Becoming an Expert Permaculture Farmer

Times have changed. The old assumptions don't hold up anymore. The old ways aren't good enough. We've strip-mined and exploited the topsoil that keeps our civilization alive. You don't have to poison the environment, create dead zones. And you can even learn how to quit your job and start a profitable farm for $600 without being an expert.

Modern agriculture should be criticized. And that's why it's now being criticized. Toward the end of this post, we'll also criticize the critics and show you how to master the business side better than if you had an agricultural degree. Not kidding.

Then we'll take a quick look at the business side of restoring that soil ecosystem for fun and profit, earning part time big city income, even if you only want to start small with a kitchen garden. Why isn't everyone doing it? Because most idealistic people often forget the pragmatic business side and therefore they never really get to start. And there's no glamour in farming, so you have no real competition.
The new farmers don't own a combine. Don't need one. But if you want one, you'd still need to know where to start.

Pictured: The epitome of the combine, strip-mining the last of the American topsoil to feed the childless, hedonistic LGBT/gamer generation food which contains half the nutrition their grandparents' food had.

The future needs new competence. Not more of the same incompetence, scaling up our mistakes to catastrophic proportions.

"For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. But the one who does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him." - Matthew 25:29, Matthew 13:12

We do not have nutrition, safety, cleanliness, soil build-up. We don't have a healthy source of food. The average American farmers is over 58, pushing retirement age, with no generation to replace them.

To he who doesn't have, even what he has will be taken away from him.

"Instead, If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him a drink. By doing this, you will pile burning coals of fire upon his head." - Romans 12:20


Greg Judy, Joel Salatin, and Gabe Brown, the revolutionary food producers have the temerity to charge money for their books and/or their time. Can you believe it? They actually want to be paid money for doing a valuable job for you. Shocking, I know.

They want to be paid their day's wage to save America from its stupidity.

"Life is hard. It's harder, if you're stupid."

But they've been helping young farmers develop their expertise to feed America, if there's going to be one.


Source: Gabe Brown 2018

Resource #1: Managing Cover Crops Profitably

And here are some people who don't want your filthy silver sheckels. A data-packed book on Managing Cover Crops Profitably, 3rd Edition, for FREE.

https://www.sare.org/publications/covercrops/covercrops.pdf

Why cover crops? Because fertilizer costs money. But nitrogen-fixing plants work for free, and re-fertilize your soil for you over the winter. It's great.

You can take a $100,000 - per season cost and virtually eliminate it. And in fact, turn it into a profit center. If the crops don't work out, the grazing animals fertilize, renew, and build the topsoil, depositing life into the bank account for you while producing valuable beef or protein products.

And cover crops can suppress weeds, reduce the soil temperature to preserve the thriving life beneath the surface, add nitrates and carbon to the soil to boost productivity, help retain moisture, and more.

Resource #2: Soil Owner's Guide

"The best way to address this human health crisis is with nutrient dense food. The only way to produce nutrient dense food is with healthy soil." - Dr. Zach Bush

And some, if you don't do something stupid like slash and burn them, will automatically grow and rain down minerals into your soil from deep underground. Which is good, because...

The nutrient density of food has decreased from 15% to 65% in the last 50 years

And food that doesn't have nutrients makes you hungry, which makes you eat more to seek those vital nutrients, which makes you fat. Obesity (and related diseases) are caused by a poverty of nutrition in our re-fortified, process, homogenized food that's processed so fast, it's causing gluten allergies and diabetes and other diseases.

Sick food makes you fat. Being fat makes you sick.



If you don't want a doctor to lop off your foot one day, or rush you off in an ambulance to rebuild your heart from spare parts, then you just might want to eat healthier food like our ancestors did back when everyone was thin, strong, attractive, didn't need braces to have a beautiful smile, and kept their teeth all their lives.

To do all this, you need to know a few things about cover crops, soil, beneficial insects, fungus, bacteria, and nutrient cycling.

And yes, you can start farming profitably on someone else's land for free. Joel Salatin, Gabe Brown and others are competing for volunteers who want to start farming with no money and no land.

Imagine a world in which people are willing and able to raise children, increase their expertise and competence.

The public is educated. They want high nutrient density, and want to know how it's raised, and they're willing to pay for it.

Resource #3: The Great American Farm Tour

A tour of farms in all 50 states. Funded by his viewers, America's most innovative alternative (dissident) farmer decided to find and publicize the best ideas, from big to small, normal to weird, and document the best innovations in healthy farming.

And what he discovered changed the way he raises food for his own family.

He brought even more innovations in electric fences for mob grazing, no-till, designed and built two versions of his chicken-coop rickshaw (because while suffering from Lyme disease, he couldn't pull an ordinary chicken tractor, so he innovated), chemical-free pest control for virtually fly-free dairy farming.

Enjoy these 3 resources that allow you to go deep, build a solid foundation to inspire your own innovations.

We produce enough food to feed more than 10 billion people, but the obsession with quantity has meant we don't have high quality food for ourselves. We have strip-mined our most precious resource, the life-giving soil that feeds our people and preserves our bloodline.

"Feed my sheep." - Jesus








Criticizing The Critics of Traditional Agriculture:



Curtis Stone's Myths about Swales, Mulch,

Making Money:

Curtis Stone's 5 Most profitable Crops

How to make money farming: 2 Things Successful Farmers have In Common:
1) They all started small. (First, feed yourselfhttps://youtu.be/fzGnlN0i1So?t=513.)
2) They all learned from someone.
Because you have to love the whole process, including the marketing. They produce content around what they're doing. That's marketing. Not just production.

8 Reasons more permaculture farms aren't making money, from a man who started with very little but plans to pay off a farm in 5 years in a highly regulated country with a short growing season.
Limiting beliefs, Get clear about your context, Hesitating to get started, Not committing 100%, Make time for planning & monitoring plans, learning only begins when you have something on the line, fear (of commitment, unknown, of failing, of life change), lack of capital. It takes the right person with the right attitude.
Here's a Richard Perkins mini-seminar on the business side.

Kick Start the Farm Cash Flow

Many collectives forget to think abou the PROFIT. And starting in small investments, paying it back in the first year with pastured broilers & layers, pastured turkeys, no-dig market gardening with is more labor-intensive way to start, and it's every day, but you've started.

Doing 250,000 Euros per year with 4 employees, could double production, but they don't need to work that much.

Be entrepreneurial:

Thinking like an entrepreneur, we need to be able to extract the value out of the animals we've raised.

I've applied this thinking to raising kids. They're a 5-year investment. I think of farming as a way to drastically reduce the cost of that 5-year investment. Then it really starts paying off in economic ways, even if they're contributing 10% as much as a full-grown worker, they reach cost-neutral by helping move fences, feeding chicks, milking animals and little things like that.

Meanwhile, pastured broilers have a much faster payoff. 15 to 20 Euros profit per broiler. Very little input per day on a few hectares without being organic certified.

Turkeys are a very profitable enterprise but harder to sell because there's no market there yet. (15:34)

Created a CSA (subscriber-based purchasing) currency. Chickens can turn around in 7 to 8 weeks. (14:22) allowing you to scale production to fit the market. Can't do that with vegetables or grains. Can start it on rented land, run it behind someone's beef herd and improve their land for them.

Broilers become the first cash crop to build the farm.

Egg-mobile creates year-round product, improves the soil, follow 4 days behind cattle to obtain high omega, high protein food pecking through the cattle by-products for larvae to reduce the fly population. (Breaking the pathogen, pest & disease cycle so the cattle farmer doesn't need to inject cattle.) They turn grassland into habitat, so even though they're not as profitable upfront as the broilers, it's worth improving the pasture.

7,500 Euros, revenue 80,000 at 55%, 700 hours over 12 months on 2 ha. Scales to 1,600 birds and 90,000 profit on 3.5 hectares.

That's a city income from working an average of 2 hours a day.

Turning old trailer into egg-mobile. Old trailer for 100 Euros, scrap wood from local sawmill, creates mobile infrastructure. Bought a farm for less than 100,000 Euroes, turn that over several times every season in 6 months.

Swap stuff for chickens. When you've got chickens, you've got currency.

At agriculture schools, you're trained to write buisness plans that lose money.

No-dig market gardens 40 times more productive per square foot than some of the best-known vegetable producers in Scandanavia, no weeds, no tractors, very little work, clean, soil is deepening itself, standard-sized for standard, available tooling from Eliot Coleman



How high-intensity gardening was discovered and improved, making small scale growing profitable and competitive.

Want to plant 12 to 40 times more crops on the same acre, and plant 3 times as many crops per year, and harvest them 3 times faster?

Intensive gardening is so space-efficient, and so radically improved that you can now afford vrey cheap, simple infrastructure on tiny amounts of borrowed land near a starving market for premium-priced, locally-grown food.

Experimenters originally used glass tops to extend the growing season, put a greenhouse around it to protect it from snow, and each layer of protection "moves" your farm 500 miles south.

Details: How to build 98% less expensive Eliot Coleman modular greenhouse.An even cheaper modular greenhouse to triple your growing season.
The ZERO Dollar Greenhouse - 2 Hour Build.

The good, the bad, and the ugly about Growing Microgreens

Never bend over again. No rain jacket required. Look at the indoor microgreens business that scales, designed to make cash right away with an 8-day crop, even in winter. This couple scaled to $10,000 per month growing microgreens in a basement to keep revenue going all winter long.

BUT the truth is there's more capital investment and other problems. Like making $5 to $10 per hour and operating in a seasonal market. Getting the right market is the #1 success factor, so economizing on location and growing the wrong crop are the wrong places to save money. 

The lesson is do your market research before diving in to anything. Sell what people want to buy, and what they'll pay a premium to get. Any business startup is a daily grind, to some extent. The right attitude is required. It's not about free money falling from the sky for zero work with no investment.

It's about being of service to your neighbor. That's the right attitude. You'd better have a solid foundation of wisdom before you build anything. A slack hand causes poverty.

You get more sun in the US than Northern Europe, where they're growing year-round, even in Maine where you've got 2 or 3 feet of snow on the ground, piling up in drifts.

Year-round growing doubles productivity per acre. Intense gives you 40 times more productivity per acre. You need so little land, you can do it in your neighbor's back yard.  And micro-greens are so profitable, you can just grow them in indoor flats on shelves.

Tools:

Planting 12 rows planted to a 30-inch bed with an auto-seeder.
Greens harvester: If you're growing greens, "You'd have to be insane if you don't have this tool."

Intensive gardening with an easily-movable greenhouse that costs 5 cents on the dollar. But then they made one even less expensive and even easier to move. The least expensive greenhouse Coleman's ever used. Same protection. Same ability to do double-layered protection of high-intensity planted winter crops.



EXCELLENT video on soil blocks. Bad thumbnail for the video. Watch this one to learn about soil blocks for beginners, giving your favorite plants an unfair advantage against any possible weed pressure. The soil block establishes 3 days sooner than plug tray seedlings, reduces the stress and virtually eliminates the most common pest problems.

Handheld harvester that makes green-production market gardening a paying proposition for small farmers without harvesting on hands and knees. Turns a 2 hour harvesting job into 40 minutes.

Replace 3 or 4 hand cutters easily.

Cuts at any height. Get multiple cuts per planting.


And going out of order, now that you know how easy it is to harvest...

The best multi-row seeder on the market for small farmers.




These are the game-changers. Starting with poultry that you can sell in 8 weeks from hatchlings to raise money. Using CSA bucks chicken bucks to pay for scaling up. Using an acre of a neighbors unused YARD to turn it into the same production as a 12 to 40 acre farm. Harvesting 3 times faster. Planting faster. Getting faster starts with inexpensive tools. Cutting the cost of a greenhouse by more than 95% and also tripling the utility of the infrastructure by MOVING IT.

Yes, refrigeration and marketing and self-promotion and selling in bulk to local restaurants may be part of the plan, advertising your products at farmer's markets to pick up some cash, but the chicken bucks spend just fine on some of the things you'll want or need.

Curtis Stone rents an acre of urban land from several neighbors in exchange for a bag of groceries. And he gets to be picky about whose yard he wants to use. Once they see what he's doing in his yard, they gladly volunteer their own yard.



More than you expected from this little blog post? 

Good. Then share it. It takes days to cross-pollinate all the best possible information for you and distill it down like this while leaving out a lot of the evil influences who'll lead you down the wrong path, and it's then it's hours of work to make this post, but that's what I do.

This is part of a rock-solid new American lifestyle that's possible for the average man who'll do it, and I'm growing and establishing both the resources and people to get the word out far and wide about big, healthy, strong, prosperous happy families who lack for no good thing.

The very fulfillment of God's promise in Psalm 1. And for heirs to the promise through Jesus (Galatians 3) who seek to have God multiply them as numerous as the stars in the sky, here's a way of doing it.

You can also grow your own guzzoline fuel for trucks, tractors, cars and such, re-discover who you are and where we came from (with evidence), give children something useful to do so they NEVER have to feel like a financial burden on their family, including all kinds of home industries they can help manage, there's no practical limit to the number of children you can have once kids are no longer an expense, but a legitimate profit center to invest in for a quicker retirement, (If I can cut costs for greenhouses by 98%, imagine what I can do for the cost of raising a HUGE family that's well-behaved) you can be more independent of the system when home birth is an option, and meet more women more easily when girlfriends aren't an expense, and you can discover why except for kings and priests, the Bible never discourages having your own personal harem, doesn't prohibit pre-marital sex, and leaves the age of consent to the states to decide on their own.

So you might not be quite as sinful as you thought.

I know you who are seeking salvation and an EMP-proof future didn't exactly come here to learn how to get as rich in your spare time as you want planting market garden crops and raising broilers.

You probably just wanted to survive. But now I've showed you how to do both.

There's more to know. Just follow up on the guys and the topics in this article, and you'll know plenty. You'll be an expert at permaculture style gardening.

And then, start small. Commit. Have something on the  line. Maybe get your wife pregnant again because the sky's the limit. If you can grow money and "free food" this quickly, maybe you can grow a big a family, too.


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