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Biochar, Gasification, and Woodlot Management

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May 062013

This episode is about my recent field day on “Renewable Energy for the Farm: Charcoal Production for Power & Fertility” where we covered three main topics: charcoal & biochar production, renewable energy, and wood lot management. The Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture and Village Acres Farm made this field day possible. Before we begin, I’d like to share with you a little bit both.

The Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, abbreviated by locals as PASA, was created in 1992 as a way to promote profitable farms that produce healthy food while respecting the natural environment. PASA is the largest statewide, member-based sustainable farming organization in the United States. This organization does a ton of good work in Pennsylvania with a variety of programs, but the two that have the most impact on me, and I think is of value to other permaculture practitioners, the is Farm Based Education and the Farming for the Future Conference. The farm based education is how I went to the Energy for Your Farm event and PASA holds these kinds of activities all the time. A few coming up as I write this are: “Forest Farming for Wild Edibles: Ramps, Nettles, Fiddleheads, and More”, “Animal Handling Workshop for New & Beginning Farmers”, and another Renewable Energy for the Farm focusing on micro-hydro. All of these have application to people interested in permaculture, and let you get out and see farms in operation. This last part matters because if you aren’t farming, or near a rural area, it’s hard to get a grasp on the broadscale picture. These events also let you network with people interested in sustainable practices.

All those ideas are at play with PASA’s Farming for the Future conference. Held shortly after the new year in central Pennsylvania, this conference condenses what you can do throughout the year via Farm Based Education into four amazing days of workshops, lectures, keynote speakers and other events. Not to mention that this event draws around 2,000 people from all over. You’re likely to find someone who knows more about any particular interest you might have relating to sustainable agriculture, and is willing to share what they know.

But neither of these resources would be available without the aid of the farmers who make it happen. For this most recent workshop, I was at Village Acres Farm. An organic operation in Mifflintown, PA, run by Roy and Hope Brubaker, they recently transitioned into a partnership with Debra, Roy’s daughter, making this a multi-generational operation that is also inter-generational as other family members own and operate Blue Rooster Farm nearby and provide meat for the on-farm CSA. Another interesting aspect of the farm, and something I wouldn’t have learned about without this farm based experience, was the FoodShed. Though a simple name, the building this name encapsulates is a gorgeous timber framed design with a radiant floor, passive solar lighting, and other energy efficient and sustainable features. Here they serve food from the commercial kitchen and hold a variety of events. This is where we had lunch that day, and I was very thankful that the family members who served us were understanding of food allergies.

We’re almost to the material from the workshop, but remember, this show is listener supported. Find out how to lend a hand by going to: thepermaculturepodcast.com/support and remember to like the show on facebook, facebook.com/thepermaculturepodcast or follow me on twitter: @permaculturecst.

Now then, the field day. In covering this I focus mostly on the question and answer material we covered during the class. I say this because charcoal and biochar production is something you should experience to get a understanding of. So, give a listen, look at the pictures on the website, check out some videos, and sign-up for a workshop. This is a great hands on project for any gardener, farmer, or permaculture practitioner.

Gary Gilmore with his Charcoal Gasifier in the background.

Our workshop was taught by Gary Gilmore, a Forester for the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, and, as someone identified him that day, a “char-vangelist”. He’s passionate about the possibilities of charcoal and bio-char for a more productive, local, and thriving culture. So much so that it’s almost infectious. His background combined with the science involved from his current occupation tied together such that the session was science and numbers heavy. I’m including the pieces I understood enough to write down and will include everything I can.

We began the day, after introductions, with charcoal and bio-char production.

What is Charcoal or Biochar?

Both are essentially the same thing: carbon, along with some oxygen, hydrogen, and minerals, left over after burning the source material in a low-oxygen, or oxygen-free, environment. They are very similar end products and the distinction is in how we use them.

Charcoal is larger and used primarily as fuel. If you think about lump charcoal, not the briquettes, this is about what charcoal produced at home looks like when it first comes out of the kiln. Mr. Gilmore, during the second section of the class, showed us his grinder that he uses to make the charcoal a uniform size for gasification.

Bio-char, on the other side, is very fine, to the point of resembling black dust or powder that is in turn used as a soil amendment by digging it into the garden. This fine material has a much much larger surface area by volume, allowing for more nutrient holding, water retention, and the other benefits currently being researched.

Though the terms can be used interchangeably, for this conversation, charcoal is for fuel, and has one set of characteristics, and biochar is used for a soil amendment.

What about Direct vs. Indirect production?

TLUD Direct Production Kiln. Primary air comes in through the bottom.

Direct production is where you burn wood directly in order to produce charcoal. This can be done as simply as with two metal barrels, one on the bottom to hold the wood with holes in the bottom for primary air intake, and another larger barrel on top acting as the afterburner to create cleaner combustion. This is known as a Top Light Up Draft gasifier, or TLUD, as the fire is lit from the top and burned downward, which causes gasification, and the gases move up and are ignited. The primary air from the holes in the bottom of the barrel allow the wood to burn, while secondary air, coming up through the crack between the two barrels where they meet, is the secondary air flow that aids final combustion. This design is very very clean burning. Once it got started there was little to no visible smoke.
All of the demonstrations at this workshop were with this TLUD style of direct production.

Indirect production is what you might see where there’s one barrel inside of another, or a specially built biochar kiln where an external fire is applied to the

TLUD Kiln with afterburner in place. Very little smoke.

material to be converted into bio-char. In this case heat is applied from the outside to “bake” the material inside, driving off volatile gases, and turning it into charcoal.

What do I use to make charcoal or biochar?

Mr. Gilmore recommended making Charcoal out of wood that had air-dried for one year, which means it has about a 20% moisture content, considerably lower than fresh cut wood. This wood should come from the heart of the tree and not contain a great deal of bark, as bark contains more minerals which leads to more ash. Instead, bark is excellent for biochar.

Using indirect production, you can use just about any garden refuse you want, because the process doesn’t require the material being turned into biochar to fuel the process directly. Material with higher mineral content, such as wood bark or green plant material, work well in this case, as the mineral content helps to build the soil.

What is the difference between High Temperature vs. Low Temperature production?

High temperature production, via the indirect method, produces a higher quality fuel because the pyrolysis drives off more of the oxygen, hydrogen, and other materials. High temperature production is not appropriate for use as bio-char. Low temperature production, in the 600-800 degree range, produces a material that is around 70% carbon, 30% other materials, and is useful for both fuel and soil amendment.

The direct method uses some of the source material as fuel, leaving you with around 60% of the starting weight in charcoal. The indirect method is more efficient for converting to charcoal, leaving you around 70% of the starting weight, but requiring external energy to produce, leading to a potentially less efficient system. I have seen indirect methods that cycle the volatile off-gases back into the firebox to increase efficiency. Time and tests will tell which works better, but to get you started the direct method is great.

I’m interested in biochar production as a way to turn multiflora rose and mile-a-minute into something useful for my garden, as they are rather pernicious non-natives that quickly spread and smother out other vegetation. In my interest to design myself out of the system, reducing them in my area is important while the system establishes itself and can better minimize this kind of rapidly spreading plant.

How much charcoal or biochar can you get from your source material?

