building community gardens are being targeted and in some cases, the people involved are even threatened with jail time and fines.

Tiny Homes

Tiny Homes are structures 500 square feet or less and are one way for people to break free of mortgages, taxes, utility bills, and the general entrapment of having more than is necessary. They’re especially attractive to Millennials and retirees, or those seeking to live off-grid. In Maryland, tiny-house legality will likely be handled at the local level as a zoning or building code issue where placement on a property is determined by local zoning and land use regulations.

A priority for many tiny home owners alongside being self-sustainable, is reducing their carbon footprint and many are opting to use the elements for their energy from solar and wind, collecting rainwater, and reusing gray-water. And in many areas those who put their tiny home on a piece of land away from big cities with the intention or living off grid and self sustainably, are considered outlaws by the state because they are refusing to hook up to the utility grid. Tiny homes everywhere are being targeted by unjust laws to keep people tangled in debt.

Solar Panels

The issue of developers and homeowner associations banning homeowners from installing solar panels is widespread across the nation, but is especially relating directly and significantly to Texas, California and Florida, since homeowners in those states are overwhelmingly governed by property owners’ associations. Homeowners have lost lawsuits and have been forced to remove solar units they installed because they conflicted with an HOA’s binding legal obligations written into the deed of a property by the seller. These covenants can penalize buyers by fining those who fail to obey them. In January, Nevada practically killed its solar industry, causing solar providers to leave the state by increasing their tax on solar customers by 40 percent!

Collecting Rain Water

Harvested rainwater is storm water that is conveyed from a building roof, stored in a cistern, and disinfected and filtered before being used for toilet flushing. It can also be used for landscape irrigation. In some places it is illegal to even collect rainwater, threatening those who do with jail time and fines, but often you have to jump through a bunch of hoops, such as registering with the division of water rights or some states that put a limit on how much water you are allowed to collect on your property at time.

Community Gardens

Community gardens are also labeled a threat of the food industry because of the freedom it provides for low income and impoverished people. One example of a garden being shut down is the South Central Farm that was a community garden located at East 41st and South Alameda Streets and the garden was the largest community garden in the United States. The city allowed the farm the be created but sold the property to Ralph Horowitz in a secret deal out from under the citizens, and the new owner attempted to evict the farmers even though the farmers were able to raise the money to buy the land themselves.The selling of the land was corrupted, as it involved many backroom deals but it still ultimately lead to the demise of the peaceful garden. There were many protests and acts of civil disobedience for several years before the farm was finally bulldozed in 2006. There have also been many cases from around the country where the city or HOA’s shut down peaceful community gardens and even regular front yard gardens.

Building On Your Own Land

Many landowners are also being targeted just for building structures on their own land without having adequate permits. Even people who are building their homes well within codes are being forced to tear down the structures they have spent so much time and money creating. Activist Adam Kokesh, outright bought a piece of land in Arizona, started building and making improvements to it and not soon after he was harassed by David Williams, an employee of the county government. David Williams believed a written document from 1910 obligated Adam to comply with David. After Adam had his lawyer contact David and David was unable to provide any evidence that the code applied to Adam, David only escalated the situation by offering Adam a false choice, either an admin hearing or a criminal prosecution. This is still an ongoing issue for Kokesh as he has elected to not make the regular updates he was making about progress on the land. Which not only affects him as a paid content creator, but also those he was inspiring and helping learn from his venture.

Though people continue to struggle for the freedom to use their land and structures as they see fit, this self-sustainable movements only continue to grow. More people are choosing to live a more environmentally friendly life and will continue to build a life free from corporate choke-holds. Time will only tell if the state will continue to attempt inhibit the growth or encourage self-sustainable lifestyles but for now their choice is clear.

https://thehomestead.guru/self-sustainable-lifestyles-illegal/

On – 06 Apr, 2017 By Hailey

May 22, 2017
Arid land to a fertile Eden: permaculture lessons from Portugal

The land undulates upwards into gentle hills, cradling nooks of fertile terraces growing sweetcorn, sunflowers and tomatoes, before rolling down into tranquil lakes. It looks like a natural Edenic paradise on earth. But 20 years ago this land was arid and barren, and farming was a struggle.

