So awesome to hear this! Thanks for sharing and definitely get involved with UMass Permaculture. The newest crew is totally rad and I bet you'd meet some great folks
I absolutely love this video! I wrote a paper last semester about permaculture and it's place in the community. It focused on edible landscaping mainly but I also added in a good few paragraphs about using a portion of my school's 200 plus acres that only have a few trees. This is very inspiring thanks so much for sharing your hard work and experience.
I love the video and I'm glad to see young people becoming more interested growing their own local food. From the images in this brief video tour, I'm not sure calling this 'Permaculture' is entirely accurate, but they have certainly created some wonderful garden spaces and I'm happy it's bringing locally grown food to the wider campus discussion. Excellent work!
That's just what I was thinking. Looks like they have rows of the same plants all grouped together. It might need more maintenance that way, but as you say, it's still a beautiful thing to see! :)
I don't live in Massachusetts, but watching this video gave me an idea. I love to garden, but I am getting old, and building a permaculture, or just about any type of gardening method is starting to get out of reach for me. My body just can't hold out for the hard work. It's depressing. Colleges who offer agriculture, should also teach about charity, and allow people to apply for students to come to their homes, and build gardening systems, that they might otherwise not be able to have. I love to go outside and eat food straight off the plant, and I would be first in line to apply for a project such as this. I can even pay for the supplies needed, I just can't do the physical labor. But if someone is interested, and can't afford the materials, it would be great if there was funding available to them. It would be a way to make people who rely on government assistance more self sufficient, plus they would be getting fresh, homegrown food, instead of that nasty, tasteless supermarket junk.
itsnotthesamething Amen! My father is hitting on the same thoughts, but he never stops!! Still working his land almost everyday. Your idea is long overdue and MUST be implemented while it still can! We can't wait on the government or any organization big enough to put money first; they can't have their slaves becoming self sufficient. We wouldn't be slaves anymore! I will get back to you if I decide to make steps in this direction. It would take a simple forum for those interested to interact. Nothing more. It will all grow from there!
+itsnotthesamething I believe God will bless you. All Good deeds will be supported. Why not try the local organic grower, local agriculture campuses or even heck why not try the Green Peace. I mean, just throw out the idea into FB status and let's see how many responded. You will be surprised at how much of an impact you can make from social media. I pray that you can see it happened, God bless.
Beautiful way to coincide with nature and utilizing the resources that are readily available in nature. Prof. John Gerber said it the best, " The awareness that comes with it and the sense of power and participation that comes with students growing their own food. That's where the big differences will come". If every institution starts a similar initiative, our community, our country, and this world can be a better place where all of us can come together as one, in nature and share our wealth and knowledge. Thank you.
I love this so much! It's amazing how little the average consumer knows about his or her food and how or where it's grown. thank you for helping to educate future generations!!
I sponsored a gardening club at the school where I taught.None of the children had ever grown anything.So I played a little trick on them. Had them plant a collard seed, you know how small they are.As the collards began to grow they were amazed.At maturity they were huge and the kids were amazed.Then they harvested the plant took it home and had a good meal.I got so much out of it watching them stay excited as the plant grew larger and larger.
now i understand what is permaculture...same thing what we do way back when we are at elementary level...our mother tried her best to make us busy by planting plants on our backyard rather than playing with other children. this idea is best love it...
Your layers of organic material over 1200 feet is ridiculously awesome! I've got all manner of composting going on but you make it look so freakin' easy!!!! (Sigh, the struggles of permaculture in high desert of AZ.)
Take a look at do nothing gardening, biomass ground cover, no till gardening, hugelculture, terraces, swales, greening the desert.....This is our savior if we can balance our offspring production.
I have felt so alone in the world lately. This video brought me to tears, lots of them, due to seeing all these bright young people who share this vision
I live in Iowa. John Garber you may not know this, but your “industrial agriculture” feeds the world (google Norman Borlaug). I would welcome UMass students/faculty to come visit us. Furthermore, those farmers that farm that land generally are 3 generation (or better). To say they are vested in soil health and to long term sustainability of that land is an understatement. I think many consider it to be their identity and heritage. John is again incorrect when he says: Ag is detrimental to a small community. Agriculture is the cornerstone & life blood of many small towns in rural America, and allows us to live a very high quality lifestyle. I applaud you efforts to build a edible landscape. We here in rural America haven’t stopped gardening, canning and harvesting natures bounty for our personal self sufficiency. Keep up the good efforts in your backyard, and consider coming to middle America to experience a hands on education of farm/ranch life (*warning you may fall in love with the lifestyle).
Permaculture irrigation is minimal. In many cases, one can design drought resistant water caches which can be tapped when there is no rain. Traditional gardens waste a lot of water as the top soil is always dry and the ground doesn't hold onto the moisture within the top 6" which is where most vegetable roots reside.
good to see a university taking on permaculture , when it started with Bill Mollison at sydney uni they proved beyond any doubt a community could live off the grid in a green way however they got shut down . Well done to the campus to making this happen
Thanks for this vid. It prompted me to research cardboard and I find that cardboard has toxic chemicals in the glue mix and that there is also water resistant and fire retardant cardboard out there in the real world. So much for keeping chemicals out of the food we grow.
