Cowtown's 2011 Permaculture Design Certificate Course

The Permaculture Project    www.permacultureproject.com

The Certifying Instructor

Wayne Weiseman is certified by The Permaculture Institute of Australia as an instructor of the Permaculture Design Certificate Course. He has worked as a school teacher and as a consultant to educators and administrators in curriculum and professional development. As a primitive wilderness instructor he relied on observation techniques and a thorough understanding of the natural world to ply his trade. He has worked extensively with corporate executives in the art of team building, and the application of ideas in business and life developed through the observation of the cycles and connections found in the natural world. He has worked as a builder and contractor, herbalist, renewable energy expert, and farmer for the past twenty-five years.

Wayne is Director of The Permaculture Project, a full-service, international consulting and educational business promoting the ideas of eco-agriculture, renewable energy resources and eco-construction methods. He currently co-manages Dayempur Farm in Southern Illinois, a land-based, self-reliant community project combining organic crop/food production, ecologically-built shelter, renewable energy, appropriate technologies and educational programs.

---

Co - Instructor - Elizabeth Samudio

---

OBSERVATION IS THE KEY

Article submitted by Wayne Weiseman, Instructor of the 2009 PDC Course, copyright

“When trying to determine whether crops can be grown without fertilizer, one cannot tell anything by examining only the crops. One must begin by taking a good look at nature.”(Masanobu Fukuoka)

As gardeners and farmers we would all benefit by keen and persistent observation of natural processes, events and elements in connection with the ecosystems in which our land is situated.

Here in the Shawnee Hills of Southern Illinois, at Dayempur Farm, we are experiencing a warm February as light southerly breezes carry a whisper of spring across the sixty acres we call home. The Shawnee Hills, also known as the Illinois Ozarks, are primarily a sandstone/limestone escarpment that arises near Mt. Vernon, Illinois and falls off gradually toward the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. A meeting ground of several ecosystems, including the Eastern Woodlands, Ozark Plateau and the northern most boundary of the Gulf Coast, the Shawnee Hills contain some of the most spectacularly diverse plant and animal landscapes in the United States, including 225 species of trees and over 100 species of mammals. Situated on the Mississippi Flyway migration route, an abundance of water and vegetation attracts 325 species of birds annually.

As a Permaculture practitioner, consultant and educator I utilize observation as the essential foundation of my farming practice. Included within the broad scope of Permaculture, we also incorporate methodologies from Biodynamic agriculture, Bio-intensive gardening and the natural way of farming of Masanobu Fukuoka. This gives us a well-rounded vision of eco-agriculture that has proven remarkably successful for our crop production at Dayempur Farm.

The essence of these systems lies in the “connections” between all the elements in the landscape. Bill Mollison, the founder of Permaculture, has said: “Design is a connection between things. It’s not water, or a chicken, or the tree. It is how the water, the chicken and the tree are connected…as soon as you’ve got the connection you can feed the chicken from the tree”.

Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian philosopher, scientist and educator, introduced Biodynamics to a group of farmers in 1924. He often discusses the idea of a “farm organism”, a system of interlocking facets combining minerals and soil, plants, animals, humans and planetary forces. Form evolves through an integration of earthly and cosmic forces that give shape and meaning to the way we view and experience all the varied elements in our farm landscape.

John Jeavons, a student of Alan Chadwick and the Bio-intensive system, has spoken of his application of personal experience and observation garnered from native farming techniques from around the world (i.e. planting in raised beds, planting close together in a hexagonal pattern, thus creating a living mulch and higher yields per square foot than in conventional linear fashion).

Masanobu Fukuoka, a plant and soil biologist from Japan, and the author of “One Straw Revolution” and “The Natural Way of Farming”, came to an understanding of natural farming after inheriting his father’s orchards. He observed that the fruit trees were weak and diseased, after years of unnatural pruning practices and chemical applications, causing severe soil debilitation. He elected to allow the trees to run their natural course and die off, much to his neighbors’ chagrin and disbelief. After setting up a no-till, rice and legume rotation that he based on years of observing the natural world, his grain, bean, fruit and vegetable poly-culture produced exceptionally nutritious and healthy yields with some species reverting back to the form of their wild ancestors.

Observation on an on-going basis is tantamount for the novice square-foot gardener as well as the soybean farmer on ten thousand acres. Complete immersion with all of our senses in the natural world will teach us more than years of book study. With patience and persistence we become not only master gardeners and farmers, but masters of life as it is given in each and every moment.

The first steps toward sound observation on the farm obviate these questions: What are the lay of the land, the wind and weather patterns, mineral and soil constituents, the health of vegetation and its location in the landscape? Where is the insect and animal life taking place? What are the native plant guilds? How does the water move and flow? What are the natural cycles and how do they give shape to the land? What are the smells that waft up as we walk about? How does the soil feel when we rub it between our fingers? Do we notice temperature fluctuations in different areas of the farm or home? How does the ground feel under foot? Rock hard? Springy? Soft?