I don’t have number on garden waste, because of how much this varies from plant to plant, when you cut it, etc. However, for wood, it’s a little more straight forward, though of course your end results will vary, but your end result is about 40%, by weight, of what you started with.

For those of you interested in the numbers, I came to this figure because Mr. Gilmore recommended using wood that had air dried for one year, which is about 20% moisture, then burned through direct production. Fresh wood is around 50% moisture. So if you start with 10 lbs of freshly cut wood, after 1 year you’ll have 7lbs of wood ready to go in the kiln. You lose another 40% through pyrolysis, 20% being the moisture driven off and 20% as fuel, resulting in about 4lbs of charcoal in the end.

Charcoal, biochar, and climate change.

When we hear conversations with people such as Connor Stedman or Eric Toensmeier about taking action to mitigate climate change, with things like carbon farming, what role does charcoal production and biochar play in that?

Charcoal represents, to the best of my understanding, a carbon neutral fuel source if, and that if is very important, we use well managed wood lots and industrial waste, such as lumber mill refuse, to provide the base material in a way where we grow what we burn at an equal replacement rate, while using that material for both fuel and charcoal. For every pound of material harvested, we need a pound of growth to replace it. In this way, the wood takes carbon out of the air to grow and then returns it when combusted. That’s a simple recycling of material. Where this doesn’t work is in using fossil fuels to burn material grown specifically for charcoal or bio-char production.

Where things get more interesting is in the using this as a soil amendment. Carbon, in the form of biochar, is very very stable in the soil and can last for centuries. There’s evidence that the terra preta from which the idea of biochar arose, is pre-columbian in nature and dating back over 1,000 years ago. That’s a long time for this to be locked up in the earth. According to Mr. Gilmore, for every pound of carbon sequestered in this way, we keep upwards of 3.5lbs of CO2 from forming due to decay of the original material. And it can be done on a home scale.

However, and I hope this points to the question about whether or not this is really carbon negative, a point raised by Brent Virrill on the facebook page announcing this episode, the value Mr. Gilmore gave is correct about 1lb (454g) of carbon sequestering around 3.5lbs (1.66kg) of eventual CO2, a figure confirmed by two friends who know a lot more about chemistry than I do, is an ideal theoretical maximum conversion of carbon into CO2, which is not reflective of what actually happens through the biological cycling processes that lock-up and then release CO2, so the actual ratio of sequestration is probably lower than that 3.5lb figure. Also, as low temperature biochar production results in a product around 70% carbon and 30% other, you’d need to bury 1.4lbs of bio-char to sequester that 3.5lbs.

In creating biochar, for it to be carbon negative, the inputs need to be small enough in carbon output relative to the storage potential so the inputs don’t outweigh the sequestration value, which may be one of the issues of industrial versus small scale production of bio-char. Gasoline releases 19lbs of CO2 per gallon burned, while diesel releases around 22lbs. Using gasoline equivalence figures, natural gas requires around 128cu/ft for the same amount of heat energy (measured in BTUs), which releases 15lbs of CO2 on complete combustion, and bituminous coal requires 10lbs and releases 28.6lbs of CO2.

Now, with all these numbers rolling around, you can see why using gasoline or diesel to transport the material to a central location, then moving the final product out again to where it’s used, and then digging it in with machinery can quickly deplete the benefits of burying biochar in the ground for sequestration on an industrial scale. Once you include fossil fuels to create this material there’s even greater loss of how much carbon is stored versus created.

Though this was a quick shot that’s number heavy, I was going to include a lot more of math here to break down how charcoal and biochar production converts between these different fuel sources, but I wasn’t confident I had everything right. The few pieces I could find that gave numbers don’t show the work from point A to B and I don’t want to extrapolate that. If someone knows the numbers behind how much energy is required to convert wood to charcoal and can do a comparison between the different fuels, please let me know.

But, bio-char has other values to us when buried beyond just carbon sequestration.

Biochar in the soil.

So, what does biochar do when we add it to the soil? The reported benefits are many, here’s a sample:

Enhanced plant growth.
Suppressed methane emission.
Reduced nitrous oxide emissions.
Reduced fertilizer requirements.
Reduced leaching of nutrients.

These last three in particular were of interest to Mr. Gilmore because of the impact they have on waterways regarding nutrient runoff. As I’ve mentioned before, reducing the daily total load from run off into streams and rivers in my watershed is very important because of the impact it on the Chesapeake Bay. Integrating biochar and reaping these benefits is one pathway to do this.

Two things you need to do in order to use the biochar. The first is to make sure it is a small size, like dust or grains of sand. This is where using garden waste for conversion comes in because grass and leaves are finer grained to begin with and power readily. Whatever you need to do to get them to this point, go for it. I’m thinking my 3yo son and a butter churn filled with charcoal is the ideal way to reduce charcoal to powder, but Mr. Gilmore commented about mixing it with wood chips and spreading it over a section of his driveway and letting vehicle traffic reduce it over time. His current process is to add the course charcoal to his horse stalls where the horses tramp it down, while also mixing their urine and manure with the charcoal.

This leads to the second point recommended by both Mr. Gilmore and Dale Hendricks, another biochar enthusiast who attended the course to assist, to charge the bio-char. Charging is introducing an initial source of nutrients into the biochar before incorporating it into the soil. In addition to animal pens, there was a suggestion of adding biochar to a composting toilet in place of brown material, or as the main absorbant in a urine bucket, or mix it with compost or compost tea.

One thought Mr. Gilmore had, and I’m interested in experimenting with or hearing from you if you’ve done so, is if you can use charged biochar directly as a growing medium, without any soil or other additives. Have you tried this? Let me know.

Gasification as Energy

Mr. Gilmore’s homemade charcoal grinder.

After lunch we talked about using charcoal as a fuel source. Opening this conversation Mr. Gilmore began by holding a can of gasoline and bundle of wood. The two fuels are roughly equivalent in energy: one gallon of gasoline to 25lbs of air-dried, seasoned wood. If you burn wood directly, you get about the same amount of energy. But, you can also use the wood in a wood gas generator to create syngas, short for synthetic gas, by using the pyrolysis method to generate charcoal and biochar to drive off the volatile gases in the wood, which an internal combustion engine can use directly with little to no modification. Another option, is to create charcoal and use it for gasification into syngas to run an engine. Of these three methods, Mr. Gilmore prefers using charcoal gasification because the charcoal gas generator system is less complicated than a wood gas generator, and will still run his engine directly.

Rather than get into the full details of the difference between these two systems, what I can say is that the benefits of a wood gas generator is that it is more efficient in time because you don’t need to convert you fuel from wood into charcoal, and more efficient in generating gas because you don’t lose the 20% of so you would in burning the wood to charcoal. However, the wood gas generator is more complicated because you need to include traps in the system for the moisture being driven off as well as the ash, tar, and other materials that can gum up or degrade an engine. Also, because of inconsistencies between outputs from various woods, a way to control the gas flow into the engine is also important.

If you want to learn more about wood gasification there are websites devoted to it, and there is also a book recommended during the workshop called “Have Wood Will Travel” written by Wayne Keith. You can buy it directly from Wayne at his website, driveonwood.com, for the price of $50. Seeing what Mr. Wayne is doing by driving with wood gas already has my mind turning for other, down the road, projects.

