Category Archives: Permaculture & Design

Backyard Bounty: Permaculture is Taking Root

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AppleSeed Permaculture was featured alongside gardening guru Lee Reich in a recent issue of the locally-focused Chronogram magazine. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Not-So-Strange Fruit
Ethan Roland teaches and practices permaculture at the Epworth Center in High Falls. His goal is “to establish local food security and deliciousness in a time of dramatic change.” He talks about each separate polyculture planting as a metaphor for the movement as a whole; as they grow and spread outward, he will mow less and less space between them until they connect to form a complete fabric.

[Lee Reich, Ethan Roland] …and other experts provide advice, classes, and assistance in making some positive changes to the flora around our homes and doing it in a way that works for us. We don’t all need to become self-sufficient overnight. But if we make choices that gently move us in that direction, relying less on imports, spending more time (and less money) connecting with our food—and enjoying luscious fruit along the way—we can spend less, eat better, and have enviable yards. What’s not to like?

You can read the whole thing over at the Chronogram website: www.chronogram.com

RESOURCES

Lee Reich www.leereich.blogspot.com
Ethan Roland www.appleseedpermaculture.com
Green Phoenix Permaculture www.green-phoenix.org
Catskill Native Nursery www.catskillnativenursery.com

Ethan Roland’s Top 5 DIY Permaculture Books
1. Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway (2009, Chelsea Green)

2. Edible Forest Gardens, Volumes I and II by Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier (2005, Chelsea Green)

3. Food Not Lawns by Heather Coburn Flores (2006, Chelsea Green)

4. Landscaping with Fruit by Lee Reich (2009, Storey Publishing)

5. Sustainable Landscaping for Dummies by Owen Dell (2009, For Dummies Press)

Ethan Rolands’s Top 5 Regional Permaculture Nurseries

1. Catskill Native Nursery, Kerhonkson
2. MiCosta Nurseries, Columbia County
3. St. Lawrence Nurseries, Potsdam
4. Tripplebrook Farm, Southampton, Massachusetts
5. Oikos Tree Crops, Michigan

The Power of Enterprise Budgets: Permaculture, Holistic Management, and Financial Planning

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Permaculture designers: It’s time to get serious about profitability.
Farmers & Greenhorns: You already know what I’m talking about.

I’ve been working on an integrated ecological farm design for the Ashokan Center in the Hudson River Valley bioregion. The design calls for a mega-diversity of organic enterprises: Multi-species rotational grazing, hardy kiwi vineyards, mixed-fruit orchards, agroforestry & silvopasture, no-till & greenhouse vegetables, gourmet & medicinal mushrooms, and more. There are 200+ edible & useful species spread across 13 acres of farm and 200+ acres of forest.

Ashokan Center Farm

But to start an ecological farm (in the USA at this point in time) takes money. In order to justify the up-front capital expense that my clients will have to invest to get this farm going, I need to be able to show them that this mega-diverse permaculture system can be profitable.

How can I do it? How can I predict the potential expenses, and calculate the possible profits? What can I show my clients to convince them that all of these great permaculture ideas make good economic sense?

By using Enterprise Budgets.

Enterprise budgets are summaries of actual data on the costs and yields of growing a particular crop — from asparagus to tilapia to black currants to walnuts to cattle to shitake mushrooms. The basic pattern is as follows:

INCOME – EXPENSES = NET INCOME

  • INCOME (aka revenue, receipts, gross revenue, gross income – sometimes shown with a break-even chart)
  • EXPENSES (aka costs – often divided into variable costs & fixed costs)
  • NET INCOME (aka margin, gross margin, annual returns over costs)

Pretty straightforward, right?

For example, download a simple Bell Pepper Enterprise Budget from Penn State here and take a look.

Bell Pepper Production

As you move into perennial crops (like this pear example), the enterprise budgets get a bit more complex. AND, there are currently very few enterprise budgets that focus on small-scale, organic and post-organic permaculture enterprises. So we’ll need to develop based on the small-scale enterprises we initiate — this means learning the basics of good bookkeeping and accounting, and keeping good records on our expenses and yields. Some of the best current documentation on this scale comes from Joe Kovach at Ohio State University – take a look at his work here.

