These are the easy times.
Right now, we have an excess of energy that we will not have in the future.
So let's put systems in place
that will be passively yielding for decades upon decades.
How do you make a living from a piece of land in a cold climate,
cycling resources on site in the most resilient and regenerative
way possible?
This is one of the first years
that these chestnuts are bearing, this is ten years old.
Then there's Bur Oak Swamp White Oak, American Chestnut, Asian chestnut,
hickory, mulberry, pear, apple on the south side of these rows.
Really, what we're trying to do
in a lot of permaculture systems is just basically
promote a highly forageable landscape as a whole,
more than we are trying to create like rows of food
where it's like, this is the food or the medicine we're growing here.
It's more so stocking the system, with just a lot of perennially producing yields
where you can walk out and just have like, Oh,
this is the best place I could forage.
Let's go around and realize the world does provide.
There's food and medicine all around you.
Here, you want to taste something really good?
I haven't gotten all the sugar off of this yet.
The big traction point was
this is much better.
This is a way better way to live.
I kind of tend to take just a real creative approach,
I guess you could say, and try a lot of stuff.
And much of it doesn't stand the test of time, but some of it has.
And all of it is focused on how do we meet
our basic needs in a more resilient way with less offsite resources.
And increased yields, ideally.
And, you know, dealing with just all the challenges of our time,
increased resource costs, increased toxicity of the environment
at large, and decrease reliability of weather.
We're now in,
you know, a kind of three year long drought to some extent in the Northeast,
which is somewhat unheard of as far as a multiyear thing.
Our climate is really typified by being in the mountains
in a relatively clean ecosystem.
You know, we're at the top of where the water's
coming into the landscape, primarily from rain directly.
So we have less pollutants to deal with.
We're not, you know, downstream
of pretty much anything here, but we also have less water.
We have less soil, bedrock sticking out of the ground here, everywhere.
This is the primary ridge in this field and this is pretty good soil, too,
where there is some.
Yeah, but there's also places where there's literally zero inches, you know.
In the world of ecological restoration
and permaculture and regeneration, permeability is the name of the game.
You want to avoid impervious surfaces, but impervious surfaces
allow you to collect a lot of water from certain areas
and actually have a meaningful amount of water, even from a quarter inch
or half inch rain event, which wouldn't be meaningful at all
in pervious ground because it just goes in to the surface.
It doesn't get to the roots if it's dry, dry time of year
and you have no water to harvest.
So here we are at the ramp pump.
We're in a drainage where water normally, when there's plenty of it, flows
from one pond to the next pond.
So we turn this on in the spring and usually we run it most of the summer
when it starts to get real dry. So it's off right now.
Then turn it on, it's a water powered pump.
Some people call it a water hammer, which is a good way to think about it.
There's no electricity to this. The pump runs on water.
That's the fuel.
But this is the most robust, resilient form of water pumping.
Global warming, that would be kind of easy, and I think
it's much more of a global weirding situation, to quote Amory Lovins.
And what we're trying to do is shock absorb those impacts.
So spread out rainfall, store water - ponds, primarily.
Soil, topsoil formation, plant a high diversity of genetics
to deal with colder winters, warmer winters, warmer summers especially.
So we're now in the agroforestry hedgerows.
This is a sylvopasture system where we're grazing, making hay
and have planted thousands of trees for a third dimension of yield.
The drier the climate gets, the more valuable
the tree yield is and the less valuable the grass yield is.
And this is an adjustable system.
If we change course and instead of drying out over the years,
we start to get wet again.
We can always cut down a tree row or two or three
and promote more of the grass side of the system.
So this farm system has dials, you know, we can dial it one way.
We can dial in another and get intermediate yields in the process.
I like to joke like if the grass crop fails one year
completely, that's Armageddon.
At the same time, let's hedge our bets and not be dependent just on grass.
Let's get tree systems rolling, especially nut tree-based.
And then let's get nutrient and sugar systems rolled out,
which are pear, apple, berries.
Those are the three most robust systems for this climate.
We have seaberry on contour, which is a health care yield.
So that's not a sustenance crop.
We're equally as focused not only on calories
as we are on medicine.
Here is one of our medicine cabinets.
You know, think of the term healthcare provider., for instance.
This land is my healthcare provider.
So a plant like seaberry, there's a particular imperative
for in a changing world with increasing stressors.
One is that these are incredibly high quality medicinal nutraceutical level
plants loaded with vitamins A, C, E, which is cool.
Although you can get those vitamins from other things,
but this has omega 7s, so this is 10-15% fat.
I like to call seaberry a fish on a bush.
I mean it literally has like fish quality essential oils,
and we're not near the coast.
We may need to live this way in the future.
I mean, we will at some point when we've used up the easy to access
fossil fuels, but we can also adopt it before we need to
and harvest a ton of other benefits from it, like
health, happiness, wellness,
peace of mind, strong bodies, maybe eventually wisdom,
you know, know-how, competence, capacity, ability to help neighbors.
Those are all yields of the system.
Actually, that's how I got into a lot of this lifestyle in the first place, was
as a direct act of resistance to tyranny,
to corporatocracy, to the destruction of all that is wholly in this world.
And then I found ecological design
as a way to prove an alternative is possible.
Engage a solution that makes the current destructive system obsolete.
Don't fight it, just make a different system.
Don't oppose forces, use them.
I didn't realize I was signing up for that, but I was.
To engage in land directly is to sign up for all that mystery
and being part of that mystery, that's reason enough.
All the other survival benefits, whatever.
I mean, that's all academic compared to
let's just live in a more connected, more meaningful way.
That's real talk right there.