The land is called Tamera, the name given to these 330 acres in southern Portugal by a community of 30 people who moved here from Germany in 1995. Today, 200 people from all over the world live here. Through simple practices of digging swales (ditches) and creating water retention spaces, Tamera’s ecology experts have transformed an area on the brink of desertification – and say they can do the same anywhere in the world.

The community wanted to be more sustainable and grow more of their own food, rather than importing it, and it was clear that water would be central to being able to live autonomously on the land.

“When I came to Tamera in 2006, trees were dying and wells were drying out,” says Bernd Mueller, director of Tamera’s Global Ecology Institute and one of the engineers behind the transformation.

At that time, in the summer months, Tamera looked like a desert with hardly any vegetation. In the winter months, however, there was heavy rainfall and flooding. Mueller and his co-engineer Thomas Lüdert realised that most of the water was running off the soil and causing damage to infrastructure, rather than soaking into the earth.

“It rushed down to the rivers causing erosion and other damaging side effects,” says Mueller. The project’s goal, then, was to retain all the rainwater that falls on the land, to refill the groundwater which was getting lower each year, and to provide flowing spring water.

They started from the top of the hills, hit hardest by erosion and overgrazing. “The wind and the water eroded all the fine earth that should serve as a sponge for the rainwater,” says Mueller. “We started to manipulate the situation so these places retain the rainwater falling on them. Then you start to build structures like swales, which fill with rainwater and slowly filter into the earth.”

The lakes were dug out and formed without any concrete seal at the bottom so water can seep into the earth. “There’s a principle in permaculture called the triple S – slow, spread and sink,” says Mueller. “When you have flowing rainwater, something in your ecosystem is wrong. You have to slow it down, spread it over the land and let it sink.”

Transformation of the landscape began in August 2007, and by February 2008 a new spring had appeared at the edge of Tamera’s boundary. “I was surprised. I didn’t expect that to happen so fast,” says Mueller. “We suddenly had a creek going through the valley, and that brought more lush vegetation and animals; wildlife responds immediately to constant access to water.”

The Tamera case study has been presented to the EU and at the UN’s Cop22 in Marrakech by the Global Ecovillage Network. “For us it was important from the beginning to change the situation in Tamera, but do it in a way that it will be a model for the rest of the world,” says Mueller, who has travelled most continents to consult on water projects. “When you scale the ecological problems down to principles, it’s all due to the same mistakes. In all the cases I have seen all over the world, the key to ecosystem restoration is rainwater and vegetation management.”

Mueller has consulted on water management in Israel and Palestine, Turkey, Jordan, Kenya, Togo, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, and has shown how the Tamera model can be used in development and humanitarian settings.

After the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, Mueller worked with NGO Cafod on a project at the Carradeux camp for internally displaced people (pdf), providing sanitation, drinking water and waste management. Recommendations for the camp included harvesting rainwater from roofs, providing alternative fuels to wood to prevent deforestation, and installing composting toilets.

“I’m happy to support [Tamera] because they’ve got a different way of doing things,” says Geoff O’Donoghue, Cafod’s operations director who worked with Mueller on the Haiti project. He says that the Tamera approach helps in humanitarian settings because they have an awareness of the bigger picture. “There’s so much you can do which isn’t more expensive, but requires a front-loading of knowledge and design.”

After the consultation in Haiti, the Blueprint Alliance was set up for organisations to share sustainable solutions in humanitarian emergencies.

Mueller also worked with a local government in Kitui, Kenya (pdf). “I witnessed how in a short time a supportive local government could make a programme prompting swale building on a large scale,” he says. “In three months, I couldn’t recognise the land. It was a relatively small amount of money that was invested there. After three years every farmer could see the effectiveness of it.”

So could this approach be used somewhere experiencing extreme drought or even famine, such as South Sudan? The country has similar ecological conditions to Kenya, says Mueller, where he has seen how effective it can be. Mueller is now focusing on showing Tamera’s new water paradigm (pdf) to governments, the UN and NGOs, and supporting community-based projects.

