Farm Small Farm Smart Daily

This episode is a replay of Dr. Elaine Ingham’s keynote talk, Building Soil Health, from PV1. To introduce the talk, Dr. Elaine Ingham says… A revolution in our understanding of soil has been taking place. “Conventional” agriculture requires ever-increasing inputs and energy into the system to maintain production, while natural systems reduce the disturbances in the system, while increasing produc...

If you are doing the life that everyone expects of you, what are you doing to explore that. Everyone has the capacity to really make the choice to really live life, to be engaged, and live a life of vitality. It's never too late to start living. That’s what Matthew Abrams of Mycelium and I are exploring today. Creating the conditions for pull learning, learning about what you are interested in, do...

Steve Gabriel author of Farming the Woods joins me to talk about forest farming. Growing agriculture crops within the forest, beneath the already existing tree canopy. We could grow things like mushrooms, ginseng, medicinal herbs, berries, all while harvesting nuts and tree saps. Economic yields coming out an already established perennial system, no plowing required. Show Notes: permaculturevoices...

This episode with John Pugliano is meant to get you to start thinking in a different way and to plant some seeds in your head. I think that everyone can benefit by starting thinking more like an entrepreneur. We will touch on business idea generation and John will cover some value add type businesses that anyone can start with low capital. They aren’t directly permaculture, but they are related. T...

Maddy and her partner Tim started the magazine back in 1992 out of their home office. At that time the readership was tiny. But they had a vision for something bigger. A vision of world where permaculture could provide solutions to some of the problems that the world was facing. But in order to make that vision a reality, they had to help get the word out there. Literally. And going from the home...

This show is a conversation that I had with Mark Shepard about the process of starting up his farm, New Forest Farm, in Viola, Wisconsin.  How did he start? What was the process like - both on the land and off? What were the real life financial struggles and challenges that he went through and faced? Hint... It wasn't easy. Show Notes: permaculturevoices.com/91 PV2: permaculturevoices.com/pv2

How can we start to broaden the reach of permaculture and start to involve areas outside of permaculture in the greater movement of permaculture? How can we use the permaculture toolkit to make more effective use of resources in other areas? How can we start to include willing, able, and highly skilled individuals and groups that don’t’ have a land focus and have previously felt excluded from the...

Joel Salatin's talk on Stacking Fiefdoms from PV1. "The whole idea is to create customized fiefdoms so that people are autonomous and have the authority to run their own fiefdom within your own umbrella, and you can't believe how many things you can get done that way." Show Notes: permaculturevoices.com/89

Engineer and permie Rob Avis from Verge Permaculture talks about building and designing passive solar greenhouses. Key Takeaways: Orientation. In Northern hemisphere orient it South or within 45 degrees of South. Higher the glazing transmisivity is, the better it is for the plants. Don't underestimate the value of good insulation in the walls of the greenhouse. Rob uses R-20 in Calgary. Keep in mi...

Luke Callahan author of The Complete Guide to Growing and Selling Microgreens and the co-founder of Seedwise joins me to talk about starting and running a microgreens business. It’s a business that can make some serious money when you are selling the product of that business for $50 to $150 per pound. With those prices, and selling at scale we are talking about the very realistic possibility to ge...

While American Guinea Hogs are suited to a wide variety of environments and will do better than most breeds on low grade forage, they prefer lush pastures with clover along with access to minerals, kitchen scraps, quality hay in winter, clean water to drink, access to a muddy wallow, minimal shelter from precipitation and wind, dry bedding, and perhaps a small amount of grain. They thrive where ra...

This is the very real story of Chad Stamps and his unromantic journey into farming. It's the reality of life that makes this story unromantic, versus the common romantic notions that you hear when someone speaks about going into farming. Long hours, driving, and hard work are par for the course. Entry into farming is often a grind. But it is that grind that has become some people's destiny. People...

Today’s guest is Joe Baird.  Joe and his family are taking on the task of restoring the village of Veglio. It is a place that has family ties and ties to when things were much simpler. The way of life in Veglio, then and now, is a stark contrast to the way of life in Joe’s current home in Orange County California. Despite the contrast to today’s technological world, much of what was done in Veglio...

