Cheers,
Matt

If you put the money into Woolies shares the dividends would pay the grocery bill

I can’t understand why this article would get you going so much.

Generally you have 1 or 2 of the following: time, money, experience.

This client is busy with work and family. He has money. He will gain experience.

You have time. You will gain experience.

You’re both smart enough to realise it’s time to secure your supply lines but have different situations.

You’ve both secured your supply lines.

The end.

What’s the problem here? We’re at a point in history where we just need to get on with it and I’m sick of hearing about Permaculture being ‘grassroots’ as if grassroots is a badge of honour from an exclusive club that you can only get membership to by feeling ashamed about earning money.

This project was featured on ABC rural radio and has got many farmers in the region interested. The effect of that on the invisible structures alone is huge.

It’s also nice that Nick took the time and effort to share what looks to be quite private information for the benefit of the permaculture community.

Permaculture is the application of commonsense – Ingenio patet campus” – the field lies open to the intellect.

I didn’t say there were not cheaper approaches in monetary terms, only that there are other costs to consider (time, foregone benefits). Every case is different and I am not saying consultancy is always the way to go.

In this example, let’s take the 3 months cost of doing a PDC and 10 week internship as a lower limit. The median Australian income is about $66,820 (Wiki), giving an after tax income of $52,924. The net income foregone to do these courses and develop and implement the same design (assuming 1 week design time and 6 working weeks labor time (14 days * 2 consultants)), comes to a total of 19 weeks = 19/52*$52,924 = $19,282, plus course fees ($1925 + $6600), comes to a conservative grand total of $27,807. This does not include travel costs, purchase of reference material, background study, extra experience and material sourcing time, delivered at least 3 months later. Nick and David charged $10,640 for their travel and consultation. If you went through these courses you would have the knowledge to execute further projects, but if this was the end goal then the consultancy was a more economical and expediant route. Prior commitments may have made doing these courses impossible.

Mistakes are important for learning but they can also be expensive and hazardous. Some friends of mine recently put together some raised beds from brand new CCA treated pine. How much do you value your health?

Advising people to plant seeds that are not true to type without telling them that is wasting their time. Millions of seeds needed to be planted to come up with the popular cultivars and your initial comment suggested you were interested in the fruit, not a hedge or timber for which there are likely to be much better choices.

Neither did I say that this was an example of scaled up permaculture. I meant that (good) consultants will be the most qualified to undertake such projects in a reasonable time frame. Scaling up does not necessarily mean a large land area. This is a confusion conventional farmers make. A very profitable commercial system can be tiny. David Blume ran a 2 acre farm through community supported agriculture and was competitive with organic farms of much greater size: http://www.permaculture.com/node/1344

If you listen to Mollison he is constantly talking about consulting – designing for clients and charging for it. It’s not one way or another, every approach can be taken. Use and value diversity. Permaculture has been going for some 30 years and the small and slow teaching model is great, but we need to pick up the pace.

I have heard of poor quality consultation but this is just like any industry. It does not invalidate the model, it may just indicate the need for improvement in education, assessment and certification. Even in the medical profession there are doctors that should not be practicing – Dr. Patel for example. You can see David’s copious experience listed in this article, and Nick has been a landscaper for 11 years and participates in permablitzes. I agree that a PDC and 10 week internship is not enough experience to be charging these rates.

You may be underestimating the accumulated cost of food, which is the largest proportion of household spending in Australia after housing. As Peter pointed out this is the family’s food budget for perhaps 3 or 4 years. The family may also save on fuel, the location being fairly remote. The return on investment is likely to be significant and they will likely have surplus food.

Permaculture for the rich? Why not? I recommend you read the following article of Bill’s: http://nmag.soton.ac.uk/mollison/html/15-millionaires.html

If the window to truck goods is closing then we should take advantage of it while we can. The seeds you are planting from the supermarket are trucked too. On the other hand, with commercial application of permaculture the window to close nutrient cycles can be opened indefinitely by growing our own motor fuels. My article on biofuels should be appearing here shortly. Mollison has recommended harvesting seaweed and sea grasses for cycling nutrients.

Where is the $9K figure for mulch? As far as I can see they spent $5K. It is difficult to compare with your experience since unknown delivery distance was included, quantities, and quality (e.g. organic) were not specified and there may have been other factors such as growing conditions, time of year and region. In any case I’m not trying to defend every decision that has been made on this or any project, and you may have gotten a bargain in that case.

The small scale revolution will not come soon enough. While conventional farmers can take energetic subsidies and ignore external costs to produce cheap food, people will not have the incentive to grow their own food en masse. Depending on expensive food for motivation will result in widespread suffering. We need to create commercial models that produce better quality food for a competitive price to displace destructive models.

I enjoyed reading the project write up as I have been trying to design a similar system for myself in similar climate and location, just less inland but on the same basic longitude in NSW in cool temperate climate. I find the support species lists most interesting as that is what I’ve been scratching my head to come up with.

I also notice this design is standard orchard tree types. Is that a climate limitation or client prference?

Cheers,
Peter

I have one additional point to make: The pre-requisites for becoming a permaculture consultant: Its a 72-hrs course. It’s not years of study and it won’t give you anywhere near the knowledge that is required – I don’t think you’ll walk away with the knowledge of plant guilds for every soil type, climate and rainfall. How you organise and direct earthworks and what questions you have to ask the potential contractor. You won’t learn how to grow specific vegies. You also won’t have the botanical knowledge to id most plants on sight.

I repeat from the original post above: “Fresh out of our internship I strapped on these huge boots …”

The internship is 10 weeks. So after 72hrs of PDC and 10 weeks internship one is able to charge consulting money that not even a dr. med. gets out of med shool after probably more than 6 years of full time study.

Again regarding the “Big Picture” – I believe the permaculture master plan is: People do the PDC, start their projects and finance their expenses by teaching permaculture. Its a pyramid scheme but its a good one.

The more people grow their own food and improve their soils and the planet in the process the less we have a need for commercial growers and the attached required transport and cooling and outlet chains. Any commercial operation that exports their nutrients (and don’t consume and return the waste on site) will have to put input into their operations. Input from where? Obviously the place from where those inputs come from is being impoverished.

We also need to learn how to grow plants from seed, cuttings, by grafting and division.

Forget commercial permaculture.

the message I am trying to get accross here is that permaculture does not have to be as costly as this project turned out to be.

Regarding growing fruit trees from seed: Not true to type does not mean no fruit. No fruit does not mean useless. Avocado can be a good hedge if kept low, fruit or not. Some fruit trees provide valuable timber. Continous grafting results in trees not being able to evolve along with their predators. The result: fungicides and pesticides. Examples of “hit the jackpot” type of fruit grown from seed are Golden Delicious and Granny Smith. “Accidents”.

You make it sound as if using permaculture consultants is the smart thing to do, not doing that can result in “losses”. (mainly fincancial?) Making errors is a learning process as well. Reading books and doing a PDC is not taking longer than, say, 3 months? And once that is done the work with a consultant will be much more beneficial. 3 months loss of opportunity? Pleeeaaase… And what do “true” permaculturists say: Slow and Small is good.

Not smart to use this project as an example for “scaling” commercial permacultrue operations. We’re talking $40k for a kitchen garden and orchard (hopefully) feeding a family of 4. Consultants that charge over $500 per day? What is this now, permaculture for the rich?

I thought permaculture is mainly a grass root movement. As Geoff so beautifully sais: “All problems in the world can be saved in a garden”. It’s not a “…commercial orchard”. Grass roots. Small is beautifull. Slow is good. Plan, do, observe, act.

What we need are consultants and normal down to earth people than can show us how things can be done small scale. Everyone. Especialy the ones that have little means to do it. What we don’t need is “scaling up” of single projects. We need to “scale” the number of projects. Small ones.

The window of opportunity to “truck” tons of mulch for hunderts of KMs to establish a new garden is closing. We need to see ways to start off on little more than nothing. Seeds from Woolies or Coles – Why not? Dates, Citrus, Nectarines, Lemon grass (yes just plant it), tropical fruit. Be creative.

Also: $9k for mulch? I paid $900 for a semi trailer with 28 rounds of spoilt lucerne. Yes spoilt – perfect! That covered 2.5 acres about 15cm thick. What about the almost black walking paths? Would not want to walk in the garden without shoes in summer – or winter for that matter. Would that not “bake” the soil from the side?

Citrus, some mangoes and possibly plums do not come true to type and must be grafted (cloned from another plant). R2E2 and Bowen mangoes seeds are OK.

There is a trade off between learning enough yourself to be confident to do this level of design & installation, and using a consultant. The consultant obviously involves a significant financial cost, but there is a big opportunity cost in doing it yourself. That is, while you do not have productive systems in place you are foregoing their benefits, including income, soil building, predator populations, etc. For most people it will take years of study and mistakes to get near to the level of a consultant, consuming time and money. The cost when you do get to it yourself may be higher since the consultant will know or find the best material sources and will also have specialist tools you may not want to own for one job.

The client should learn how and why their design functions, of course. The job of the consultant should not be to just set it up and run, but to involve the client, explain & document the design, provide a user manual and get them started on their education. Providing the client with resources for further study and support networks may mitigate the problem you mention of calling back the consultant.

From a big picture point of view, we need consultants to address the overwhelming backlog of work. Quality commercial projects will give permaculture the credibility needed to be taken seriously. I often hear from primary producers the idea that “permaculture doesn’t scale up”, while they burn money on inputs, let water run off and evaporate, and degrade the environment. We need to turn that around by building up a strong consulting industry and commercial portfolio, showing how profitable it can be.

Brings a tear to the eye. That was good fun and good learning too. Nice article. Great to show folks how we went all about it.

Keep up the dynamite work.

David

Can’t wait to listen to the podcast later. I hope you explain what all the pink things are.