But, what I got to see the day of the workshop was Mr. Gilmore’s functioning charcoal gasifier, which he ran to show us that yes, this does work, and how everything was setup.

The burning charcoal gasifier.

The basis of the system was a barrel to burn the charcoal in, with an air inlet consisting of a piece of 1” threaded pipe, which I believe was stainless steel, going through a homemade bulkhead into the barrel, about a ¼ of the way up from the bottom. Attached to the outside of this pipe was a valve. On the inside, this was covered with a larger piece of iron pipe with about a quarter of it’s circumference removed, lengthwise, to create a shield to cover the inlet. Charcoal is added on top and shaken down into the bottom. The lid is then added, which has an outlet that attaches via a piece of plastic tube to a filter can. Inside the filter can, from top to bottom, is a piece of wool fabric sewn to a metal wire shaped to fit the top of the can fairly tightly. Beneath this is a thick section of open cell foam rubber, and beneath that wool fabric scraps. Mr. Gilmore uses wool as part of his filter based on some research he read from Australian charcoal gasifiers that wool is one of the better natural filters. The filter connects by more tubing to an electric fan that creates a draw to move the gas from the gasifier through the filter to the engine, with the tubing from the fan running directly into the carburetor for uptake by the engine. The exhaust from the engine is then routed back to a valve connected to the inlet so some of the exhaust gases can be recycled, producing cleaner combustion. The valve allows for control of this gas flow being recycled to control the combustion temperature, as the exhaust gases are hotter than the charcoal gas being generated. From there, the final gases run out through a combined radiator and exhaust.

One note here is that the charcoal gas for most of the burn is fairly cool, under 120 degrees. The piece of plastic pipe Mr. Gilmore uses to connect the gasification barrel to the filter is one of his fail-safes, because it melts at 120 degrees. If something happens that the system temperature rises too much, this pipe fails and prevents damage to the other components.

Once everything is setup and connected, it is lit through the inlet pipe near the bottom of the charcoal barrel. Within maybe a few minutes of lighting the system, Mr. Gilmore started the gasoline engine on the charcoal gas and allowed it to run for 15 or 20 minutes while we talked about and explored how it worked.

The engine attached to the system was a standard, unmodified 10hp gasoline engine. Using charcoal gas, the system produces around 8hp because charcoal gas is less energetic than gasoline with a resulting loss of around 20 to 25%. He estimates he could run this engine for about an hour to an hour and a half on around 6lbs of charcoal, whereas he has a larger 25 hp engine, with a resulting 20hp output, that runs for around 30 minutes on the same amount of fuel, all off of the basic system he showed us with a 1” inlet and outlet for air and gas flow. He thinks that a 25hp base engine is about the limit for a 1” flow setup, but that by increasing the inlet and outlet size it scales up easily, with a similar increase in fuel consumption as well, so you’d need to include a larger gasifier unit, filter, fan, and so on as things get larger.

What really got me about this system is the potential to do real work with unmodified or lightly modified existing machinery, without fossil fuels. These aren’t novelty applications, as was reinforced by Mr. Gilmore talking about running his 25hp walk-behind tractors on charcoal gas, and he even ran a vintage air-cooled beetle Volkswagen on it, traveling about 11 miles in his tests. That’s one side, the other is that this can be used to generate electricity as we saw from a pair of lights attached to, and run off of, the charcoal gas demonstration system. This is small scale portable solution that could be used now in emergencies, or off in off-grid arrangements as back up to solar and wind, or as a possible long term solution for local generation of power.

And, as was stated several times during the workshop, cool and cold weather is the time to produce charcoal and biochar from the previous year’s brush and scrap wood, so you could potentially build a charcoal kiln as a heater so as not to let all that energy go to waste. Creativity with good design leads to many many yields in this system. One participant in the workshop commented about using the exhaust from a gasifier to warm and elevate the CO2 levels in a greenhouse. Though I’m sure there would have to be safety measures in place, so as not to cause safety issues due to the carbon monoxide and other gases in the exhaust, it is a possibility.

Which, is where the warning goes, making one of these systems is not inherently dangerous, but there are risks involved. If you don’t feel comfortable with something, don’t do it! Work with someone with more experience to build or design your solution and learn to operate it safely.

I’m also not going to argue that these are the most efficient systems around by any means for producing useful work, creating electricity, or the time required to do so, but they remain options that can make a difference for the choices we make in our desire to build a better world. It’s not about a one size fits all solution for everyone, but a series of options to use where appropriate to build more flexible alternatives.

Champion TLUD stove.

That also goes for another use of gasification, and that was a TLUD stove design Mr. Dale Hendricks of Green Light Plants shared with us that day. The particular stove he brought is called a Champion TLUD and is based on an award winning design from a cleaner burning stove competition. The idea behind this is the same as the wood gasification for charcoal production, and the stove even produces a small quantity of charcoal, except in this case applying the designed to a small scale for cooking.

One note here is that if you use this type of stove to cook and produce charcoal, you’ll want a bucket of water several times the size of your stove with water in it to quench the charcoal in when you are done cooking. A handle on your stove to lift and move it probably helps too. In his demonstration Mr, Hendricks used compressed hardwood pellets for fuel, and I thought it was a simple way to use pellets that might have been damaged by moisture and no longer usable in a regular wood pellet stove. I say this because I have several bags sitting around at the moment a friend gave me after their basement flooded and a stove like this fits easily in my thoughts.

This TLUD stove is another option to include for emergencies, or potentially to replace other forms of stoves in off the grid or no-grid situations. There’s plenty of information available on how to build your own if you are interested, as well as people making them for purchase. Consider experimenting with this and adding your experiences to the growing pool of knowledge on these simple, yet revolutionary, systems.

Woodlot Management

That brings us to the final part of the workshop material, which was woodlot management. Being a forester by training, Mr. Gilmore shared with us how to apply the way a forester thinks with our production of charcoal and biochar.

To that end we started with a conversation about invasive species that kill trees, such as the emerald ash borer here in Pennsylvania and other parts of the U.S. Knowing your local area and what threats there are to your trees lets you make choices. If a tree is highly likely to be killed, you can harvest it before that happens and make use of what you can, or be prepared to cut it down when it does die and know what you’ll do under the new conditions.

From there we walked into a woodlot at Village Acres Farm, and began by looking up at the canopy, or over-story, trees to see which ones won the war for sunlight. The losers could be selectively harvested to open up more of the canopy to allow success to begin in that spot, and use the removed tree for charcoal production or some other means.

But, before making that choice, after looking up, we looked around to identify the trees that were there. To see which ones are rare, so should be preserved, which ones are unique for some reason, such as trees having a unique or pleasant form, which ones you might consider invasive and want to remove, or which ones might be valuable for coppicing. Using that information, then make decisions on which to keep and which to remove based on your overall site plan and usage patterns.

While doing so, be sure you don’t mine the woods for resources, because then a process that could be sustainable becomes extractive. Rather, make the choices so that you can regenerate the forest as you make use of it. One point Mr. Gilmore made was to not remove the down woody material on the forest floor. The twigs, sticks, and limbs we find resting against the soil play an important role in maintaining soil fertility and supporting fungi, so should be left. I was left with the impression that selectively removing and using trees had a lower impact on the forest ecology than scavenging for what can be found on the forest floor.