“The ecological knowledge is there and its effectiveness can be proved in so many cases,” he says. “The problem lies in political strategies and social habits.”

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2017/mar/07/tamera-portugal-permaculture-water

On – 01 Jul, 2017 By Anna Leach

May 16, 2017
How To Decolonize The Permaculture Movement

About a year ago, I posted an article in the Huffington Post detailing some of the reasons why I thought permaculture had become a “gringo” movement irrelevant to the majority of small farmers around the world.

There were a number of reactions, both positive and negative, but I was frustrated that very few people actually offered some sort of solution or proposal for how to “un-gringo” a movement and ideology that we find hope in.

After a good deal of reflection, I want to focus now on how to rescue the permaculture movement; how to save it from some of its most disturbing and troubling tendencies. I believe that permaculture does have a lot to offer to peasant and agrarian communities around the world, so I humbly offer these ideas and suggestions not as a judgement; but rather in the hopes that permaculture can become relevant and practically applicable to the majority of small farmers around the world.

Stop Buying Land in Shangri-La Areas Around the World

We need to understand the effects of our privilege. As a foreigner (most likely white and male, because that is the predominant demographic of the permaculture movement) we are inevitably going to change the dynamics of small, rural communities where we take up residence.

While there can be positive effects through bringing new knowledge and ideas into a community, there can (and often are) unseen and ignored negative effects. When wealthy foreigners buy up land in rural, agrarian areas, this inevitably leads to gentrification. The spike in land prices forces young people off of the land and causes migration.

I don´t excuse myself from this reality. As a white, North American male, my family and I bought a farm in the mountains of El Salvador that was the inheritance of a young man who was no longer interested in farming. With the money we paid him, he paid a human trafficker to try and make it to the United States and has failed twice. If he tries to go again, he´ll have to deal with a ridiculous wall, increased border militarization, and a racist president.

My only excuse is that I fell in love with a Salvadoran woman who invited me to be a part of her reality. If you do end up purchasing land in some hidden, agrarian community, make an effort to truly belong there. If you´re just buying a piece of land to have it as a vacation home and a place to host a couple permaculture workshops during the year, you´re probably causing much more harm than good.

Also, if you are interested in permaculture and are looking for land to create a vision of your own, why not look at land in rural Kentucky instead of Costa Rica? Not only is land in many rural areas of the U.S. cheaper, but there is also an urgent need to repopulate rural areas and increase the “eyes-to-acre” ratio that is necessary for proper land management and ecological care.

Don’t Make Permaculture Courses Your Primary Source of Income

I understand that a number of people in the developed world have the extra income to spend on a $2,000-dollar permaculture course. If they’ve got the money, why shouldn´t they pay?

The problem is that if you derive the majority of your income from offering permaculture courses, you´re automatically divorcing yourself from the reality of your neighbors who make their living from the land. You can´t claim to offer a viable economic alternative (no matter how ecological it may be) to your under privileged neighbors who see that your income comes from hosting wealthy North Americans.

What if we were to use that money to re-distribute economic opportunities to our neighbors? We need to be honest and admit that establishing an economically viable permaculture system takes time and money. I´m not saying that we should stop offering courses all together, but rather reconsider how to invest that money into the dreams and visions of neighbor farmers who don’t have the same economic potential as do we.

After all, isn´t that what the third ethic of permaculture is all about: redistributing surplus so that others can enjoy the long-term abundance that comes from ecological design?

Stop Appropriating Knowledge

There is nothing that angers me more than watching permaculture videos on YouTube where some permaculture expert claims to have “developed” or “invented” some revolutionary technique to help preserve soil, store water, or save the environment.

For example, recently I watched a video of a permaculture farmer who claims to have developed a technique to slow erosion through making banana leaf boomerang barriers on the slope beneath where he planted some fruit trees. The idea is no doubt a good one; but it´s far from a unique development. I personally have seen dozens of small farmers throughout Central America do the exact same thing. Of course, they don’t have access to a camera and the internet to show the world their invention.

