Permaculture

I did my PDC (Permaculture Design Certificate) in 2020, while we were living in Canberra. I had the time and so I chose an online course, which if I had a choice between online and in person, I think in person would be better. I did learn a lot while doing it, but more than that, it reinforced what I already knew, and maybe came up with some terms I hadn't really heard of before. In reality, I've been practicing permaculture for many years. One of my very good friends introduced me to Biodynamics many years ago and then organic gardening and it just continued from there. I now think that the permaculture lifestyle is the overarching modality and that the different methods I use to garden, farm, eat, live, shop, interact with others, are just tools or methodologies stemming from that lifestyle. 

The foundation of Permaculture are the three ethics:

• Earth care
• People care
• Fair share

As a regenerative farmer, I look after the land at the same time as making a living off the land (or trying to!). We started rotational grazing in 2000 and this form of grazing management ensures that stock are moved from paddock to paddock, before they overgraze. By doing this, ground cover is maintained, thus less runoff happens, which causes erosion. Since we moved to this region, we've been slowly improving our rotation and now we have finally put the sheep, goats and cattle together, things will improve even more. 

We had sheep and goats in one rotation and we only moved them every two weeks. This was not good for the pasture as they would eat too much of the better grasses. It was difficult to get the stock density required without using portable electric fencing, which is certainly an option, but for us, it was just too much more work to do. One problem we've had is the goats tend to escape, looking for fresh pastures, now that they are with the cattle and moving a lot more frequently, they don't escape. Which is amazing as the fencing is not what most people would call goat proof! On a side note, we don't have a guardian animal with them anymore, we used to have donkeys, but they went back to my daughter. We're hoping that our Nguni cattle will act as a guardian. Half of them have nice spikey horns and they tend to turn around and face you when threatened. Joining the mobs hasn't really made a difference to how often we move the cattle, so we've gained more animal impact (which is a good thing), more fertiliser diversity (from their poo), but most importantly, we'll gain a far better rest period, and we won't have the problem of uneven grazing. And....it's less work for us - win/win!

Cattle move into a fresh paddock.

The sheep and goats are often a little slower to move than the cattle. Means more exercise for me!

Other ways that I practice earth care are:

• growing plants and animals without chemicals
• buying my extra produce from local markets so that I don't need to get it wrapped in plastic - most organic food in the shops is plastic wrapped whereas the non-organic isn't (go figure???)
• trying very hard to not use single use plastic - also helps if you buy produce from the markets and also to choose shops other than colesworth if possible - co-ops or bulk buying stores. Although these still have a lot of plastic involved, it's just bigger bags and you the customer don't always see it!
• not buying "stuff", try to recycle, re-use, refurb/renovate - landfill is a big-ticket item when it comes to damaging our earth and our oceans.
• composting as much rubbish as possible so that less goes into your bin

There would be so many more ways, so please comment below with what you do.  I'll talk about the other two ethics in future posts.