Going back to the invasive, or non-native, or exotic plants for a moment, I’m of a mind that removing some of the more pernicious ones to you area, to help re-establish the succession of local woodlands, is important, and also provide a resource for bio-char production through the indirect method that could be quite useful for soil amending while leaving trees and other dense woody material in place. I know the native/non-native, native/invasive, native/exotic conversation is still open to a lot of debate and one we’ll keep circling around for a while. For me, thinking about the problem as the solution, and in turn obtaining a yield, converting this material that I don’t want into something I do plays a role in my long term strategy.

And since I mentioned the word of a hot subject, we did touch on coppicing, but by this point in the day information was tossed around quicker than I could make notes. So here’s what I did pick up:

- In Pennsylvania and other northern hemisphere cool temperate climate areas, the time to coppice trees is during the plants dormant period, which is the months of R: January, February, March, April, September, October, November, December.
- Evergreens like pine or hemlock do not coppice.
- Deciduous trees generally do.
- Deciduous should be ones that do not form root suckers, such as locust or aspen. There were also comments that beech and birch do not coppice well, but I didn’t note why.
- Trees mentioned that do coppice well: maple, oak, ash, willow, hickory, black walnut, hazel, and chinese chestnut.
- To coppice, you want to cut the tree down to a stump nearly at ground level, perhaps a few inches high, and at a slight angle to allow water to run off and not rot the stump. This forms a new crown that additional growth occurs from.

Coppicing wrapped up the conversation and brought the workshop to a close. We walked out of the woodlot, said our goodbyes, and went our separate ways.

Listener Questions

Now then, the listener questions, submitted by Brent via the Facebook page.

Hugelkultur vs. Biochar

“I would like to understand more about why hugelkultur is more highly recommended for colder climates, while biochar is recommended for warmer climates. I understand why you might not want to bury wood in tropical areas. Because there is no cold cycle, bacterial and fungal action are amped up in tropical soils and break down all organic matter faster. But I don’t see why biochar wouldn’t work as well in colder climates as it does in warmer ones, perhaps even in conjunction with wood.”

To the question specifically regarding non-tropical regions: biochar works and there’s no reason not to implement it as part of your overall strategy where appropriate. Using the permaculture zone model, I wouldn’t dig it into zones 3, 4, or 5, but would certainly include it in the hole for trees and shrubs when planting them, and incorporate it fully in garden and production beds in zones 1 and 2.

More broadly, I think what’s going on with hugelkultur compared to biochar is that hugelkultur is more widely understood as a technique and less intensive to implement, while still providing benefits such as a raised bed, improving the garden conditions, and building the soil. Though you can dig a trench to bury the woody material for the bed, it isn’t necessary. Pile it all in place, dump soil and compost on it, mulch it, let it age if so inclined, and eventually plant in it. I like hugelkultur because my children and I can collect the material in one place while playing in the yard, or I can start building a new bed as I find things without having to complete it all at once. Hugelkultur can also be taught in an hour or two and people can go home and start right away.

Biochar, on the other hand, takes time to gather the materials, some equipment to create it in, even if it’s just a pair of metal barrels, and then remaining with it to manage the burn. Yes, you can do some other work while it’s burning, but should remain with it on fire watch. Once done, it needs reduced to a powder, charged, and then dug into the A and B horizons of the soil. This is considerably more work than hugelkultur, and limits implementation on a broader scale.

Brent also asked about whether or not biochar is truly carbon negative, which I think I handled to some degree earlier. If you’d like more research and contemplation of that, please let me know and I can work something with more detail.

“I wonder about the wisdom of single purpose biochar kilns. I see things on the internet, youtube videos, instructables, even products you can buy, and most especially kilns that charities are making for developing countries, and I cringe. All that energy that could have been useful for something is wasted to make biochar. Biochar is great and all, but wouldn’t it make sense to make use of all that heat?”

I agree with you on the idea of search for other solutions and ways we can use that heat, but from the designs I’ve seen of single purpose biochar kilns they’re potentially an efficient way to convert non-woody material, like grass, dry leaves, or end of season plant stalks and so on, into biochar because they are usually an indirect means of production with a sealed chamber heated by an external source, allowing the moisture in the plant material to be cooked off and then convert what’s left into charcoal in a controlled way, something that isn’t as easy to do with this finer material in a direct system. These also allow the ash, and the mineral content contained within, to be collected as an added benefit to building soil with biochar.

This goes back to one thing that Mr. Gilmore and Mr. Hendricks mentioned several times during the workshop: charcoal and biochar production is based on ancient systems we’re rediscovering in the modern era.

What that leads me to is that making charcoal and biochar isn’t hard. Where the difficulty rests is when we start thinking about how to use all our knowledge in the current age and these big brains of ours to eek out the widest range of yields for the system like the most efficient kilns or determining which biochar is more effective for soil building. The designs that exist at this moment represent some of the earliest, simplest options we’ve come up with us as we figure all that out. As these design advance and we continue to learn we should be able to produce more, with less, and increase the benefits benefit from all the possibilities.

Or at least, that’s my thought on it. What’s yours? I’d love to hear from you. If you have a comment or question about this show, a guest request, or want me to cover a particular topic, please feel free to contact me through any of the many ways available:

E-mail: show [at] thepermaculturepodcast [dot] com
Phone: 7one7-8two7-6two66
A direct message on twitter: @permaculturecst
A message on facebook: facebook.com/thepermaculturepodcast

Resources:
Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture
Village Acres Farm
Gary Gilmore’s Youtube Videos
Biochar @ Pbworks
Wayne Keith – Drive on Wood
TLUD (Biochar) Stoves @ International Biochar Initiative

Permaculture and Disasters

Question and Answer No Responses »

Feb 132013

Click here to download the episode.

This episode is a listener question thanks to a good friend of mine, Tony, sending an email for me to check out a recent video by Toby Hemenway on Redesigning Civilization and a question.

His question:

Say, for the sake of argument, that we lived in a fully functional Permacultural society (as to how large a society, let’s consider the question in regards to a local, city, and national sized societies). How would a Permacultural society deal with an extensive drought and/or other longer-termed production destroying situations as opposed to an industrial/agricultural one?

Before I dig in, I’m going to say that this is a thought experiment at best, and a bit of a rambling one at that. Here is my mind as I’m pulling from various angles to look at various points. I could easily spend months working out more and more intricacies, putting in references to support and refute various pieces, but I’d rather provide a basic response than to fall down the rabbit hole of seeking perfection and never produce something. For the sake of time and brevity, this is what I have for now.

Given the complexities of any arrangement of people, a clear-cut answer of what this final society would look like isn’t straight forward. Every situation and site is unique, and thus would be every town, city, or nation that make permaculture the primary design system. However, I can speak to how the principles and other core ideas of permaculture potentially lead to a different society that can face this, or other, loss of production.

To see how that happens, I’m going to walk through Holmgren’s widely publicized 12 principles and be mindful of the three ethics.

For those of you who haven’t heard them in a while, or if this is your first introduction to permaculture, here are those ethics and principles.