The universities all over the world should teach the principles and the research institutes of this world should investigate the underlying mechanisms of Sepp Holzer permaculture/agro-ecology. Sepp Holzer's agricultural system beats conventional/GMO farming in every regard: no factory animal farming, no chemical or genetic pollution, more production per surface unit, huge bio-diversity, extreme landscape beauty, intact and clean water household, no deforestation, no hunger, no epidemic of diseases, each place would have its unique plant varieties, and most important, food would become medicine, as food grown in permaculture is packed with nutrients and antioxydants. If the world adopts Sepp Holzer's farming system, we would live in a world of abundance and beauty. His system, methods and philosophy can be successfully applied anywhere in the world. We could feed 3 times more people than currently live on earth. If Holzer agro-ecology prevails, the earth's biosphere will soon be regenerated. Sepp Holzer has already more than 200 projects in the world, tendency rising. He knows how to reclaim deserts and turn them into lush, fertile land. Register now for the Holzer Austria Tour 2015: ruclips.net/video/k_0OgWHr0mw/видео.html If you wanna get a glimpse of what one of Sepp Holzer’s international projects looks like, please travel online to Portugal: ruclips.net/video/4hF2QL0D5ww/видео.html Vive Sepp Holzer! Hoch lebe Sepp Holzer! 赛普·霍尔泽，加油!
this is so amazing very inspiring. hope all schools in the planet will do this as well. imagine what the plant would become if this become a global movement. i have some curious observation though. why not start with the card boards to mulch or cover the weeds before the compost? just an observation.
1:30 I would've put wood mulch down with the soil on top of the grass, inoculated with mushrooms, then covered it with cardboard, then more soil and mulch. Anyone know of any edible mycorrhizal mushrooms that might survive in subtropical regions?
+barkershill Maybe, but some of those grasses will grow right up through a bale of straw. Also, worms love cardboard, so it makes a nice home layer for them.
the cardboard is also a perfect cross sectional medium for mycorhysome, the funguses that interconnect the roots of the plants and transport nutrients in between
Not true for bermuda grass and other rhizome vegetation. Certain grasses and weeds can survive for long periods underground as they have thick tuberous roots that store energy. Hence why you need to add a composting barrier so that the noxious weeds/grass use up all their stored energies trying to push through the barrier in order to reach sunlight.
Where is the water coming from? Permaculture makes use of what is available, to make the whole thing work for itself. There should be a grid showing how water run-off is watering this garden without anyone having to drag a hose around. Where are the swales and berms that slow water flow so rain can soak into the ground?
This video is just an intro into the UMass program. Go to their college campus website for details into how they setup rain caches, swales and hugelmounds in order to retain rain water runoff.
Lynda Jones I made lovely, lovely rich compost just by using waste food, eggshells, grass clippings, leaves, braai charcoal dust (that's barbeque to you...) which contains some fat and nutrients, and, believe it or not, used cooking oil from the kitchen. Nice dark, rich, nutrition for my plants, at no discernible cost. Anyone can do it.
You need about 2 acres for a family of 4 to be self sustaining given typical methods. Permaculture might lessen that a little, but you still need close to that (and permaculture isnt designed to have efficient harvesting, just efficient growing). Thats easy for people who live in rural areas. I have 1.223 acres. My parents live in a suburban area and dont have 9000sq ft of property. The cities around the country/world hold more people and they have FAR less than that. So, the real question is when are we going to sart disbanding cities and telling people to save the environment and move? Thats right, never. So, until that day, we need giant farms producing fields of crops efficiently in order to feed the cities, suburban areas, and even the rural areas because we arent an agrarian society. Yes, it would be great to have people more aware of the land and how food is produced, but its unrealistic as long as we have millions of people grouped into a few dozen or hundred miles.