Kovach_Polyculture

In Kirk Gadzia’s Holistic Management module during the Carbon Farming Course, our financial planning exercise (which you can read about over at the Carbon Farming Course blog here) focused on choosing agricultural enterprises to re-invigorate an ailing farm. To bring the whole-systems thinking of permaculture into play, I needed to propose viable multi-functional alternatives to the simple and unprofitable hay production. Fortunately, I’ve been collecting every single enterprise budget available on the web for the last year — so I had many options, from seaberry & hazelnut orchards to perch & bullhead catfish aquaculture. (The systematic collation and organization of all these budgets creates the backbone of the economic design tool for ecological agriculture enterprises I blogged about here.)

In order to support the ongoing development of ecological agriculture, I’m making available to you all the all the enterprise budgets I have collected in the last 2 years – more than 1090 of them. I ask only that you keep seeking and creating out new budgets to add to the collection – especially ones that use real data from small-scale organic and permaculture operations. Download ’em here – careful, this is a 130mb file.

Any questions?

Permies, are you ready to get realistic about profitability? Let’s get this sort of economic sensibility into our designs.

Farmers & Greenhorns, how can I make this information more available and useful to you?

Economic Projections for Ecological Agriculture

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Over the past 2 years I’ve been developing an economic design tool for ecological agriculture enterprises.

It creates ten to fifty-year profit and loss projections based on hand-collected & collated hard research data on the following ag enterprise areas:

• Permaculture food forests, forest gardens & agroforestry areas;
• Mixed-fruit orchards;
• Small fruits, berries & hardy kiwi + grape vineyards;
• Organic annual & perennial vegetable production w/ no-till beds & greenhouses;
• Rotational grazing layouts & keyline patterns for larger livestock
• Chickens, ducks, bees and other micro-livestock;
• Composting, worm composting, and aerated compost tea production;
• Short-rotation coppice biomass production for heating & biofuels;
• Gourmet and medicinal mushroom production;
• Wetland agriculture, aquaculture & pond polyculture systems.


Pilot farms using the tool’s projections are being developed in the Hudson River valley, integrated with residential and institutional developments. For an example farm prospectus created with the tool, click here.

Anyone interested in collaborating? Contact me: ethan[at]appleseedpermaculture.com and http://twitter.com/ethanappleseed

All Permaculture Principles!?!

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Ever notice that there seems to be a plethora of permaculture principles? And that every permaculture teachers tends to use a different set?

How could this have happened? Is this a lack of consensus in the permaculture movement? Is there a definitive set of permaculture principles?

To understand these questions better, I started to collect EVERY PERMACULTURE PRINCIPLE that I’ve ever seen anywhere. I’ve created a first-draft graphic collection of all the principles that I’ve found so far, organized by originator/lineage — take a look below!

You can download a .pdf of this first draft here.

What do you think? Is this useful?

Have you encountered a principle that’s not on this map? Let everyone know in the comments below!

(Thanks to permapower for the post that encouraged me to post this!)

Permaculture Earthworks in the Hudson Valley

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Yeehaw! Working with permaculture water-harvesting principles, we dug a small pond and connected it to more than 400ft of rain-capturing-forest-garden-watering contour swales. I worked with Tristan Vis (a past PDC student of Geoff Lawton‘s and mine) and a local earthmover Dick Stokes for 8 hours yesterday to get everything in the ground, cleaned up, and seeded with a mix of nitrogen-fixing groundcovers.

Dick skillfully operated an 8-ton CAT D4C Bulldozer in concert with a 4-ton excavator to dig the swales and excavate the pond. We calculated the water catchment on top of the ridge to be approximately 19,000 gallons per month (average), and the 400ft of swales (3 ft wide at the base, 4 ft wide at a height of 1.5 ft) have capacity to catch and infiltrate approximately 18,000 gallons into the ground when full.

We seeded the swales with red clover (Trifolium pratense)& Alfalfa/lucerne (Medicago sativa).

Here’s Tristan & I in front of the lower swale.