Ethics
Care for the Earth
Care for the People
Set limits to consumption and reproduction, and return the surplus.

Principles
Observe and Interact.
Catch and store energy.
Obtain a yield.
Apply self-regulation and accept feedback.
Use and value renewable resources and services.
Produce no waste.
Design from patterns to details.
Integrate rather than segregate.
Use small and slow solutions.
Use and value diversity.
Use edges and value the marginal.
Creatively use and respond to change.

So, we have the premise of the question: A disaster occurs destroying long term production. Though it could be anything, I’ll focus on Tony’s suggested drought as an illustrating point. The principles, being principles and not techniques, apply in the same way to any other problem encountered, even if that’s a wandering horde of zombies or keeping rebels out of your new planet destroying orbital base. The specific design elements and techniques come in to solve the problem at hand, such as a strong fence to keep out those zombies, if they’re the slow shambling Romero types, or insuring you have good security in place and small enough exhaust ports so some lucky farmboy doesn’t have the skills to hit that now half meter target. Though I don’t know how you’d account for the wisdom of a ghostly Obi-Wan Kenobi encouraging him to use the force, but I digress.

Now then, with the 12 principles as a guide for figuring out how this society would differ from the world we have today, let’s go.

Observe and interact.
This principle gets us into the world examining the site and what happens there. Through the use of zone, sector, and vector analysis the internal, external, positive, and negative influences become clear, including accepting the unknowns.

We know what disasters are most likely, can plan for the eventuality, and consider the worst case scenario. We then design solutions into the system expecting that one day the disaster will come. Knowing there is a drought guides how we respond to it.

Catch and store energy.
Another reminder to capture and use as much of what’s coming through a particular system as possible in order to slow the progress of entropy. Living systems represent the best way to do that, through the plants and animals, people and their knowledge.

Considering the impacts of a drought: long term drop in food production, we need to store food, our own energy for the future. When it comes to our plants, that means building nutrients in the soil and in turn water the soil.

Knowledge is another form of energy storage, if you want to play loose with the idea of energy, but figure this more to be the wisdom of those around us and who came before us. Planning for drought, we can investigate techniques to help in that situation both common, such as mulching, but also more specifically like dry farming tomatoes. Again, with any emergency, the best time to gain those skills are before the problem arises, so we’re constantly learning new things early and often.

Obtain a yield.
Whether the disaster occurs today or 10 years from now, preparing ahead of time and considering what yields we want to obtain allow us to still produce something useful from the system.

It’s possible to spend so much preparing for an eventuality that in the time until it occurs the systems costs us more than we gain. This shouldn’t be a zero-sum game where we win or lose, but rather to be perpetually gaining a little bit more and ever improving. But don’t take that as a commandment to seek ever increasing growth, as the only thing I’ve known of that can grow forever is cancer, and that’ll kill you. Instead, we expand the yields we get from the system.

Storing water in tanks is a great improvement if it benefits us now and in the future. Capturing rainwater to water plants may aid the recharging of the local aquifer because of the decreased need to use it, allowing that to be an additional resource when the drought comes. Storing food saves us should the drought mean there is less food, but spending money we one doesn’t have to build those reserves could put you in more dire straights. The same goes for spending resources to put away food and then failing to use it. We’ve introduced unnecessary waste to the system.

Apply self-regulation and accept feedback.
Like a recession, by the time we realize a drought is upon us, we’re already in trouble. This isn’t something that happens suddenly and is gone, like a tornado or single storm, but is a long term disruption that may happen over a large area. As long term planners, after a few weeks with no rain, we being making decisions on how to handle the situation. The community begins coming together to figure out how to get the necessary work done. The nation begins directing any available volunteers where they can do the most good, while under the auspices of the local community leaders and citizens they serve.

Use and value renewable resources and services.
We use renewable resources and services because they’re ones that can be managed easier, by individuals and communities. Though the usage could be extractive, say cutting down a tree, planting another one or allowing succession regenerates that loss so it is only temporary.

In turn, this preserves the limited, scarce, and non-renewable resources so that should a problem arise, a small portion may be used to help solve the problem. For our drought conditions, this could be fuel for tanker trucks to deliver water onsite to those in need, or to move resources long distances should the local ones reach critically low stores.

Produce no waste.
For produce no waste, the 5 Rs come to mind: Refuse, Reuse, Reduce, Repair, Recycle, which all tie into the third ethic to reduce consumption and have a surplus to share. For our drought, that means concentrating on what matters most in the landscape and community to move forward and overcome the issues at hand, to refuse to produce any waste, to reuse as much as possible in light of the current problem, reduce the use of water to preserve for the landscape, possibly by asking people to work together to restrict water use to divert that water from other uses into the landscape.

Similarly, there’s no reason to grow food that the individual or community won’t eat. My wife loves cherry tomatoes, but is the only member of our family who does. One cherry tomato plant is enough for our family. Growing ten doesn’t make sense, even if there’s more than that have currently escaped into the yard.

Design from patterns to details.
Patterns help focus our planning, not only in the assemblage of parts, but also in what can happen. Think about a garden you’ve raised, or what you hear in the news about agriculture, if there’s a long dry spell, what are the first plants to begin drooping, wilt, and then die? How would that influence what you grow?

In the community, you can also find out, through those acts of observation and being involved, who the leaders are, whether they think they’re in charge or not. Ever notice how there’s someone who people defer to when making certain decisions? Or who step up and volunteer when something needs to be done? They become leverage points to turn to when problems arise and also the jesus screws you need to keep tight when they’re called upon. Within my own family, those people are my father on his side of the family, and my maternal grandmother on my mother’s.

Who can you identify in your own location or family should the wheels come off the system to call on to make a difference?

Integrate rather than segregate.
Bring things together, be they the plants and animals in a yard backyard, or the members of a community community. Whether you think individuals are dumb and groups are smart or groups are dumb and individuals are smart, bringing everyone together lends additional intellectual, social, and other yields that help solve problems. Though your neighbor may not be strong enough to lug water down the road to the horticulturist, they may have a wheelbarrow you can borrow to get their water there. Or an old farmer may remember how they made it through a drought years before, aiding your position.

Use small and slow solutions.
As the drought becomes apparent, rather than making huge drastic changes, we begin with little ones, looking for those leverage points where the smallest action produces the most good. Again, this will vary depending on scale. The home user may decide to eat through some stored foods that don’t require water to cook so they can continue watering. A large producer may make that choice to abandon one or two crops, but not whole sections of field. As time passes and the conditions continue, the choices made adapt to the situation incrementally. The line “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” comes to mind, because if we completely abandon something for a week and the rains come, then the solution could be worse than the problem.

Use and value diversity.
Permaculture abhors monocultures as much as nature. Using a diversity of plants, animals, and people, keeps the system from having a single point of failure. Even though a few parts may not make it, others may thrive, and the overall system survives.

Use edges and value the marginal.
Permaculture systems allow for more diversity and ways to integrate the pieces together by looking for the little places to make and use change. Everyone and everything within the system contributes something, it’s up to our imagination and observation to find it, to look where others might not, and then to make use of it. Not in an extractive way, but in a functional, regenerative one.

Creatively use and respond to change.
With this idea, we can engage the artist and the creator rather than the engineer and logician, to move this problem from something negative and life defeating to something positive and abundant.

