It's Day 2 of our certified Holistic Management training, dipping into the 2nd half of our awesome 10 Week Internship program. The Savory Institute has been updating, clarifying and simplifying their workbooks as smaller & more concise workbooks, available cheaply via their website.  We have been running through Financial Planning and Grazing Planning today, using the farm as a model for planning for the factors, observations and circumstances we have in our situation, to ensure we create the best possible plan to move consistently towards our Holistic Context.

We see managing holistically is key to forwarding effective regenerative enterprises and regenerating degraded landscapes whilst creating resilient & socially just incomes into the future.  We plan to write some series of articles to clarify some of the common misconceptions and explain the process to support others to start managing holistically.  Stay tuned for details.

We have another 10 Week Internship running at the farm July- Sept, with a few spots open, where once again we will be training up a diverse and engaging group in the following areas;

The 10 Week internship includes over 530hrs of curriculum based learning & 5 Certificate Courses;

• 90hr+ PDC certified by PRI (Aus) & PC Assoc (UK)
• 5 day Forest Gardens & Perennial Cropping
• 5 day Regenerating Soils
• 5 day Keyline® Design
• 3 day Holistic Management Training®
• 5 day Teaching Permaculture Creatively

Allan Savory's work observing & managing game reserves, ranches & national parks as a biologist is only part of what he describes led him to his breakthroughs fighting desertification (and the subsequent social & economic breakdown in some of the world's most hostile environments) through holistically planned grazing.  His role as President of the opposition party against a racist government in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) eventually forced him to seek exile in the US where he observed desertification in National Parklands as bad as anything in Africa, yet with large herbivores having been absent for decades. 

As late as 1969 he was advocating culling large populations of wild animals such as elephants and hippos, when they were appearing to be destroying their habitat. He had participated in the culling of 40,000 elephants in the 1950s but he later concluded the culling did not reverse the degradation of the land, calling that project "the saddest and greatest blunder of my life" in his recent TED talk.

Savory was inspired by earlier work of French agronomist André Voisin (some works available freely at the awesome resource http://www.soilandhealth.org/) who observed that cattle tended to return to the same patch of grass after about three days. Savory saw this as a solution of the riddle of time and that it was the length of time cattle were left in the same area and not just simple overgrazing which led to problems.  Holistic planned grazing is now happening on every continent on over 15M Ha.

As well as Well Engineered Stuff we also like innovative use of tools & machines that make farming less debt reliant; a core aspect of Regenerative Agriculture.  Inspired by Darren J. Doherty's innovative adaptations of the Yeoman's Plow (and subsequent other mod's from others) we are tricking out our own Yeomans 6SB to accommodate forhigh quality tree planting as well as seeding, biofert/ compost tea applications and hopefully in the future pasture cropping to close the loop on our pastured broiler & pig enterprises.  There's a couple of awesome sites everyone should know about if they don't already....

Wanting to take a Permaculture Design Course (PDC)?  Wondering what you get out of taking a course like this & how they differ around the world?  There are regular courses all over the world now and because Permaculture is decentralized there is a great variance in different courses, which we have observed on our travels working & teaching around the world.  We've compiled a list of 10 reasons why taking a training with us represents a good investment in both your own learning pathway and offers points well worth reflecting upon generally if you are considering taking a similar training...

Continuing on the theme of money for our free book giveaway we decided to gift a copy of our friend Mark Boyle's Moneyless Manifesto.  Mark is an awesome writer and speaker who has dedicated many years to writing & talking about our relationships & embedded philosophy of money as well as demonstrating how to live well without participating in a degenerative economy.  Mark lived completely without money in England for two and a half years which formed the basis for his first book, The Moneyless Man. He is also the founder of Freeconomy, an alternative economy which has local groups across 171 countries.

Mark very kindly came as a guest speaker to a PDC we ran near Bristol, UK, back in 2012 and together with his partner Jess (who is also an awesome writer) is currently in the process of creating a fully localised, land-based gift economy in Éire which will demonstrate how all the ideas and practical solutions described in The Moneyless Manifesto can be integrated into one holistic system design.

To celebrate the beginning of our new Permaculture project & enterprise we thought is would be perfect to give away a copy of Ethan Roland & Gregory Landau's new book Regenerative Enterprise.  I first met Ethan whilst working in Thailand, then again during my time at Gaia University in California, where Gregory also studied. 

Globally we have spent a huge amount of resources, energy and money wreaking havoc on soil, ecosystems and ultimately our own health, and we are going to have to spend a lot more to restore it all.  But as Ethan & Gregory put it, "It is no longer acceptable to create financial profits by extracting the foundational living wealth of our lands and waters. Enterprises need a new model with which to interpret the world, and a new process for whole-systems design and decision-making."

Money is still largely a contentious issue in the Permaculture world it seems, and as a...