Description
Book SynopsisThe best person to design the property of your dreams is you. This book gives you the tools to succeed.
Building Your Permaculture Property offers a revolutionary holistic method to overcome overwhelm in the complex process of resilient land design. It distills the authors'' decades of experience as engineers, farmers, educators, and consultants into a five-step process complete with principles, practices, templates, and workflow tools to help you:
- Clarify your vision, values, and resources
- Diagnose your land and resources for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats
- Design your land and resources to meet your vision and values
- Implement the right design to enhance your strengths and improve your weakest resource
- Establish benchmarks to monitor the sustainability and success of your development.
When designing a regenerative permaculture property, too many land stewards
Trade Review
"As well as being a valuable tool for individuals in their permaculture journeys, Building Your Permaculture Property represents another step towards permaculture being recognized beyond its widespread misconception of being simply a fashionable form of organic gardening. It highlights the need for permaculture design thinking in creating resilient, regenerative, landscapes and communities. Through this work, Rob, Michelle, and Takota make a valuable contribution to the ongoing evolution of permaculture thinking and action."
— David Holmgren, permaculture co-originator
"A book to take the reader from thinking into action, Building Your Permaculture Property offers an excellent addition to permaculture theory and provides a key resource for all designers. By confronting and working through real, thorny, and often invisible human and landscape problems — a terrain in which they have earned their share of cuts and bruises — the authors slice through the Gordian knot that stops most people from realizing their home and nature visions through a powerful design system. Their vibrant and positive attitude yoked to psychological insight harnesses clean language and a keen focus on process to cut a neat furrow of systematic thinking through the complexity of living systems assessment, design, and management. Offering a window on digital design tools, clever illustrations, and examples from the demanding world of cold prairie farming, the authors have created a well-marked pathway for the advanced learner to reach professional outcomes."
— Peter Bane, executive director, Permaculture Institute of North America, author, The Permaculture Handbook
"A life well-lived includes leaving the land better than we found it. This fivestep design manual jumpstarts that journey to a foregone conclusion, laying out a thoughtful process for making permaculture principles your own. Every farm, every ranch, and every homestead benefit from thinking deeper about how human intent engages with the places we're blessed to call home. Restoring integrity to degraded ground is our primal mission now as a species. Restoring diversity means planting many more trees. Restoring ecological posterity begins with listening to the heart of the mother... and then reading this book."
— Michael Phillips, Holistic Orchard Network, author, The Holistic Orchard
"A fresh, integrative, and holistic perspective on how to orientate oneself to the process of establishing your dreams and visions on the land. Designing and managing a farm that can build soil, create amazing food products, and sustain the farmer financially is possible anywhere; and yet it is the clarity of our context and decision-making and our attitudinal responses to design and management that largely underlie success. If you are dreaming of starting out on the land, this book will be a useful companion that will help you clarify your own approach to success, and help you navigate complexity with confidence."
— Richard Perkins, author, Regenerative Agriculture, owner, Ridgedale Farm AB and Making Small Farms Work AB
"If you are serious about designing a permaculture property, this book has to be in your toolkit. The authors offer an accessible and current guide to the complexity of good design based on years of practical experience."
— Morag Gamble, Permaculture Education Institute
"Rob, Michelle, and Takota have put a pair of glasses on something that is often blurry in permaculture design: process. Their step-by-step process from beginning to end is exceptionally useful, along with Takota's story which proves the process through a case study of a well-functioning, finely-tuned permaculture farm. Interwoven with a good amount of philosophy and detail, Building Your Permaculture Property is a needed read for anyone who is serious about developing their property through a permaculture design."
— Nicholas Burtner, founder and director, The School of Permaculture
Table of ContentsForeword by Geoff Lawton
Preface
Introduction
The Problem with Permaculture
You Need a Process (Not a Prescription)
About This Book and the Companion Website
Your Very First Practice: Get an Accountability Partner
Step 0: Inspect Your Paradigm
The Gorilla in the Room
The Upward and Downward Spirals
Takota's Story: The Coen Permaculture Farm Upward Spiral
Practices for Step 0: Inspect Your Paradigm
Step 1: Clarify Your Vision, Values, and Resources
What Do You Have?
What Is Right?
Takota's Story: Two Paths to the Same Cliff
What Do You Want?
Walking Through a Field of Landmines Blinded by a Scarf
Be Careful What You Wish For
Practices for Step 1: Clarify
Takota's Story: Buckets of Well-being
Step 2: Diagnose Your Resources for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats
Takota's Story: Don't Skip Your Diagnosis!
A Watershed of Information
Takota's Story: Growing Up a Carpenter
Two Stages of Diagnosis
Black Swans
Takota's Story: Black Swan Dam
The Value of Digital Mapping and Open Data
Practices for Step 2: Diagnose
Step 3: Design Your Resources to Meet Your Vision and Values
Why Design?
What Design Is Not
Takota's Story: To Swale or Subsoil?
Form, Timing, Placement, and Scale
Takota's Story: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Creating a Permaculture Design
Practices for Step 3: Design
Step 4: Implement the Right Design That Will Most Improve Your Weakest Resource
What Is Your Birdshot?
What Is Your Slug?
Pull the Trigger
Good, Bad, and Ugly Decisions
Takota's Story: The Bazooka Approach
Practices for Step 4: Implement
Takota's Story: My Best Advice for Solving Any Problem
Step 5: Monitor Your Resources for Indicators of Well-being or Suffering
The Push and Pull of Life
Monitoring Your Resources
Takota's Story: Monitoring for Mastitis
Takota's Story: Building My Own Permaculture Property
Takota's Story: An Ecosystem Disguised as a Farm
Practices for Step 5: Monitor
The Solution to a Sisyphean Task
Putting It All Together
Your Very Last Practice: Your Permaculture Property Planner
Afterword: The Land Needs Us to Live Differently Here
Glossary
Notes
Index
About the Authors
About New Society Publishers