As a drought occurs and deepens, we can use the drier conditions to our advantage. As certain previous plants die off, their passing creates new space for others, which could include bringing in plants with low water requirements or work in poor compacted soils, so we again build for the long term. Techniques that seemed unnecessary in a world without a drought get tried and tested, be those a changes in mulching, something like zai where we plant in the bottom of a shallow hole, or smoothing out the soil surface and direct it so that dew gets caught and directed towards plants on now barren spaces.

We could use this as an opportunity to bring together our community with more meals cooked and eaten collectively within a neighborhood to reduce the amount of water used, and to use an economy of scale to cook food for many.

And that’s just a shotgun approach to looking at a drought and how these different principles allow us to prepare and respond to the disaster. Hold onto those for a few minutes, as I want to walk through a quick rundown of the agricultural/industrial model.

The agriculture/industrial model that currently exists suffers from a few problems in regards to responding to something a disaster like a drought. One is the reliance on machines, some of which have limited applications for what they can and cannot plant or harvest. Needing to retool a farm because of ongoing crop failures is an expensive prospect. Now multiply that over many many farms and the impact on food prices and stability. Heck, look at the exploration of corn based ethanol in the United States and impact on world food prices. I recently read an article discussing whether or not it’s worthwhile to subsidize and produce ethanol to add to gasoline given the recent impact of drought on food production in the US this year. Ending that usage may keep food prices down, but what about next year, or the year after, or the year after, if changes aren’t made now.

Which leads to another issue: short term thinking. Market forces and the demands placed on farmers, as I understand things, limits how far out someone can plan. Also a demand for financial profit, especially among multinational corporations that require a profit to satisfy shareholders, produces short term gains at the potential expense of the long term. The head of a company may have the best intent for implementing a 30 or 50 year vision, but when they need to go before a board once a year or quarter and talk about losses as part of a long term plan, unless everyone involved including those investors, are on board, what’s the likelihood that leader keeps their job?

Another short term issue that comes to mind is a reliance on extractive and functionally non-renewable resources. Initially the drought may not appear that bad to the farmers in the current model because they can turn on well pumps and pull water from the aquifer to irrigate fields. But if the recharge rate of the aquifer is lower than the irrigation rate, the ground water can become depleted. This also occurs in areas with high water tables and shallow wells. The these areas may be to sink a deeper well, but this further exacerbates the issues for others.

If you wonder why water rights are such an issue in some areas, and conversations about future resources conflicts could revolve around water, imagine a world where someone doesn’t have water to irrigate crops or an inability to access fresh clean drinking water. However, methods exist for reducing this problem.

The agriculture/industrial model by itself, doesn’t do much to build topsoil. Drive by a field at the end of harvest and look at the stubble sticking up and all that bare ground exposed to the elements. A hard late summer rain turning the runoff first clear, then tan, then brown, and finally almost black as erosion carries away the stuff food grows in. Importing fertilizers can help feed plants as fertility is lost, but what happens when there’s nothing to grow in? Look at images of the dust bowl for an idea of how bad things could get in the long term.

Short term thinking leads to management issues for how we use and value resources. Markets, as I understand them and recognize that my viewpoint is limited, work largely around the economic role of resources and financial capital. Without being able to assign a fair financial value to resources, or failing to assign a value at all, exacerbates management of limited resources.

As I study Natural Resources Law and policy, I’m beginning to see the broad view and why we run into so many issues between industry, economists, conservationists, and activists in the current model of agriculture and industry. The resource section below includes additional links for related topics of interest.

So, those are just a few of the problems I see within the current model. Within the bounds that it exists, it works more or less. Billions of people get fed off this system and the response to issues work because of the resources available to do so. However, my biggest concern as it relates to Tony’s question, is whether or not there’s sustainability in the long term if any of the pieces required for this to work goes away. Which is what leads me to the permacultured society.

Let’s take those bits and pieces from the principles and tie them all together with a more complete vision of what this society looks like and why permaculture in this case leads to people less impacted by the problem.

I think that a permacultured society ultimately leads us towards, to borrow the term from Chuck Marsh, a neo-horticultural revival which creates resiliency and regeneration as the underpinnings of society. To make that happen, a shift needs to occur where more people produce food on a local scale. Figures I’ve seen and calculated on my own comes to a minimum of 10 percent of a society’s population, would need to be producing food via horticulture. Whether on their own property or their neighbors, space needs to be opened up to allow tending where we are, not far away.

Because we focus on the local, and generating a yield and a surplus, we take care of those located close to use spatially, reducing the need from someone else far away to do the same. However, should the conditions allow it, we can transfer some of those resources to a place that needs eat. For the drought, that’s food to feed the hungry. But, if we’re in an OK place, we can move that food to where it needs to go. The focus on local and renewable saves the use of non-renewable resources so that we can use them when appropriate, reducing the feeling they are scarce, and allowing for the feeling of abundance from what we have ready access to.

Governance, in my mind, would also be largely on a local scale to make decisions meaningful for the people in a given community. Just as the needs of someone in one country and with one culture may not meet the needs of someone halfway across the world, the same goes from state to state and city to city, or town to city, or nation to city, and all permutations. However, because of a focus on cooperation, the usefulness of a state or nation doesn’t go away. The ability to coordinate on a large scale and shift and move resources around on a large scale is useful, but it could be considerably smaller if the communities involved aided and worked with one another while keeping what they have. Which re-localizes economies and lessens the impact of larger scale disasters from occurring, but if they do, there’s the will and direction to work through and move forward. When larger scale help arrives they should, to borrow from Ethan Hughes, meet the community where they are and work together, not assume control of the situation.

So, bringing that to the issue of a long term drought, here’s my permaculture society narrative. As the drought begins because of water conservation techniques, soil building, integrative pest management, and other permaculture standards, the food system is already resilient to many basic problems. A mild drought may elicit no change to practices at all or any noticeable impact. But, as the the lack of rain begins to take a toll, the individuals tending to the horticultural plots see what plants are starting to fail and which ones thrive. They speak with their colleagues, the other growers, to see what’s working where and what’s not to begin sorting out solutions in their own space and helping those around them save what they can. This early stage also begins the communication process to other communities to find out the extent of the issue and begin seeing where there the drought is localized and who is, no pun intended, weathering this the best.

As that information comes together and begins to worsen, the information is passed to community leaders who can help put together broader scale plans to help the growers get food to market. The community can be informed and keep fear from growing by being honest and informed about what is and isn’t happening, as well as how everyone can help work the plan.

From there, as shortages do arise and become long term, different communities can see about shifting members to other areas nearby where there’s more success to help increase food production, or to move resources from one area to another on an on-needed basis.

This interconnectivity of the permaculture designed system to inter-operate on many different levels plays a key role in allowing for the resiliency that permeates a design stemming from the principles of design.

But, all this is fun to put together because it’s predicated by removing the hard part: I didn’t have to work out how we get to a permaculture oriented society. That seems to be the big question. I got to assume that it already exists. As of yet, I don’t have an answer to that idea, but I do have ideas bubbling up from underneath. Once they mature, I’m sure to share them.

