Implement permaculture without overwhelm or analysis-paralysis! Join 36,000+ growers and build freedom for yourself by establishing your own self-reliant systems. Think of me like Tim Ferris for gardeners: every week, I take a complex subject and boil it down to step-by-step guides or plug-and-play tools like calculators, workflows and permaculture calendars.
“Do I regret our farm purchase?”
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A few weeks ago, someone on X shared what she learned after buying a small farm during the lockdown era (w/o a rural background). One line stood out: “Everything is default inconvenient and manual.” Her days involve hauling water, moving feed, and caring for animals in all kinds of weather. Some of that work is unavoidable, but a lot of the unnecessary back-and-forth can be designed out by connecting the right elements. One of the main characteristics of a regenerative property is that all of its different components are interconnected, working together as an integrated system. There is continuous cycling whereby the outputs of one component fulfill the inputs of another. This eliminates or at least minimizes the amount of labor, energy, or resources you need to invest in providing the inputs or eliminating the waste. On a traditional small farm or homestead, generally, nothing is actually connected to anything else. There might be chickens, pigs, cows, ducks, gardens, or orchards… but they’re all separate and usually located far from each other. As no component supplies the needs of others, it’s up to the farmer or homesteader to do all that extra work. Your regenerative property, on the other hand, should have the needs of every element met within the system. So, for example, if the pig, chicken, or cow needs water and food, you need to find the elements within the system that will satisfy these needs. And in the same manner, you should have yields of every element used within the system. So, for example, if your animals are producing manure, then the system or another component within the system must be able to use that manure. Ideally, you should also put those interconnecting systems close together so that you don’t have to constantly haul resources from one end of the property to the other. So, take a minute or two, and think about whether or not you are making these types of connections on your property. Do you have open loops? I developed an input/output database called Regenerative Loops for this very purpose. For example, if you’re producing "cow manure," you can search for that under “outputs”, and see which regenerative systems you could build that would use it as an input: Alternatively, you could take a more holistic approach and search for “manure” globally across everything. Then you’d get a birds-eye-view list of all the systems that either need manure as an input or produce it as an output: It’s a tool you can’t get anywhere else, so I don’t want price to be a barrier. Pay what you can. If you’re interested, you can get it here: https://permaculture-apprentice.kit.com/products/regenerative-loops
-William ​ ​ |
🍀 Permaculture Apprentice
Implement permaculture without overwhelm or analysis-paralysis! Join 36,000+ growers and build freedom for yourself by establishing your own self-reliant systems. Think of me like Tim Ferris for gardeners: every week, I take a complex subject and boil it down to step-by-step guides or plug-and-play tools like calculators, workflows and permaculture calendars.
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