Sort of yes and sort of no. Yes: To live in a city or a suburb and try to try to be entirely self-sufficient would be a poor decision. Partially for the land-supply reasons you declared but also because it shouldn't be about building up a bunker so you can disconnect from the world. Being in a city, so close to so many people and other systems and trying to do everything yourself as an ultimate generalist would be a waste of so many things, including the community opportunities. What is more realistic is a local economic network of semi-specialists doing something they've found themselves proficient and passionate about, establishing business relationships with the conventional public. This is how it's already growing with local food and urban ag movements. No one in this system is completely independent of the global economic chain. Maybe not yet. Maybe not ever. I think it would be presumptuous for either of us to say if it is possible or not but maybe it doesn't have to be for us as a civilization to reel things back to the carrying capacity of the Earth. I'll try to get through the 'no' without raising the whole ten-page case against industrial monoculture. The giant farms you're talking about are efficient but that's really a labour-efficiency rather than land-efficiency. With the machinery and chemical management, land can be cultivated with fewer people in less time. But although you can see more food at once in a large field, it is not necessarily more productive. The yield per acre per year is typically much lower than a labour-intensively managed polyculture, especially when you consider that monocultures often need a recovery period to lie fallow with a cover crop; a well-done permaculture site is always producing in a decent climate. When you consider that these monoculture practices salt and impoverish the capacity of that land over the long-term without fossil inputs, it becomes clear that it can't feed a family of 4 regardless of how big it is; this system undermines its own productivity in the long run. Cities are land-poor, yes, but when you consider the fact that we are net importers of food and are getting smarter about dealing with organic waste, they are incredible concentrations of labour, nutrient, and the creativity to marshall those resources in intensively productive ways. It's not about repeating the UMass project across the city until everything is producing the same mix of produce and we'll see if it's enough. The UMass' value is more in education and capacity-building so its people are capable of going forth, finding a productive niche and having a set of skills that doesn't make them completely obligate to the dependencies of this conventional global food system. So you're right, we shouldn't expect a big de-urbanization exodus where everybody builds a food bunker on rural land, because they simply won't. But I disagree entirely that it means we have to stay locked into the big mechanized farm system, because we can't; it degrades its own productivity and won't last. If these are the only two options you see, you're going to get very depressed. The actual sustainable and realistic solution is going to look nothing like those two scenarios.
Riley Iwamoto The problem with the "semi-specialiasts" is they do a certain task/product/crop. Lets say, corn. They start off small, enough for neighbors to buy/trade with. Then, as word spreads, they expand and get a few acres. Then a few hundred acres. Then they are a farm. Making corn. And you have monoculture farming and run into the same need for disease/pest resistant strains of food because the crop is so clustered that regular crops die too easily. Same with Jiffy Lube and a bank. They started small and grew to the size they are now. You then get businesses that are "too big to fail" and must be supported by the government when their business models arent good, yet people who ARENT self sufficient rely on that one business for their lives. The problem with "big business" is it outcompetes small business that is specialized and you lose the innovation. I wasnt saying that big farms are NEEDED, I was saying that the big cities are the problem. They are the cause of crime, pollution, hunger, and everything that is destroying the world. They are also where innovation due to specialists who can focus on a single non-food-production task like medicine, technology, or oil changes. Want to go to space? big cities. Want to not have to leave the planet because we havent ruined it? Self sufficiency.
I'd say that the scenarios you described with the corn farmer, Jiffy Lube, and the small lender that becomes a bank is one of full-specialists; they started as small entrepreneurs but they focused on maximizing one product or service. They were also operating on conventional priorities of profit maximization and indefinite growth, neither of which is characteristic of permaculture businesses or, arguably, most local movements. That is not to say you need to live in poverty or cannot make a comfortable living in a locally-oriented polycultural system, urban or rural. The Joel Salatins, Sepp Holzers, and other visible names in the community work fairly large plots but they diversified as they grew, looking at the relationship of their first resources (say corn or chickens) and using that to support another agent/crop/resource on the land. They found a ‘just right’ size of operations according to their ability to manage it closely and produce multiple products without degrading the landscape. Exercising limits and pluralizing their output might make them bad capitalists by some conventional business philosophies, but they are demonstrating that success doesn't obligate you to pigeon-hole yourself into doing one thing or unsustainable expansion (spatially or fiscally). A self-employed person in a city practicing a similiar way (even in non-food industries) might diversify themselves based on the complements and relationships of their products/services into doing multiple things part-time while their networks will be set by locational efficiency (usually the immediate community). If we agree that people aren't going to leave big cities, then you did say big farms are needed: "until that day, we need giant farms producing fields of crops". If that wasn't what you meant, you might've picked a better way of saying it. I agree on the problems of big businesses and the vulnerabilities it imposes on specialized labourers but I'm not sure how that serves your argument or, to be honest, what your argument is. Are you arguing for the decimation of cities and self-sufficient atomism or something else? Are you waiting for us to invent ourselves out of our problems with high-tech miracles? I'd also suggest you not see cities as the causes of human problems but where societies challenges are concentrated into visibility. Living close together does not obligate us to be destructive or make us malicious. What does make the way we live destructive is way more complex than that and scattering the population isn’t going to fix that.
Riley Iwamoto My argument is people are demanding that we stop polluting(via a smartphone/computer), then drive their car(built by big business and industry) to a store using monoculture to produce a single product(like starbucks) all while feeling smug about how better they are than some flyover stater. Dont even get me started on the crying about the non-native "honeybee decline" they always moan about. Is it good to teach polyculture? Absolutely. But until we DO decimate cities or expand beyond this planet, we get people in big cities telling us to reduce cow farts but make sure they get their burger. sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/09/01/cow-fart-regulations-approved-by-californias-legislature/
These students never noticed their grandparents and neighbors gardening and growing food? Didn't they help their elderly neighbors? Permaculture has been around for centuries. Only in America do you go to a university to learn to maintain a garden, permaculture or traditional.
Urban peeps see concrete and maybe a cute little herb box in their grandparents windowsill. Please be more understanding. Plus, many farmers aren't doing the permaculture method and are wasting millions of dollars on chemical fertilizers and pesticides and irrigation to produce a fraction of one can by allowing things to work naturally.