To put it bluntly, this is appropriation of knowledge, and it´s the same thing that mega- pharmaceutical companies and agricultural corporations have been doing for years through the patenting of medicines and seeds that have been stolen from the shared ecological wisdom of indigenous and peasant cultures throughout the world.

Be humble, and recognize that while permaculture may very well have a number of unique skills to offer, many of these skills and techniques have been around for hundreds of years.

Stop Demonizing Small Peasants

There are a number of very serious problems with how many small farmers in Central America and other parts of the world farm their lands. The effects of the Green Revolution on small farmers around the world have led to an almost complete loss of traditional farming knowledge in some rural communities

The excessive use of pesticides and herbicides, burning crop residues, tilling hillsides, and other examples of ecologically damaging farming practices are obviously unsustainable, unhealthy, and damaging to the environment. The solution, however, is not to criticize these farmers, but rather to humbly seek to understand their situation.

If you had an acre of land and 6 children to feed, would you prioritize permaculture farming solutions that might offer abundance a decade from now or would you continue to follow the well-trodden path that while unsustainable, does offer subsistence and income?

Instead of criticizing small farmers who adopt unsustainable farming practices, it would be much more valuable to look at the sociological and systemic factors that lead to this adoption. Permaculture has not had much of a voice for advocacy, but it would be heartening to see permaculture “experts” around the world offer their voices to fight against unfair distribution of land instead of simply blaming small farmers for their “ignorance.”

Start Farming Grains

I understand that annual grain farming does come with a number of difficulties. The annual tillage of the land and the monocultures of one crop obviously present an ecological challenge. But you know what, agrarian communities around the world subsist on the farming of annual grains and that is not going to change. Even if you stoutly believe in developing a “food forest” or “stacked polycultures” of tree and perennial crops, dedicate at least a portion of your land to developing more ecological solutions for annual grain crops.

It takes years for a perennial food system to develop enough to offer any sort of subsistence or income, and almost no small farmer around the world has enough savings or alternative sources of income to wait around for their system to develop into the marvelous and awe-inspiring productive systems that you see on a 20-year-old permaculture farm

I´m not saying that we should throw out the idea of food forests or perennial crops, but avoid the tendency to offer those systems as the “only” way to grow food in an ecological and sustainable manner. When you show off your acres and acres of food forest to a small farmer in Central America, chances are that he or she might find it interesting but have little incentive to try and reproduce what you have created.

If, however, you had a diversified landscape with an acre of food forest, an acre of pasture, and an acre of annual crops, there is a far better chance that your neighbors will find interest in what you´re developing.

Despite the challenges, it is possible to grow grains in a sustainable, ecological fashion. Susana Lein of Salamander Springs Farm in rural Kentucky lived and worked in Guatemala for close to a decade. When she moved to her own farm in Kentucky, she started a no-till Fukuoka method of annual grain production that was adapted to the traditional corn and bean diet of Central American farmers. If she can do that in Kentucky, why aren´t more permaculturists doing the same in Central America, or experimenting with no-till rice harvests in Asia.

Be Aware of Alternative Epistemologies

The bread and butter of the permaculture movement is the PDC, or permaculture design course. The two-week curriculum has been offered by thousands of teachers in every part of the world and has been adapted to the specific and particular contexts of small farmers everywhere.

Many of the folks who critiqued my first article argued that they offered free PDC´s to their neighbor farmers. While I find that commendable, I think it´s also important to recognize that many rural, peasant and indigenous communities don’t learn the same us westerners do.

The pedagogy of a course with Power Point presentations, lectures and “visits” to the field might actually be so foreign to a small Guatemalan farmer that he or she might get nothing out of it. The Brazilian professor Boaventura Sousa Santos talks of the idea of epistemicide, the elimination of alternative forms of knowing through the colonization that comes through western academia and forms of learning.

An NGO that I worked with in Guatemala found that the best way to “teach” small Guatemalan farmers had nothing to do with courses, workshops, agricultural schools, or the like. Rather, they simply brought small farmers from neighboring communities together to tour the farms and lands that each one worked.

