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.
How to design an agroforestry system
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Here's a farm worth studying. In 1994, Mark Shepard bought 110 acres of worn-out corn and hay ground in southwest Wisconsin. The land had degraded soil and no surface water within a mile and a half. It was the kind of land most people walk away from. Today it has 250,000 trees growing. It’s roughly 98% perennial, and Mark uses no synthetic sprays and no fertilizer. Completely justified, his land is now valued at around $4.2M, while his neighbors’ land (who continued conventional crop practices) sits closer to $800K. But the part that stuck with me the most isn't any of those numbers, although the part about a quarter of a million trees is quite impressive, I must say. It’s the fact that he takes time off from the farm and the land actually gets better without him. He has done this form of voluntary or forced abandonment many times (more in the video below), and the system kept on working on its own. In my mind, that's the agroforestry’s ultimate benefit. In a conventional perennial growing operation you plant trees and then you end up being a slave to all the work you need to do, but in an agroforestry, the system keeps producing whether you show up or not, if it’s set up/designed correctly, that is. To help with this setup/design, I just published a video walking through how a system like this gets designed, step by step, with the real numbers behind it. Here's the video: How to Design an Agroforestry System (Step by Step) I hope you find the presentation valuable. It takes a good amount of time to produce it, so please share around to spread the message about this amazing ‘tehnology’. Talk soon, -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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