Permaculture Pancake Polyculture

A PERMACULTURE PANCAKE POLYCULTURE

Updated at the Mosaic Farm Perennial Plan Design Charette in Easthampton, MA; originially composed at a Permaculture Design course in Vermont!

Here’s the species – function list :

Long-term overstory
• sugar maple (Acer saccharum) – syrup
• black walnut (Juglans nigra) – nuts, syrup
• shagbark hickory (Carya ovata) – nuts, syrup
• black birch (Betula lenta) – syrup, tea
• sweet-acorn oaks (Quercus spp.) – acorn flour for pancakes!
• chestnut (Castanea spp) – chestnut flour for pancakes! (see www.oikostreecrops.com for a great selection)

Selected Understory
• pawpaw (Asimina triloba) – banana custard-flavored fruit, shade tolerant
• gooseberry (Ribes uva-crispa) – tasty tart fruit, shade tolerant
• currant (Ribes spp.) – tasty tart fruit, shade tolerant
• thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus) – tasty tart fruit, shade tolerant

Selected Animals
• chicken (Gallus domesticus) – eggs (for the pancake batter!)
• pig (Sos scrufula) – bacon! And fat for frying the pancakes!

This arose from our discussion of mixed-species sugar-bushes. My research & experimentation this spring shpowed that black walnut (Juglans nigra) trees can be tapped and boiled for a DELICIOUS syrup, and friends inform me that Hickories (Carya spp.) can also be tapped. Add these to the traditional sugar maple (Acer saccharum), other maple species (Acer spp.), and birch (Betula spp., especially B. lenta), and we’re looking at a significantly more diverse stand of locally-appropriate sugar production!

Add in the acorns and chestnuts for a delicious and sweet perennial starch, mixed with eggs from chickens free-ranging in the understory, and your batter is coming together. Then you can use bacon fat from the acorn & chestnut-finished pigs to oil the pan and fry your pancakes. Topped off with sauces from your understory fruit production (pawpaws, gooseberries, currants, thimbleberries), this is an incredible perennial meal.

Let’s step beyond the relative monoculture of sugar maples! And go even farther for some delicious perennial permaculture pancakes.

Forest Gardening: Vision & Pattern Language

Forest Gardening: Vision & Pattern Language

We’re in the middle of the Design & Theory weekend of the 2010 Forest Garden Immersion Series. This 4-weekend series, one per month, immerses participants in the practice and culture of forest gardening. A few spots are still open for the upcomingweekends:

  • Install & Establish (May 28-30)
  • Caretake & Tend (June 18-20)
  • Food & Medicine (July 16-18)             …Sign up now at http://tiny.cc/fgis2010!

We’re compressing the entire Edible Forest Gardens design process (EFG Volume II, Chapter 3 & 4) articulated by Dave Jacke and Eric Toensmeier into a single weekend – so our teaching team needed to get creative. Rather than uber-detailing each stage of the design process, we decided to trial a Pattern Language approach.

Pattern Languages, named and articulated by architect Christopher Alexander et. al in the 70’s, are one of the most powerful design tools that exist in the world. Patterns are defined as “solutions to problems across contexts”, which can be strung together to form complete designs for towns, buildings, and more… Since their original proposed use for architecture and planning, Pattern languages have been used in realms from medical training, software design, to the compositiong of zoning laws. An excellent resource is the collaboratively co-created “Liberating Voices: A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution” published by MIT press.

Dave Jacke & Eric Toensmeier created the first draft of a Forest Garden Pattern Language in Edible Forest Gardens Volume II, which Connor Stedman of Turkey Tail Permaculture concept-mapped last year:

EFG_FG_PL_2009

Connor and I also typed up the Name, Problem Statement, and Solution Statement for all of the 57 patterns in Edible Forest Gardens — you can download a PDF of these statements here. As I looked through the patterns in preparation for our course, I realized that I and other designers have been using patterns in my forest garden design work that were not included in the first draft. So, drawing on our collective experience (especially the brilliant pattern-articulators Dave Jacke, Eric Toensmeier, Jonathan Bates, Dyami Nason-Regan, and Christopher Alexander et. al), I’ve gathered 14 patterns and proposed 23 new ones for the language. I also re-arranged the patterns into a new six-step forest garden design process, which is laid out  as a Flower Petal Bed (pattern #46) in the following diagram. To design a forest garden (after articulating goals and analyzing the site), simply choose 1 or 2 patterns from each “pattern bed” and connect them together into a design. You can download the map by clicking on it.

The Apios Institute for Regenerative Perennial Agriculture (which I’m on the board of) has just released a very exciting new co-creative resource: the Edible Forest Garden Wiki. The wiki itself is an ecosystem of information, automatically inter-linking useful forest garden Species Pages to mutually supportive Polycultures to fully designed Forest Gardens – much like the Internet Movie Database connects actors, films, and production companies. Wiki-members (subscription is about $2 per month) can add their own experiences growing 700 forest garden species, add new polycultures and forest gardens, and comment on other people’s designs. Check out the free content and become a wiki member!