Permaculture is farming in a low maintenance/input style. You first must establish a permaculture. It takes time. Like Hugelmounds actually take three years until the wood inside the center starts acting like the water reservoir and the plants begin to truly thrive. This is about how they started the journey, not about how it continued years later.
Speaking of healthy eating. One should always cook mushrooms before eating them. If this is their extent knowledge of permaculture, then they have a long ways to go before understanding permaculture principles.
***** you mean the work I have done for NASA, and other large programs? Or do you mean all the volunteer work I've done, including sitting on several non-profit boards as well as extensive hands-on work with a number of organizations like helping inner city kids, abused kids, kids with learning disabilities, people with other disabilities, abused women. Which did you mean? Or I can list a number of other real contributions to society. Just let me know.
***** Just what I thought, typical troll backs way off when challenged by a real person who cares about his fellow man, this world, and this life's experience. Back into your hole, troll.
***** I have a NASA patent and contributed to the rocket manufacturing process to prevent disasters like Columbia from recurring. NDE of volumetric defects in steel using electromagnetic acoustic transducers. I bet your rather feeble mind would struggle wrapping itself around that! But I found your defensive passive aggressive troll comment funny. lol
Have you noticed that there is a huge population of children who are allergic to strawberries and peanuts and other foods in the US but not in places like Africa and India? Although I agree with vaccinations, I also agree with the notion that we are too sanitary in the US. Our children don't get to play in dirt and evolve the necessary immune system to handle natural bacteria and viruses. I do rinse my mushrooms off, but I don't cook them unless they are of the variety that requires cooking to break down chemical toxins or oxalate.
That was an example of NON permaculture traditional farming. Permaculture chickens are put into the garden in areas that need processing and are moved periodically to new areas so the areas they did process can now be planted and the chickens can enjoy tearing down a part of the garden that is no longer in use. This style of natural recycling keeps more of the nutrients within the soil and eliminates the needs for tilling and fertilizers. Oh and chickens are awesome for pest control.
Chickens can be given free range, but limited via an electric fence. Best thing for a garden is to use chickens to process it after it no longer is in use and then add mulch and let the chickens work it into the soil. Next season you'll have a ready spot for a new garden and you can put the chickens on another spot to do the same cycle.
Using seeds would be fine when you're converting forest floor or something already fallow. When converting a lawn, you'd be spending years fighting the already dominant grass rhizomes to establish the soil builders you're trying to make succeed. The sheet mulch is material intensive, yes, but the materials can be non-chemically synthesized and is a "once and for all" way of smothering the grass so you can start working the space one season later with minimal turf resurgence.
this video is the reason why im attending umass this fall
So awesome to hear this! Thanks for sharing and definitely get involved with UMass Permaculture. The newest crew is totally rad and I bet you'd meet some great folks
Ff
Imports tons of compost and woodchip and calls it "permaculture"... it is organic yes, but bringing so much in is not permaculture.
End the production of worthless grass, start growing food in its place.
Spread the word, permaculture!
Grass isn't worthless, but for sure it shouldn't be the default ground cover, especially not in dry climates.
We need grasses, but not lawns there is a big difference.
I absolutely love this video! I wrote a paper last semester about permaculture and it's place in the community. It focused on edible landscaping mainly but I also added in a good few paragraphs about using a portion of my school's 200 plus acres that only have a few trees. This is very inspiring thanks so much for sharing your hard work and experience.
There is a lot of space on most University Campuses... it would make a hell lot of sense for more Universities to do this.
I love the video and I'm glad to see young people becoming more interested growing their own local food. From the images in this brief video tour, I'm not sure calling this 'Permaculture' is entirely accurate, but they have certainly created some wonderful garden spaces and I'm happy it's bringing locally grown food to the wider campus discussion. Excellent work!
That's just what I was thinking. Looks like they have rows of the same plants all grouped together. It might need more maintenance that way, but as you say, it's still a beautiful thing to see! :)
I don't live in Massachusetts, but watching this video gave me an idea. I love to garden, but I am getting old, and building a permaculture, or just about any type of gardening method is starting to get out of reach for me. My body just can't hold out for the hard work. It's depressing. Colleges who offer agriculture, should also teach about charity, and allow people to apply for students to come to their homes, and build gardening systems, that they might otherwise not be able to have. I love to go outside and eat food straight off the plant, and I would be first in line to apply for a project such as this. I can even pay for the supplies needed, I just can't do the physical labor. But if someone is interested, and can't afford the materials, it would be great if there was funding available to them. It would be a way to make people who rely on government assistance more self sufficient, plus they would be getting fresh, homegrown food, instead of that nasty, tasteless supermarket junk.
itsnotthesamething Amen!
My father is hitting on the same thoughts, but he never stops!! Still working his land almost everyday. Your idea is long overdue and MUST be implemented while it still can!
We can't wait on the government or any organization big enough to put money first; they can't have their slaves becoming self sufficient. We wouldn't be slaves anymore!