Interested in permaculture earthworks for your property? Contact me over at www.appleseedpermaculture.com

PDC Apple Tree Surgery

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Young apple tree bark stripped off by rodents! Oh no! What can we do?!? Ethan Roland of AppleSeed Permaculture attempts a bridge-grafting technique (basically a skin-graft!) to heal the tree — connecting the root system back to the living bark further up the tree. This is at Jason Kass’s place in VT during a Permaculture Design Course. For more on bridge-grafting, see here: http://www.bit.ly/mJybO

Directives for Architects

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So what’s the role of architects in all of this?

Architects often become the de-facto landscape designers, because the majority of money in any development budget is spent on the buildings. Any landscapes design, much less integrated landscape design, is a often a tired afterthought. To go beyond sustainability, we need to step past this paradigm! The following notes are from a talk I gave at the University of Massachusetts in September 2008

As architects for a resilient & thriving future, here are your tasks:

• OBSERVE – prolonged at thoughtful observation instead of protracted and thoughtless action

• DESIGN the simplest, most functional, and most vital built ‘environments’ possible.

• INTEGRATE your buildings with the landscape so that they functionally interconnect with as many living systems as possible

• REGENERATE openly seek out and heal the damage and oppression done to living systems — both internally and externally.

• LEVERAGE your work to do the greatest good for the greatest number of beings for the longest amount of time by EMPOWERING people to design with you. Spread your energy and knowledge and excitement through the networks as fast as possible.

Ask yourself:
– What is the simplest solution? what’s the most functional? and what will serve the interests of all life-giving forces on the planet and meet their needs in the most harmonious way?

Whad’ya all think? Do these directives resonate with any of you architects out there?

GEEK! Permaculture Computerizing

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I get this question all the time:

“What are the computer programs you use every day? What are the most useful for your work as a permaculture designer?”


So, here we go…

EVERY-DAY USE
• Omnioutliner Pro – incredible note-taking and organize-everything software. The program I use most.
• Omnifocus – the omnigroup’s implementation of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system. beautifully simple and powerful.
• Microsoft Excel – iWork Numbers would work as well, I just haven’t switched over yet.
• Mozilla Firefox 3.0 – advanced web browsing
• Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) – powerful cross-platform mind-mapping; a little quirky at times but really excellent.

WEB APPLICATIONS
• WordPress – powers my website & blogs
• Doodle – best web app for organizing meetings
• Gmail – rocks. best email ever.
• Google Docs – realtime collaborative editing.

DESIGN & MAP TOOLS
• Vectorworks – $1800 professional Computer-Aided Drafting (CAD) software. Awesome, and a steep learning curve.
• Google Earth – free and versatile. combines beautifully with…
• Google SketchUp – free 3D modeling – quick and easy to use

OTHER PROGRAMS
• Adobe CS – especially acrobat, photoshop & indesign
• Preview (Mac OSX) – quick and functional image & pdf editing
• Quickbooks – bookkeeping & invoicing
• Keynote (Mac OSX) – way, way better than powerpoint. seriously.
• Quicktime Pro – most of my video editing here, final touch-ups with iMovie.

AWESOME. Enjoy geekin’ it out.

50% by 2015: A Perennial Agriculture Challenge

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From Kevin Skvorak of Regeneration CSA to the Northeastern Permaculture Listserv:

“…What percentage of the calories in our diet (NE region) should we be getting from perennial crops?  How if any way should this influence the thinking of people involved in local planning, farmland protection, and smart growth issues?”

My Response:

Howdy Kevin and All!

I think the ‘should’ is difficult. It depends on who we are talking about, and what their goals are.

If we approach this from the CO2 and climate change angle, and set a goal of reducing CO2 emissions by shifting to perennial agriculture, here’s a proposed research track to answer your questions:

• What are the CO2 emissions resulting from annual ag. in the northeast?
• What are the estimated CO2 emissions (or sequestrations!) from perennial ag? We might look at some small-scale estimations (e.g. Martin Crawford’s forest garden in the UK) and larger estimations (Badgersett Research Center‘s Woody Agriculture in MN, Carbon Farmers of America‘s Holistic Management grazing in VT)
• What might be the CO2 emissions resulting from transition between annual & perennial agriculture?

Personally, I think I can get to 5% of my calorie intake from perennial crops by fall 2010. And, I’m going to aim for 50% of my calories from perennial ‘crops’ (including animals!) in the next 5 years.

How about that? 50% by 2015? Anyone else want to give this a try with me?

Cheers,
Ethan