Restoration Agriculture Foundations - (Master Course) Practical Permaculture and Agroforestry for Farmers

Integrated Polyculture

Learn how to revision your farm into a diversified, resilient polyculture with tree crops, livestock, fruits and vegetables, and more.

Permaculture

Understand the core principles of permaculture design; you will be better able to choose crops and methods of diversification most suited to your farm, your climate, and your interests and abilities.

Permaculture Meets Agroforestry . . .

Learn how to apply the principles of permaculture and the techniques of agroforestry to a specific property to design an integrated system producing food, fuel, fiber, medicines and wildlife habitat.

You will learn . . .

Specific tools and techniques which will be discussed include:

• Windbreaks

• Alley cropping

• Silvopasture

• Polyculture and permaculture

• Multi-story forest cropping

• Erosion best management practices

• Integrated specialty crops

Mark Shepard is a permaculture designer, agroforester and ecological farming consultant and is the author Restoration Agriculture, Water for Any Farm and Water For Any Farm: Engineering Field Manual. He and his family have transformed a typical 100-acre row-crop dairy farm into a permaculture-based perennial-agricultural ecosystem using oak savannah, successional-brushland and Eastern woodlands as the ecological models. The result is one of the first and finest farm-scale models of permaculture in the United States. Their farm features chestnut, hazelnut and fruit trees, a variety of other fruits and vegetables, and chickens, ducks, pigs and other animals. He has lectured worldwide and consults with growers around the world including teaching permaculture techniques in sub-Saharan Africa. Upper Midwest organic farmers will recognize him as the banjo player in the band Synister Dane.