I will get back to you if I decide to make steps in this direction. It would take a simple forum for those interested to interact. Nothing more.
It will all grow from there!
Wyatt Bottorff It lifts my spirits to know I am not the only one who has thought of this. Thanks for responding!
+itsnotthesamething I believe God will bless you. All Good deeds will be supported. Why not try the local organic grower, local agriculture campuses or even heck why not try the Green Peace. I mean, just throw out the idea into FB status and let's see how many responded. You will be surprised at how much of an impact you can make from social media. I pray that you can see it happened, God bless.
***** I didn't know there was such a thing.
+itsnotthesamething 8:07 1 a year, on campus.
So cool to see this happening. Thank you all for doing this!!!!!
Beautiful way to coincide with nature and utilizing the resources that are readily available in nature. Prof. John Gerber said it the best, " The awareness that comes with it and the sense of power and participation that comes with students growing their own food. That's where the big differences will come". If every institution starts a similar initiative, our community, our country, and this world can be a better place where all of us can come together as one, in nature and share our wealth and knowledge. Thank you.
I love this so much! It's amazing how little the average consumer knows about his or her food and how or where it's grown. thank you for helping to educate future generations!!
I sponsored a gardening club at the school where I taught.None of the children had ever grown anything.So I played a little trick on them. Had them plant a collard seed, you know how small they are.As the collards began to grow they were amazed.At maturity they were huge and the kids were amazed.Then they harvested the plant took it home and had a good meal.I got so much out of it watching them stay excited as the plant grew larger and larger.
rick padgett Do it again with them helping you!
now i understand what is permaculture...same thing what we do way back when we are at elementary level...our mother tried her best to make us busy by planting plants on our backyard rather than playing with other children. this idea is best love it...
If every school, college and university around the world did the same thing, the world will become a better place.
Your layers of organic material over 1200 feet is ridiculously awesome! I've got all manner of composting going on but you make it look so freakin' easy!!!! (Sigh, the struggles of permaculture in high desert of AZ.)
Take a look at do nothing gardening, biomass ground cover, no till gardening, hugelculture, terraces, swales, greening the desert.....This is our savior if we can balance our offspring production.
I have felt so alone in the world lately. This video brought me to tears, lots of them, due to seeing all these bright young people who share this vision
+i like plants and video games
i have felt the same.
I live in Iowa. John Garber you may not know this, but your “industrial agriculture” feeds the world (google Norman Borlaug). I would welcome UMass students/faculty to come visit us. Furthermore, those farmers that farm that land generally are 3 generation (or better). To say they are vested in soil health and to long term sustainability of that land is an understatement. I think many consider it to be their identity and heritage. John is again incorrect when he says: Ag is detrimental to a small community. Agriculture is the cornerstone & life blood of many small towns in rural America, and allows us to live a very high quality lifestyle.
I applaud you efforts to build a edible landscape. We here in rural America haven’t stopped gardening, canning and harvesting natures bounty for our personal self sufficiency.
Keep up the good efforts in your backyard, and consider coming to middle America to experience a hands on education of farm/ranch life (*warning you may fall in love with the lifestyle).
how did you water the garden beds?? buried drip line? soaker hoses? just rainwater and no irrigation? awesome project!
Permaculture irrigation is minimal. In many cases, one can design drought resistant water caches which can be tapped when there is no rain. Traditional gardens waste a lot of water as the top soil is always dry and the ground doesn't hold onto the moisture within the top 6" which is where most vegetable roots reside.
Wow yall are an inspiration, thank you!!!
hello from Austin, TX
This is the kind of academic ideas worth spreading. Amazing example of people with initiative...
so exciting! very soon i'll get a spot in the local organic community garden. can't wait!
good to see a university taking on permaculture , when it started with Bill Mollison at sydney uni they proved beyond any doubt a community could live off the grid in a green way however they got shut down . Well done to the campus to making this happen
Thanks for this vid. It prompted me to research cardboard and I find that cardboard has toxic chemicals in the glue mix and that there is also water resistant and fire retardant cardboard out there in the real world. So much for keeping chemicals out of the food we grow.
With the extra gardens, I bet the air quality around the buildings has improved.
Now that's an efficient way of promoting permaculture.
how to distinguish if they are Gardening or Perma-culturing?
Great! Keep up the great work guys!
Cool video, it's great what you guys are doing! Where can one gain knowledge for starting a permaculture garden in my backyard?
Oregon State University has a free online course!
thank you for upload^^
Very NICE! Thank you.
Excellent go ahead guys
The universities all over the world should teach the principles and the research institutes of this world should investigate the underlying mechanisms of Sepp Holzer permaculture/agro-ecology. Sepp Holzer's agricultural system beats conventional/GMO farming in every regard: no factory animal farming, no chemical or genetic pollution, more production per surface unit, huge bio-diversity, extreme landscape beauty, intact and clean water household, no deforestation, no hunger, no epidemic of diseases, each place would have its unique plant varieties, and most important, food would become medicine, as food grown in permaculture is packed with nutrients and antioxydants. If the world adopts Sepp Holzer's farming system, we would live in a world of abundance and beauty. His system, methods and philosophy can be successfully applied anywhere in the world. We could feed 3 times more people than currently live on earth. If Holzer agro-ecology prevails, the earth's biosphere will soon be regenerated. Sepp Holzer has already more than 200 projects in the world, tendency rising. He knows how to reclaim deserts and turn them into lush, fertile land.