While one corn field may appear just like every other corn field to the untrained eye, these visits allowed for small farmers to learn of small variations in growing techniques, in seed saving, in the combination of companion plants, in soil preservation that many “experts” might never have noticed. At the same time, it allowed for small farmers to take pride in what they were doing which is so often criticized or ignored

Perhaps the famous PDC needs to be laid to rest and other, more appropriate pedagogies developed if permaculture is going to find relevance with small farmers around the world

Conclusion

I truly hope that this article doesn’t come across as a futile and derisive attack on permaculture practitioners around the world. I do honestly believe (and hope) that permaculture has a lot to offer the world. We need to recognize, however, that what´s most important isn´t the content or subject in itself, but rather how it is presented with respect for the local autonomy of the placed agrarian communities around the world.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tobias-roberts/how-to-decolonize-the-per_b_14501784.html

On – 31 Jan, 2017 By Tobias Roberts

April 25, 2017
Planting a food forest: Proposal for Springside Park would help connect people to the land and to food

PITTSFIELD — An edible landscape, dappled with fruit, vegetables and nuts. That’s part of a vision for a food forest in Springside Park.

A local permaculture design company has applied for a $25,000 grant to support the idea. Now through April 19, people can vote daily for that idea, one of hundreds of proposed projects, on the Seeds of Change website.

“Food isn’t just something we eat,” reads the grant application. “It’s our history, culture, family and memories. It is our medicine and fuel.”

A food forest is a gardening technique that imitates a woodland ecosystem by bringing a number of crops that can help support each other into one area. The vision for a 1-acre plot of Springside Park includes edible trees, shrubs, perennials and annuals.

Matt Lamb and Jay Allard, owners of Berkshire Earth Regenerators, applied for the grant. They have studied the park for six months and developed a food forest plan on land near the Springside House.

“My goal is to get as much diversity into the plan as possible,” Lamb said. “There’s so many different things we are trying to correct with this project.”

He said the additional plantings in the proposed food forest would improve stormwater runoff and help cut down on carbon emissions. He said the plan could be expanded to as much as 40 acres of the park.

Allard said their concept for the park could yield thousands of pounds of food, which would be distributed to area residents and community organizations.

“A lot of people in the community are having a hard time getting food at all,” he said. “This is a very local situation it keeps food from traveling far distances.”

In addition to being a source of fresh food for the community, the forest would be used as a living classroom, where people learn to garden, and it would provide some job opportunities.

“As people take interest in these plantings, they become more invested in their community,” Allard said. “We want to be able to reconnect people with that.”

Springside has become a place for education in addition to recreation.

Regular garden workshops and interpretive walks are offered from the spring through fall. There’s also a weekly membership-based learning program at the park’s greenhouse.

Joe Durwin, a longtime resident of the Morningside neighborhood, and a parks commissioner, said the proposed plan is overdue.

“A food forest at Springside Park is an extraordinary way to honor a robust heritage of agriculture at this very historic park site, while updating it for the needs and expectations of neighborhood residents and other park users in the 21st century,” he said in a written statement.

Last year, the city received a grant from the Kresge Foundation to study how growing food could help revitalize the Morningside neighborhood.

Named Morningside Up by the city and community partners, the project envisions a “community-led food system.” That means residents would be involved with food production, processing, distribution, and consumption as well as waste management, said Jessica Vecchia, director of Alchemy Initiative, which is managing the Kresge grant and working in partnership with Morningside Up.

Allard and Lamb said they are excited by the impact the food forest could have.

“This will help educate people on how we can use public space to do greater things for ourselves, our families and our community,” Lamb said.

The food forest concept is among nearly 600 ideas submitted by groups from across the country to Seeds of Change. A total of $310,000 will be awarded to groups by the California-based organic seed company.

The top 50 vote winners advance to the finals in April. And grant winners will be announced May 8, according to the website.

The Downtown Pittsfield Farmers Market, another of Alchemy’s programs, was awarded a $10,000 grant from Seeds of Change last year.

Reach staff writer Carrie Saldo at 413-496-6221 or @carriesaldo.

http://www.berkshireeagle.com/stories/planting-a-food-forest,503487

On – 05 Apr, 2017 By Carrie Saldo

March 15, 2017

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