Part of my longer term vision is develop the Forest Garden Pattern Language through a similar co-creative online space, where we can all propose patterns and try them out in our designs. The patterns that work across contexts will emerge through our collective research and experimentation. Sound like fun? Want to play? Let me know in the comments!

Carbon Farming: Concepts, Tools & Markets

Carbon Farming: Concepts, Tools & Markets

Here we are in winter farming conference season – I presented this talk at the 2010 Northeast Organic Farming Association’s  Winter Conference (Massachusetts), and got some great feedback on the idea of local carbon markets. I’ll be presenting again next weekend (January 23rd) at the NOFA NY conference – you can learn more and register here: www.nofany.org. Scroll down below the slideshow to download the handouts.

Anyone interested in starting a local carbon market? Let me know in the comments.

[slideshare id=2935355&doc=carbonfarmingpermacultureforfarmers201-100117110433-phpapp01]

handout

Carbon Farming: Concepts, Tools & Markets Handout

Young Farmers Conference 2009 – Permaculture for Farmers & Ecosystem Investing

Young Farmers Conference 2009:

Permaculture for Farmers & Ecosystem Investing

Below are the slideshows and handouts for the two workshops I presented last week at the Young Farmers Conference, dosage held at the incredible Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. Let me know what you think in the comments – and Enjoy!

Permaculture for Farmers

[slideshare id=2669780&doc=pcforfarmersslideshow09-091207175232-phpapp02]

Download the handout by clicking on the image below.

Permaculture for Farmers Handout

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Ecosystem Investing

Download the handout by clicking on the image below.

Ecosystem Investing Handout

A Dirty Story

A Dirty Story – Permaculture Poetry & the Microbial Beats

Fresh from the final party of our 2009 Permaculture Design Course at the Virgin Island Sustainable Farm Institute – Listen to these mp3s, download’em, and spread’em around. Lyrics are in the comments below…

Bale Shabaka –

“Abundance”

Gabriel Vieira –

“A Dirty Story”

Is anyone interested in pulling together images for these pieces? I think they could be very powerful a la Greening the Desert, Project Survival Media, WeForest, etc.

Harvested abundance at the Virgin Island Sustainable Farm Institute

First Ever Permaculture Design Course in the Virgin Islands

Permaculture Seeds Sprouting on St. Croix

VISFI_View

Birds eye view of the Virgin Island Sustainable Farm Institute. Thanks to Google Earth - download the place file here.

St. Croix, a 6 x 20 mile island in the Caribbean, is exploding with positive action. Led by the Virgin Island Sustainable Farm Institute, locally grown food and ecological agriculture are seeding in with island people and travelers across the island. Now, in collaboration with AppleSeed Permaculture and Gaia University, the US Virgin Islands are being innoculated with the empowering principles and processes of permaculture design.

The Virgin Island Sustainable Farm Institute (VISFI) is a 7-year old working farm and educational center designed with permaculture principles. The founder and executive director Ben Jones of VISFI reports, “The seed of inspiration for VISFI was born from the permaculture movement – and 7 years into the development of our farm institute, we are nurturing our first regional permaculture students. We are happy to come full circle with the vision of sustainable design, using scholarships to bring in the local community to learn with North American participants in a lush tropical farm paradise.”

VISFI_Gaia_Garden

Chicken tractor in tropical vegetable & forest garden

“This course marks an awakening of the permaculture movement into the Virgin Islands, and we’re really happy to be working with neighbours, former students, musicians, activist, farmers, and hope they leave our living campus full of new ideas to spread the fine ideals of permaculture around the wold.” The course also includes a true diversity of participants: from a St. Croix  conscious-reggae artist to a Certified Public Accountant from Pennsylvania, from a new Gaia University associate to a northeastern United States market gardener, and from an international agricultural development consultant to a Puerto-rican indigenous Jibara woman.

VISFI_Learning

Participants from St. Croix, Puerto Rico, and mainland United States.

Collaboration

ecr_elderberry

DNR

The lead teachers of this first-ever Virgin Islands permaculture design course are Ethan Roland of AppleSeed Permaculture and Dyami Nason-Regan of Starberry Farms. They connected with Ben Jones through the transformative action-learning degree pathways of Gaia University, and share his vision of global abundance through their permaculture design and teaching work. After training with Geoff Lawton of the Permaculture Research Institute in 2005, Ethan started AppleSeed Permaculture to spread permaculture through professional consulting and teaching work throughout northeastern North America and around the world – Ethan has since taught permaculture in Menominee, Thailand, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and beyond.

VISFI_Compost

Participants preparing for an 18-day hot compost.

Working with the VISFI staff and the deep permaculture design process developed by Dave Jacke (www.edibleforestgardens.com), the teaching team delivers the standard 72-hour permaculture design course as a complete immersion in permaculture design and action. Participants are mentored through a full 2-week permaculture design process, including standard hands-on activities (compost-making, food forestry, gardening, natural building) and learning in a diversity of living classrooms.

VISFI_Class

Permaculture pattern understanding: Edge class in the tidal pools.

The mission of the Virgin Islands Sustainable Farm Institute is to provide a working educational farm enterprise that integrates sustainability in education, environment, and community through quality instruction in Agroecology and related fields.