Register now for the Holzer Austria Tour 2015: ruclips.net/video/k_0OgWHr0mw/видео.html
If you wanna get a glimpse of what one of Sepp Holzer’s international projects looks like, please travel online to Portugal:
ruclips.net/video/4hF2QL0D5ww/видео.html
Vive Sepp Holzer! Hoch lebe Sepp Holzer! 赛普·霍尔泽，加油!
this is so amazing very inspiring. hope all schools in the planet will do this as well. imagine what the plant would become if this become a global movement. i have some curious observation though. why not start with the card boards to mulch or cover the weeds before the compost? just an observation.
You guys should make educational videos to teach the world about this.
Very inspiring!
Why can’t I be doing this at my school right now??
Was that The Slip playing toward the end?
1:30 I would've put wood mulch down with the soil on top of the grass, inoculated with mushrooms, then covered it with cardboard, then more soil and mulch. Anyone know of any edible mycorrhizal mushrooms that might survive in subtropical regions?
I think it works better to put the cardboard down first, then then compost, then wood chips of other mulch.
Amazing !! i wish i can join !
Can permaculture design be used commercially? I mean bulk amounts of cash crops
Has anyone made a follow-up video to this?
It's lovely to think that with very few means we could inherit the earth forever. And actually deserve it.
👍👍👍🇵🇪🌻🥀🌹🌼🥕🍅🥬🥦🌽🍆🧄🍑🌶️🍋God Bless you!!!
Wow Varshini Prakash (founder of Sunrise Movement) at 6:48!
I always thought the compost went on top of the cardboard?
Training for work on the Collective Farms of the future? Just joking, it is a Great undertaking!
Love it!!!!! LOve to you all!!!
Love this video!
If you are putting on mulch to that depth I'm sure the cardboard layer superfluous .
Agree
+barkershill Maybe, but some of those grasses will grow right up through a bale of straw. Also, worms love cardboard, so it makes a nice home layer for them.
the cardboard is also a perfect cross sectional medium for mycorhysome, the funguses that interconnect the roots of the plants and transport nutrients in between
Not true for bermuda grass and other rhizome vegetation. Certain grasses and weeds can survive for long periods underground as they have thick tuberous roots that store energy. Hence why you need to add a composting barrier so that the noxious weeds/grass use up all their stored energies trying to push through the barrier in order to reach sunlight.
Pls come to Ghana with is
I love this!!
This is more of an advertising for the college rather a documentary video on permaculture
░S░U░P░E░R░ ░V░I░D░E░O░
Where is the water coming from? Permaculture makes use of what is available, to make the whole thing work for itself. There should be a grid showing how water run-off is watering this garden without anyone having to drag a hose around. Where are the swales and berms that slow water flow so rain can soak into the ground?
This video is just an intro into the UMass program. Go to their college campus website for details into how they setup rain caches, swales and hugelmounds in order to retain rain water runoff.
'Not gonna need as much resources?' What do you think all that compost and carboard is? It's not like it grows on trees. Oh wait...
Pre-cisely! Leaves make good compost- just put them underneath other stuff or they take a long time to break down.
Lynda Jones
I made lovely, lovely rich compost just by using waste food, eggshells, grass clippings, leaves, braai charcoal dust (that's barbeque to you...) which contains some fat and nutrients, and, believe it or not, used cooking oil from the kitchen. Nice dark, rich, nutrition for my plants, at no discernible cost. Anyone can do it.
Lynda Jones FYI, the only oil I fry with is sunflower. The only oils I use are sunflower and olive.
You need about 2 acres for a family of 4 to be self sustaining given typical methods. Permaculture might lessen that a little, but you still need close to that (and permaculture isnt designed to have efficient harvesting, just efficient growing). Thats easy for people who live in rural areas. I have 1.223 acres. My parents live in a suburban area and dont have 9000sq ft of property. The cities around the country/world hold more people and they have FAR less than that. So, the real question is when are we going to sart disbanding cities and telling people to save the environment and move? Thats right, never. So, until that day, we need giant farms producing fields of crops efficiently in order to feed the cities, suburban areas, and even the rural areas because we arent an agrarian society.
Yes, it would be great to have people more aware of the land and how food is produced, but its unrealistic as long as we have millions of people grouped into a few dozen or hundred miles.
Sort of yes and sort of no.
Yes: To live in a city or a suburb and try to try to be entirely self-sufficient would be a poor decision. Partially for the land-supply reasons you declared but also because it shouldn't be about building up a bunker so you can disconnect from the world. Being in a city, so close to so many people and other systems and trying to do everything yourself as an ultimate generalist would be a waste of so many things, including the community opportunities. What is more realistic is a local economic network of semi-specialists doing something they've found themselves proficient and passionate about, establishing business relationships with the conventional public. This is how it's already growing with local food and urban ag movements. No one in this system is completely independent of the global economic chain. Maybe not yet. Maybe not ever. I think it would be presumptuous for either of us to say if it is possible or not but maybe it doesn't have to be for us as a civilization to reel things back to the carrying capacity of the Earth.