Rudolf Steiner always stressed viewing things with the eye of an artist. As we walk and examine the landscape we are constantly looking for significant and tell-tale shapes, colors, textures, edges, negative and positive spaces of figure and ground, relative layering of plants in vertical and horizontal dimensions. It’s as if the landscape were a giant canvas supported by an underlying design matrix that is constantly shifting with the seasons, weather and natural cycles that carve and sculpt the farm with an awesome dance of form and function.

In Permaculture, we are constantly on the lookout for general patterns that shape events, complexing, compaction and the loosening of components that are all working together in scintillating and diverse edges and boundaries. We consistently ask ourselves how things branch, flow, how things relate to one another, what eats and what provides food. We might ask: Toward what goal does each process in this web of life and death move? Patterns emerge and shape our awareness. We begin to notice orders of magnitude from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic, the cause and affect relationships of each and every being in the inevitable cycles of birth, life and death. We notice how the white tail deer moves about in small herds from tree stand to tree stand. If we sit quietly and watch long enough, we witness other animals using the same trails, following the path of least resistance. We observe that some of these trails lead to the edges of our fields. We awake one morning to find that our five, one hundred foot rows of healthy Swiss chard have been decimated to level ground. The deer tracks circle around and exit the same way they arrive. Upon further inspection we see fresh deer scat. All the signs are there for the taking. As we look closer we notice worm castings that look like miniature deer pellets in long chains knit together in a variety of patterns. We see earth raised in sinuous mounds where moles have tunneled underground. Over here is the casing of a strange insect stuck to the fence post. Cicadas? The more we look the more we see, the more we begin to paint a picture of how things move and flow over and under the landscape of our farms and homes.

As we collect more and more information from our observations, and as we analyze and diagnose the plusses and minuses of our landscape, thoughts about how we design and manage our land-base, our sights turn more readily to processes and connections. We begin to notice that isolated events do not exist, that everything in the landscape is about relationship. What we deduce from our study of nature will guide us successfully in the way we set up farm and land management: our soils, composting techniques, mulching, tillage and cultivation, greenhouse design, construction and operation, rotations, seed and crop selection, irrigation, microclimates, hedgerows and shelter-belts, house placement, energy resources, building materials and ultimately, our lifestyle choices. How do our ideas coincide with nature’s pattern and flow? How can we fit in successfully so that the health of our farm or garden reflects the health of the surrounding habitat? Is it mutual give and take, or do our practices cause injury to the natural succession and growth in the local bioregion?

Zone and sector analysis, the two mainstays of Permaculture, provides us with circular models for observation and planning. Zone 0 is where our house stands, the area of most frequent activity. Zone I contains kitchen gardens, sitting areas, miniature fruit trees, the chicken house, any element in the landscape that will be visited at least once, and probably more times, on a daily basis. As we move concentrically from the center of the circle outwards, orchards, vegetable and grain fields, large animals, tree cultures and forests fit into zones based on the frequency of visits we make there for work, study and play.

Sector analysis gives us the opportunity to place seasonal movements of sun, wind and weather patterns onto a circular map that reveals subtle directional nuances of incoming and outgoing natural energies and events. If we extend the circle outward even more we end up in the planetary and starry realms. The movement of the planets and stars has a profound effect on the magnetic and etheric matrices of our land. Rudolf Steiner relates how the outer planets, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, stimulate underground (root zone growth forces), and the inner planets, Moon, Mercury, and Venus, affect the process of growth above ground. The Sun acts as mediator between the two.

The possibilities of making detailed observations are numerous. Through a synthesis of the information we gather, from ongoing awareness and focus, we detect patterns within which we proceed with our hands-on practice of gardening and farming. With perseverance we inevitably acquire the means and know-how to augment yields for personal pleasure or for market. The quality of our crops will demand a high price at the roadside stand, the farmer’s market, the local food co-op or the supermarket shelf.

“We need to learn everything we can about gardening- we need to become biologically literate” (John Jeavons). The way leading to “biological literacy” begins and ends with how we walk the earth, how we feel, sense, interpret, integrate what we take in with what is already there in our experience. And, observation is the key.

     Wayne Weiseman is a certified Permaculture designer and educator. He currently plies his trade as Director of The Permaculture Project and Dayempur Farm in Anna, Illinois. He can be reached at: 618-713-0537 or see his website: permacultureproject.com

References

Mollison, Bill. Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual. 1988. Tagari Publications. Tyalgum, Australia.
Mollison, Bill. Introduction to Permaculture. 1991. Tagari Publications. Tyalgum, Australia.
Fukuoka, Masanobu. The Natural Way of Farming. 1993. Bookventure. Madras, India.
Fukuoka, Masanobu. The One Straw Revolution.
Jeavons, John. How to Grow More Vegetables.
Steiner, Rudolf. Agriculture. 1993. Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association, Inc. Kimberton, Pennsylvania.
Storl, Wolf D. Culture and Horticulture. 1979. Bio-Dynamic Literature. Wyoming, Rhode Island.
Shapiro, Howard-Yana and Harrison, John. Gardening for the Future of the Earth. 2000. Bantam Books, New York, New York.