Aryana Libris

Authors : Falk Ben
Title : The resilient farm and homestead An innovative permaculture and whole systems design approach
Year : 2013

Link download : Falk_Ben_-_The_resilient_farm_and_homestead.zip

Creating a Positive Legacy while Adapting to Rapid Change It is not the strongest animal that survives, nor the fastest, but the one most adaptable to change. - LEON C. MEGGINSON, paraphrasing Charles Darwin Regeneration involves seeing things as they could be, while resiliency requires dealing with things as they are. This book shares principles, strategies, and components being tested at the Whole Systems Research Farm (WSRF) and homestead that are helping to transform a beat-up old Vermont hill farm into a highly biodiverse and productive humansupporting ecosystem. These systems, we have learned, must be simultaneously regenerative and resilient, for without regeneration health and production are limited. This landscape, like much of the world, is a damaged place, and without enhancing the health of soil and water (and the human body-mind as a result), one cannot increase productivity in durable ways. Without increasing productivity of the land in a durable manner, one’s resiliency is not bolstered. Yet without also focusing on specific near-term needs such as having a plentiful fuelwood supply, backup lighting, fuel or tools, and basic skills, one’s ability to do regenerative work is limited - the “long” work being too easily interrupted by bumps in the short term. Along with my family, friends, and colleagues, our goal at the homestead is to implement and maintain biological and built systems that yield intergenerational value. The work undertaken at the WSRF references the most abundant, durable, and longestterm human settlement strategies developed across the globe and is intended to leave a valuable legacy for multiple generations into the future. In this way our work is intensely optimistic - we are planning for a more viable and thriving future in this place ten years down the road, an even more abundant one in a hundred years, and, ideally, an Edenic garden lasting centuries beyond that. If I hadn’t experienced directly the possibility of this, I would think of this as unreasonable. But I have seen with my own eyes that human hands in partnership with seeds and fungi, animals and rainfall can, over relatively short time periods, transform sickly land into thriving living communities. Human work, it is safe to say, can speed the healing of more-than-human systems. As is said in the permaculture community, “We are nature working.”* Our goal as participants in the land must be to do better than “less harm.” Why focus on doing less bad when we can actually improve, actually regenerate? The highest possibilities of human presence are staggering - I would consider the idea of a Garden of Eden a fantasy if I weren’t confronted with evidence to the contrary in my daily life. The Whole Systems Research Farm shows clearly how infertile land that once supported only fern, moss, blackberries, and white pine can turn into a lush multilayered landscape of grasses, flowering herbs, fruits, nuts, berries, mushrooms, and livestock supporting one another, wildlife, and people. The work here in the past ten years also shows how seasonally inundated, compacted, oxygen-deprived soils and abused, abandoned, eroded land that’s been clear-cut multiple times, bulldozed, stumped, and brush-hogged mercilessly can be transitioned into a place of deepening soils, of balanced moisture, of increased wildlife, of food growing in every corner, and of the unique beauty that emerges out of the synergy between land and people. ...