I'll try to get through the 'no' without raising the whole ten-page case against industrial monoculture. The giant farms you're talking about are efficient but that's really a labour-efficiency rather than land-efficiency. With the machinery and chemical management, land can be cultivated with fewer people in less time. But although you can see more food at once in a large field, it is not necessarily more productive. The yield per acre per year is typically much lower than a labour-intensively managed polyculture, especially when you consider that monocultures often need a recovery period to lie fallow with a cover crop; a well-done permaculture site is always producing in a decent climate. When you consider that these monoculture practices salt and impoverish the capacity of that land over the long-term without fossil inputs, it becomes clear that it can't feed a family of 4 regardless of how big it is; this system undermines its own productivity in the long run.
Cities are land-poor, yes, but when you consider the fact that we are net importers of food and are getting smarter about dealing with organic waste, they are incredible concentrations of labour, nutrient, and the creativity to marshall those resources in intensively productive ways. It's not about repeating the UMass project across the city until everything is producing the same mix of produce and we'll see if it's enough. The UMass' value is more in education and capacity-building so its people are capable of going forth, finding a productive niche and having a set of skills that doesn't make them completely obligate to the dependencies of this conventional global food system.
So you're right, we shouldn't expect a big de-urbanization exodus where everybody builds a food bunker on rural land, because they simply won't. But I disagree entirely that it means we have to stay locked into the big mechanized farm system, because we can't; it degrades its own productivity and won't last. If these are the only two options you see, you're going to get very depressed. The actual sustainable and realistic solution is going to look nothing like those two scenarios.
WE ARE NOT GOING TO RUN OUT OF OIL WE ARE NOT GOING TO SEE THE END OF OUR CIVILIZATION AS WE KNOW IT ,just carry on the same no problem WAKE UP
Riley Iwamoto The problem with the "semi-specialiasts" is they do a certain task/product/crop. Lets say, corn. They start off small, enough for neighbors to buy/trade with. Then, as word spreads, they expand and get a few acres. Then a few hundred acres. Then they are a farm. Making corn. And you have monoculture farming and run into the same need for disease/pest resistant strains of food because the crop is so clustered that regular crops die too easily.
Same with Jiffy Lube and a bank. They started small and grew to the size they are now. You then get businesses that are "too big to fail" and must be supported by the government when their business models arent good, yet people who ARENT self sufficient rely on that one business for their lives. The problem with "big business" is it outcompetes small business that is specialized and you lose the innovation.
I wasnt saying that big farms are NEEDED, I was saying that the big cities are the problem. They are the cause of crime, pollution, hunger, and everything that is destroying the world. They are also where innovation due to specialists who can focus on a single non-food-production task like medicine, technology, or oil changes.
Want to go to space? big cities.
Want to not have to leave the planet because we havent ruined it? Self sufficiency.
I'd say that the scenarios you described with the corn farmer, Jiffy Lube, and the small lender that becomes a bank is one of full-specialists; they started as small entrepreneurs but they focused on maximizing one product or service. They were also operating on conventional priorities of profit maximization and indefinite growth, neither of which is characteristic of permaculture businesses or, arguably, most local movements.
That is not to say you need to live in poverty or cannot make a comfortable living in a locally-oriented polycultural system, urban or rural. The Joel Salatins, Sepp Holzers, and other visible names in the community work fairly large plots but they diversified as they grew, looking at the relationship of their first resources (say corn or chickens) and using that to support another agent/crop/resource on the land. They found a ‘just right’ size of operations according to their ability to manage it closely and produce multiple products without degrading the landscape. Exercising limits and pluralizing their output might make them bad capitalists by some conventional business philosophies, but they are demonstrating that success doesn't obligate you to pigeon-hole yourself into doing one thing or unsustainable expansion (spatially or fiscally). A self-employed person in a city practicing a similiar way (even in non-food industries) might diversify themselves based on the complements and relationships of their products/services into doing multiple things part-time while their networks will be set by locational efficiency (usually the immediate community).
If we agree that people aren't going to leave big cities, then you did say big farms are needed: "until that day, we need giant farms producing fields of crops". If that wasn't what you meant, you might've picked a better way of saying it. I agree on the problems of big businesses and the vulnerabilities it imposes on specialized labourers but I'm not sure how that serves your argument or, to be honest, what your argument is. Are you arguing for the decimation of cities and self-sufficient atomism or something else? Are you waiting for us to invent ourselves out of our problems with high-tech miracles?
I'd also suggest you not see cities as the causes of human problems but where societies challenges are concentrated into visibility. Living close together does not obligate us to be destructive or make us malicious. What does make the way we live destructive is way more complex than that and scattering the population isn’t going to fix that.