Key Takeaways: -Even if the worst happened and the business failed. How bad would it actually be? -Learn stuff as you need to. You don't have to learn everything up front. Doing is more important that constantly trying to learn more and know it all. -Often times a hard commitment or commitment to deliver is what can really make you go out and take something on and work it out and make it happen. -...

-Key Takeaways: Hugelkultur mounds are usually positioned perpendicular to the wind. Sometimes used as a staging process to dispose of wood and build soil which can then be spread onto crop land. Think of a hugelkultur as a produce aisle raised bed. Make sure the design fits into how you live your life and how you want to live your life. -Hugelkultur Benefits: Soil building structure. Semi-permane...

This episode is a compilation of interviews that I recorded during PV1 - March 13-16, 2014. The general theme of this episode is how business can benefit from permaculture. How we as the permaculture community can positively impact the future of business. THE INTERVIEWEE'S FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE: Bill Bean of the Green Planning and Coaching Ryan Harb of RyanHarb.org Curtis Stone of Green City Ac...

This show is an interview with Peter McCoy of Radical Mycology. Radical Mycology is a movement and social philosophy based on accessibly teaching the importance of mushrooms and other fungi for personal, societal, and ecological health. Radical Mycology differs from classical mycology in that classical mycology generally focuses on taxonomy, identification, mycophagy (eating mushrooms), and the mo...

In Woody Agriculture, crops would be planted only once in a lifetime. The use of woody perennials for agricultural staple commodities production would result in little or no use of tillage, as well as the presence of a permanent cover during both the growing and the dormant seasons. Not only would this lead to a vastly lower rate of soil loss and less runoff into water supplies and aquatic environ...

This is an interview with Neal Spackman. And while you probably haven’t heard of Neal the work that Neal is doing to regreen an area of the Saudi Arabian desert is monumental. The work that he is doing is every bit as great as the work that Geoff Lawton has done. And I mean that. We are talking about regreening a portion of the desert that gets 3 inches of rain a year on average, but lately they a...

The episode is a compilation of interviews that I recorded during PV1 - March 13-16, 2014.  Each of the interviewees was a speaker at PV1.  The general theme of this episode is how we can use better management practices and plants to improve the land, increase it's resiliency, and reverse desertification. THE INTERVIEWEE'S FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE: Allan Savory of the Savory Institute Willie Smits...

Today’s show is a pretty inspirational one. What would you do if you only had a year left to live? And if you aren’t doing that now, why not? Keep that phrase in your head during this episode with Fraser Bliss of Farmwell.com. Show Notes: permacultureVOICES.com/76

This book is about designing sustainable human settlements, an preserving and extending natural systems. It covers aspects of designing and maintaining a cultivated ecology in any climate: the principles of design; design methods; understanding patterns in nature; climatic factor; water; soils; earthworks; techniques and strategies in the difference climatic types; aquaculture; and the social, leg...

Given the amount of confusion that I see on a day to day basis, and the fact that there seems to be a lot of unknowns out there about PDCs, I created this episode to try to answer a lot of the questions that I was getting regarding PDCs. Now, I am not a PDC instructor and I have only taken one PDC, so I turned to eight well respected PDC instructors (names below) to get their thoughts on ‘What’s a...

Given the amount of confusion that I see on a day to day basis, and the fact that there seems to be a lot of unknowns out there about PDCs, I created this episode to try to answer a lot of the questions that I was getting regarding PDCs. Now, I am not a PDC instructor and I have only taken one PDC, so I turned to eight well respected PDC instructors (and former PDC students themselves) to get thei...

This is the real world view of an organic farmer who is serving a community by producing food on scale, farming organic or better, for over 30 years. It hasn’t always been easy, and every day isn’t a tea party, but it has been enjoyable and resulted in a lot of great friendships and memories. This is the story of Nigel Walker and Eatwell Farm. "Communication is the key, and it is the number one pr...