VISFI

…combines experiential learning, outdoor lecture, field laboratories, personal and group research projects, leadership development, and local environmental awareness into a comprehensive educational experience.

VISFI_SAA

Participants present design site analysis drawings in the field.

…encourages personal growth, self-awareness, and community development in each student relationship with agriculture and the environment.  We promote healthy agriculture through intelligent, sustainable farm design coupled with environmentally conscious practices and principles.

…seeks to forge an economically productive link between the organic revolution and modern agriculture systems.  It is our aspiration that family and community based agricultural enterprises will prove sustainable for generations to come.

VISFI_Harvest

Harvest from the VISFI Farm - sugar apples, papaya, passionfruit, limes...

VISFI_Hibiscus

…staff, through years of academic study and disciplined agricultural experience, have developed a progressive curriculum that encompasses Sustainable Agribusiness, Tropical Organic Farming, Tropical Agroforestry, Permaculture Design, Cultural Mentoring, and Agritourism. A synergistic approach to agricultural learning will produce students with the skills and knowledge to survive in a modern world as small and medium-sized farm entrepreneurs.

VISFI sets the benchmark in advanced experiential education with our agroecological curriculum.  Our program is essential in today’s increasingly environmentally aware society. VISFI is confident that our blend of talented staff, natural farming practices, unique location, and progressive curriculum will help mold and create tomorrows farmers and agricultural leaders.

VISFI_Teams

Project teams returning from an afternoon of design work.

GU_logo

In collaboration with Gaia University, VISFI is working to create a global network of small farm and educational farm campuses to facilitate the sharing of information, ideas, and sustainable agriculture and resource management technologies. Gaia University will host its first orientation in Integrative Eco-Social Design at VISFI in December 2009, kicking off programs for its accredited Bachelors, Masters and post-Graduate degrees.

Even though we’re only a week into the course, it’s clear that the teachings of permaculture are spreading on the island. Local participants have brought their friends and family to visit the VISFI, taking home seeds and cuttings from the vast array of fruits, nuts, and perennial vegetables on the farm. They carry with them the priniciples and ideas of permaculture, to plant and nurture in their own communities.

The long-term effects of Permaculture Design Courses are always difficult to predict. But here on St. Croix, an island with a painful history of slavery and devastating agriculture, the practices of permaculture are already beginning to heal the ecological and social landscape.

VISFI_Participants

Permaculture: meeting human needs and increasing ecosystem health.

May our work in the world continue to create abundance, joy, and positive action for these uncertain and quickly-changing times.

To learn more:

www.gaiauniversity.org • www.visfi.org • www.appleseedpermaculture.com

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

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


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

Panya Project Smorgasbord

A slew of fresh photos from the incredible Panya Project in northern Thailand, where we’re 9 days into a Permaculture Design Certification Course…

In the mud-pit, the class mixes up a fresh batch of adobe for brick-making & earth-plastering. Clay, sand, rice hulls, water, and feet.Geoffroy

Students pour adobe into 4x8x16″ brick forms. On a good morning the Panya crew makes 150 bricks. Many of the structures on site are built from 1200-1500 bricks. These will sun-dry…
Everything you see in this food forest was planted 2 years ago. Incredible how quickly things grow in the tropics!
In the food forest, wow. Papaya. We just don’t grow fruit this big in the temperate climate. Wait till you see the jackfruit.
One of the many fast-growing nitrogen-fixing shrub species — a pioneer species to provide shade and improve the soil for the longer-term tree crops.
The fruits of tropical labor — Parkie brews up a ginger-chile wine named “The Ginger Temptress”.

More from the Panya Permaculture Course soon! Also check out www.panyaproject.blogspot.com for the ongoing COMPOST SAGA —->

WOW. LocallyGrown.net ROCKS.

Seriously. This is one of the most awesome presentations I’ve seen yet at the Financial Permaculture Course.

In a Nutshell: Eric Waldrop of www.locallygrown.net has solved the major challenges of Traditional Farmer’s Market’s, Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs), & Buying Clubs with an easy-to-use piece of internet software. (No nerds required! – Did I saw “wow?”)

The virtual farmer’s market he runs in Athens, Georgia has 60 growers, 1500 customers, and does over $10,000 of sales every week. By Eric’s reckoning, that makes it the largest Farmer’s Market in Georgia and the One of the largest in the Southeast USA. (Did I say “wow?”)

I almost can’t believe the ease and grace with which Eric has used the permaculture principle “the problem is the solution” to transform the challenges of small-scale ecological farming into stunningly simple solutions.

The Food & Agriculture business design group is in complete awe. I’m not even sure if we need investment capital to get this business started! Eric has made this so easy that half the participants (myself included!) are running home to start up their own local virtual farmers markets.

Watch a video explaining locallygrown.net: Click Here

One word descriptions of Eric’s presentation by Financial Permaculture Course participants:
Awesome, fantastic, connective, wow, congratulations, nouveau, hopeful, excited, hunky dory, impatient to do, inspired, valuable, do it, possibilities, resourceful, cool, great, brilliant, cutting edge!!!

WOW.