In the meantime, do you think that permaculture could lead to a more resilient and regenerative society? Do you have any insight into things I missed you feel are important to the conversation? Let me know.

Leave a comment in the show notes.
Email me: show (at) thepermaculturepodcast (dot) com
Call me: 717.827.six-two-six-six.

Resources:
Redefining Civilization with Toby Hemenway (YouTube Video)
Ogallala Aquifer (Wiki)
Water Losses in the Middle East (ABC News)
NASA Information on Middle East Water Losses
The Tragedy of the Commons A copy of the original Garrett Hardin article that started this conversation.
Common Pool Resources with Elinor Ostrom (YouTube Video)
Externality (Wiki)
Extractive Resource Definition
Non-renewable Resources (Wiki)
Precautionary Principle (Wiki)
The Precautionary Principle (YouTube Video with Caroline Raffensperger. Bioneers)
Sustainable Use (European Commission)

What Would You Want From an Online Permaculture Design Course?

Education, News and Information, Question and Answer No Responses »

Jan 132013

Click here to download the episode.

This show veers off the path some from usual episodes as I’m here to toss a question out, as the rather long title of this episode suggests, about what you, in particular, would expect or want out of an online Permaculture Design Course.

Before getting to the student side of things, a question to the other permaculture teachers who listen to the program, as I know at least a few of you do: how would you model the online experience to meet the 72-hours of instruction, as set forth by Mollison, and considered the bare minimum standard for a PDC?

Since I mentioned wanting to put together an online PDC a few months ago, I’ve mulled over the idea of what an online PDC would look like. After putting together the show on “What to look for when looking for a PDC”, I feel I can more than deliver on the requirements outlined in that material. You know who I am, who my teachers are, their teachers, and know my understanding of permaculture curriculum in every conversation with a guest or through the topical episodes assembled from my own notes.

Based on messages received after announcing the possibility of an online PDC, the core thread of desire was about having the depth of knowledge necessary to lead to a design certificate, and that the certificate is accepted by the Permaculture community. Given my teachers, the variety of people in the community who know me, and the very public format of this website and podcast, a PDC certificate from me, Scott Mann, won’t be a problem.

Now then, for the listeners who are students of permaculture, what would you want the class to look like? Before trying to answer that kind of a big, broad question, here’s what I mean: I’ve taken several online classes and talked to friends who have as well. That pool of experiences leads to some overarching examples. In some cases, the online classes were large seminars with minimal access to the instructor, and the bulk of the course work was self-directed based on a syllabus that included all activities for the semester with what chapters to read and assignment due dates. You know, read this book, do this homework, take this test, wash, lather, and repeat until you’re done. Other classes were previous recorded lectures the students watched or listened to, and then posted to a discussion forum, with homework, and 2-3 exams. One class I took consisted of a series of small assignments that built towards a final project, with instructor feedback provided on each piece building towards the final whole.

With those kinds of thoughts in mind, I come to the following questions to fill out the discussion.

How would you want to cover the PDC material? Video lectures you can watch online? A series of PDC oriented in-depth audio to download and listen to on the go? Or would you rather read the necessary material? There’s definitely reading involved however we do this, but what portion of the course would you want covered in text?

Do you want to be graded on the material? To receive scores like you might in school to determine where your work is at and where you can improve. Or would non-scored written and/or verbal feedback on assignments be enough?

How much access would you want to the instrutor? What’s your preferred method of contact? Email? Phone? Online forum? Should I have regular office hours to call and discuss questions as they arise?

Do you want a “classical” selection of Permaculture Design Course material, as outlined in Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual? Or something up-to-date and relevant to the skills, techniques, and information available now?

I know that’s a rapid fire succession of questions coming from me, but however you found this show, you continue to listen because there’s something of value in what I do. I want to honor that value by providing a course you want to take. If the majority of the feedback presents a desire for something outside my ability to properly deliver I won’t try to put together a PDC. If, however, there is a way to make it work, then we’ll have something this year.

One piece of feedback I received during the first round of conversation is that some listeners don’t want to have to sit in front of a computer all the time to cover the material, which I can understand completely. That leads me to two paths in the road, both of which I feel can be addressed, but require different ways to make it happen.

Option 1, for those who are comfortable with more time at a computer, is to do the on-line course in a way where students can meet and interact with one another and myself, and to post projects on-line as both a proof of work and for further discussion. We get more of a teacher in the classroom experience.

Option 2, to reduce the time spent on-line, is to make the interaction more of a mentor and student relationship that relies more heavily on a project based curriculum with regular one-on-one homework, and ongoing contact between myself and the student to provide feedback via email and phone calls.

Anyway, those are my thoughts right now as I chew through the details. I’d love to hear your ideas. Begin by choosing which course you’d rather participate in, 1 – a digital classroom, 2 – mentor lead learning, and leave a note in the comments for this show, or you know the usual ways to contact me:

show (at) thepermaculturepodcast (dot) com

717.827.6266.

Until the next time, take care of the earth, your self, and each other.

The Cost of a Permaculture Design Course

Question and Answer No Responses »

Sep 272012

Click here to download the episode.

In this episode I examine the cost of a Permaculture Design Course compared to the cost of a college education and break down where that tuition money is spent.

Before we begin, this podcast is 100% listener supported at this time and I’d like to keep it running without advertisements by continuing to thank the community for donating to the show. Find out more about how to help the show by going to thepermaculturepodcast.com/support. There you can make a donation and find out about other non-financial ways to help grow and expand the show.

Also, thank you to Toby Howl for getting my mind started with this idea and getting me to turn it into an episode.

The first set of notes on this subject included many facts and figures facts and figures as I fell into my normal routine of wanting to break everything down into discrete pieces: how much tuition is collected, what is spent where, and so on. I didn’t like how that worked out as the show became more technical and numbers focused. This is a more general look at the class costs related to tuition, the amount of time a teacher spends developing their curriculum, and wrap up with whether or not a PDC is worht the cost.

I refere to my teacher training because we openly discussed many of these topics. The teacher training covered both how to improve as instructors and how to handle the logistics of planning, scheduling, and presenting a full PDC. My frame of reference at the time, and copious notes from that experience, provided a clearer picture of what goes into a class. My PDC took place for a few weekend days a month over 7 months compared to the teacher training which was a one week intensive, which I feel is indicative of the expectations in a 2 week on-site PDC.

If you’ve priced a Permaculture Design Course in the United States, they usually run in the $1000-2000 range, with the average in the middle of around $1500 for a 2 week, on-site, intensive. The lower cost is usually for a weekend course spread out over several months, where everyone commutes to the site, and the higher end for more expensive or exotic locations.

If you compare a PDC to a college course, this is around the price for 6 credit hours at a community college. The comparison is fair because the amount of time spent in a PDC is similar to the time spent taking 6 credit hours of courses at a college. With each credit hour representing 1 hour of classroom instruction and 1-3 hours of homework, per week, over a 12 week semester, a student will spend around 80 hours (6×13) in a class room for 6 credits, plus another 80-240 (1×80 – 3×80) hours outside of class on homework, compared to the 72+ hours of instruction for the PDC. From my own experience, I spend around 250 hours outside my PDC reading, working on homework assignments, and preparing the final design project. Plus, at least at a 2-week intensive, you will have a place to stay and have food provided for the cost, increasing the value.