Riley Iwamoto My argument is people are demanding that we stop polluting(via a smartphone/computer), then drive their car(built by big business and industry) to a store using monoculture to produce a single product(like starbucks) all while feeling smug about how better they are than some flyover stater. Dont even get me started on the crying about the non-native "honeybee decline" they always moan about.
Is it good to teach polyculture? Absolutely. But until we DO decimate cities or expand beyond this planet, we get people in big cities telling us to reduce cow farts but make sure they get their burger.
sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/09/01/cow-fart-regulations-approved-by-californias-legislature/
Ryan Harb; Congratulation for the achievement. I really want to implement Premaculture in my Elementary School. Can you share your knowledge to me?
Oregon State University offers a free online course
Well done!
thank you! !
Regards from Ukraine!
These students never noticed their grandparents and neighbors gardening and growing food? Didn't they help their elderly neighbors? Permaculture has been around for centuries.
Only in America do you go to a university to learn to maintain a garden, permaculture or traditional.
Urban peeps see concrete and maybe a cute little herb box in their grandparents windowsill. Please be more understanding. Plus, many farmers aren't doing the permaculture method and are wasting millions of dollars on chemical fertilizers and pesticides and irrigation to produce a fraction of one can by allowing things to work naturally.
How is this permaculture? It's more like small scale farming..
Permaculture is farming in a low maintenance/input style. You first must establish a permaculture. It takes time. Like Hugelmounds actually take three years until the wood inside the center starts acting like the water reservoir and the plants begin to truly thrive. This is about how they started the journey, not about how it continued years later.
Permanent agriculture = permaculture.
Nurturing nature to be sustainable and help continue the infinite cycle of life.
Review 4:51 in video
Privileged people's kids getting 1,000 volunteers to do a permaculture garden for them so they can have better food than the general public.
so awesome
Very cool. It's too bad most of the universities in the Midwest won't do this because they have their heads too far up the agriculture industry's *ss.
Beautiful
VIVE LA VIE......... ORLEANS EN FRANCE
Speaking of healthy eating. One should always cook mushrooms before eating them. If this is their extent knowledge of permaculture, then they have a long ways to go before understanding permaculture principles.
***** you mean the work I have done for NASA, and other large programs? Or do you mean all the volunteer work I've done, including sitting on several non-profit boards as well as extensive hands-on work with a number of organizations like helping inner city kids, abused kids, kids with learning disabilities, people with other disabilities, abused women. Which did you mean? Or I can list a number of other real contributions to society. Just let me know.
***** Just what I thought, typical troll backs way off when challenged by a real person who cares about his fellow man, this world, and this life's experience. Back into your hole, troll.
***** I have a NASA patent and contributed to the rocket manufacturing process to prevent disasters like Columbia from recurring. NDE of volumetric defects in steel using electromagnetic acoustic transducers. I bet your rather feeble mind would struggle wrapping itself around that! But I found your defensive passive aggressive troll comment funny. lol
Have you noticed that there is a huge population of children who are allergic to strawberries and peanuts and other foods in the US but not in places like Africa and India? Although I agree with vaccinations, I also agree with the notion that we are too sanitary in the US. Our children don't get to play in dirt and evolve the necessary immune system to handle natural bacteria and viruses. I do rinse my mushrooms off, but I don't cook them unless they are of the variety that requires cooking to break down chemical toxins or oxalate.
whats with the chickens in cages above the ground at 3:31? It seems to be against the ideals of permaculture.
@Vicky Sandifo They were obviously showing how mass chicken farmers produce their chicken.
That was an example of NON permaculture traditional farming. Permaculture chickens are put into the garden in areas that need processing and are moved periodically to new areas so the areas they did process can now be planted and the chickens can enjoy tearing down a part of the garden that is no longer in use. This style of natural recycling keeps more of the nutrients within the soil and eliminates the needs for tilling and fertilizers. Oh and chickens are awesome for pest control.
Vicky Sandifo Do you have any idea what damage chickens can do. They ate my neighbors tomatoes because she let them free range
Chickens can be given free range, but limited via an electric fence. Best thing for a garden is to use chickens to process it after it no longer is in use and then add mulch and let the chickens work it into the soil. Next season you'll have a ready spot for a new garden and you can put the chickens on another spot to do the same cycle.
I never liked the term 'permaculture'.....also, not sure about those heavy, resource intensive mulches either...why not build soil with seeds instead?
Using seeds would be fine when you're converting forest floor or something already fallow. When converting a lawn, you'd be spending years fighting the already dominant grass rhizomes to establish the soil builders you're trying to make succeed. The sheet mulch is material intensive, yes, but the materials can be non-chemically synthesized and is a "once and for all" way of smothering the grass so you can start working the space one season later with minimal turf resurgence.
Is that hordes of people giving free labour to the farm ???
Oh, no, it is hordes of people PAYING to work for the farm.
LOVE!!!
good...
and its soo much better for you!! Makes you smarter!
Legend
Franklin
ya barley showed the garden
👍
: )
It was all good until I saw Oboma!!
Obama??