One thing to remember is that permaculture courses are generally not subsidized in any way. There are no tax breaks, government funds, loans, or other resources used to cover any funding gaps or to pay for the administrative staff a college or university has that handles incidentals. For many permaculture teachers they and their team, if they have one, handle everything.

The tuition paid towards a PDC truly goes to cover the full cost of the class. Students, in addition to providing some pay for the instructors, are also paying the overhead: insurance, renting the site location, covering taxes, advertising, professional fees like a lawyer or accountant, running a website, providing guest instructors with an honorarium or other payment for their time, as well as food for the class and someone to cook. I mention this last piece because during my Teacher Training we talked about the cost of some these fees and I was surprised to learn that the cost of food, especially to cover the myriad of dietary requirements, was around 25% of the price. That comes off the top before the class begins.

Of the monies raised from tuition, upwards of 70 to 80% goes toward these costs, leaving around 20-30% to pay the teachers. But, I’ve only been to one class that had a single teacher. My PDC had 2. My teacher training had 3. Look at a PDC listing online and you will usually see 2 or more primary facilitators, plus a list of guest instructors who, as mentioned, are also usually paid.

That just counts the dollar figure and doesn’t include any of the preparation time that goes into the course materials. Though some resources exist that provide set permaculture curriculum outlines, such as Rosemary Marrow’s Earth User’s Guide to Permaculture – Teacher’s Notes, or the chapter by chapter breakdown in Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual, every instructors chooses their focus and how to present the content. My PDC started with and focused heavily on the ethics and principles of permaculture. In a conversation with Andrew Millison, if my memory is correct at the moment, he chooses to start with reading and mapping the landscape. There is also an ongoing conversation about what to include in a PDC beyond the basics that Mollison originally framed, with some courses including more information and hours of material. To that end, each instructor largely develops their own curriculum and materials, which requires time.

I can say unequivocally that a PDC instructor spends many many hours getting ready for their class. During my teacher training, and reflected in my own experience just putting together the information for this show, every hour of classroom instruction takes between 1 and 20 hours of planning, practicing, and assembling material to suit the location, audience, and other factors for that particular class. The 1-20 hour figure doesn’t include the ongoing professional development necessary to stay current on permaculture trends and to teach an appropriate class.

This rather large time requirement is one of the reasons why I’m reaching to you, my audience, in September of 2012, to see if there is interest in an online PDC sometime in 2013. Even with all of my notes, experience, and resources, I’ve got several hundred hours of preparation before accepting the first student. This is true for most instructors.

I say that because even experienced teachers, to quote Jude, are continually “cooking the curriculum”. That is to say they continue to sharpen their presentation skills to clarify material, cut the fat off of a section to focus the content, add new in-class exercises or games to provide additional student practice, throw out parts that don’t work, rewrite whole sections, and update handouts, slides, or other audio-visual material to match. Not only does this happen in-between courses generally, but also in the weeks leading up to the class as students starts signing up and returning questionnaires or intro packets. For both my PDC and teacher training I completed a survey before the first day detailing my personal exposure and education with permaculture. In the case of my teacher training, each student underwent an interview with Jude and Andrew in the first few hours on-site to introduce ourselves, which influenced the material presented.

Further to this question of prep time is the devotion of time to students during the course itself. Both sets of my permaculture instructors made themselves available more than any teacher or professor I’d experienced previously. Ben and Dillon, during my PDC, answered question via email or through phone calls, as well as leading additional discussions during rest and lunch breaks. Jude, Andrew, and Rico, during the teacher training, were on from the moment they joined us for breakfast until the very end of the day as the last folks wandered off to bed. Though we talked and socialized, they each easily spent 12 hours or more a day in that teacher mode, insuring we all understood the material.

With this broad perspective of what’s behind the curtain for teaching a PDC, I think the cost is reasonable for what you get in return.

Though I was hesitant when this podcast first began to recommend everyone take a PDC, especially with the low cost and availability of permaculture books, as well as the plethora of videos on the web and other resources, these days I feel that if you are able, it is worth taking a PDC and I implore anyone who is interested to do so. The information and hands-on practice of design alone is worth it, but the experience and networking makes it even more valuable. The intense cooperation that occurs during a PDC leads to long term connections. Trust me, I’m not always a very social person but walked away with some good friends I am still in touch with 2 years later.

Does this help make sense of the cost of PDC? Leave a comment.

You can also contact me directly:

E-mail: show (at) thepermaculturepodcast (dot) com
Phone: 717.827.6266

Can Permaculture Feed the World?

Question and Answer No Responses »

Aug 152012

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The short answer to this question is: Yes. Why do I say that? Because of the work of various Master Gardeners in the United States, Steve Solomon and his book Gardening When it Counts, Peter Bane‘s plan in The Permaculture Handbook for garden farming, and John Jeavons Bio-Intensive gardening. All of these indicate that it is possible to grow all of the food necessary to properly support human life on as little as 1/10th to 1/3rd of an acre of land, while maintaining soil fertility.

How are we able to do that? Because the figure for the amount of needed land includes the space necessary to also grow the green manures, mulches, and compost material to return to soil. Of that tenth to third of an acre, about 30% is used for growing food, the remaining 70% maintains the fertility.

If we need 1/3 of an acre to feed someone, is there enough arable land in the world to do so? Here we are in luck because there is, according to statistics from the U.N Food and Agriculture Organization, a little over 1 acre of arable land for every person currently alive on the earth. And with permaculture techniques, have numerous ways to improve degraded land and increase the amount of land useful for growing food.

So, on paper, it’s possible to feed the current world population several times over. In practice there are numerous barriers to overcome, probably the greatest of which is the distribution of resources. Having plenty of arable land in the world to feed everyone is great, but that land is spread all over the world and our population, though on all 7 continents, are not living in the same proportions in the same areas of land.

We can do it. Let’s find some solutions. I’ll end this with some questions for you:

Other than resource distribution, what other problems do you see with feeding the world’s population using permaculture?

How would you go about making a difference?

Listener Q&A: Neal’s Garden Questions

Question and Answer No Responses »

Jun 242011

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Neal from New Jersey wrote me a few days ago with the following questions. I already had a chance to respond to him via email, so he could start working on this immediately, but this takes that response and expands on it a bit.

1) Is it bad to buy non-organic plants for your home garden? I know this isn’t ideal, but since I wanted to get a few more veggies into the garden, I just bought a few from the local Agway. Now I’m wondering if that was a bad thing to do.
2) Should I get my soil tested to see how I can improve it
3) I understand there are a lot of things we can add to improve the soil such as manure (I can easily obtain horse manure where I live), veggie scraps, coffee grinds, etc. However, is it good to use these if we don’t know if they’re organic or not
4)Any tips on making/obtaining supplies to build a raised bed?

Tips on Starting a Permaculture Design Business

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Apr 182011

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Now with theme music! My deepest thanks to Mark Blasco at podcastthemes.com for making that happen.

As Spring is here in Pennsylvania, I’ve been out tromping around through all kinds of weather doing some design work for clients which has me thinking about what is involved in running one’s own design business. Having received some questions about it from listeners in the past, it lead to this episode.

To reduce them to basic ideas, the tips are: