ah well here I am the food forest at
gora in South Australia one of the
iconic permaculture sites in the world
and I'm here to meet Graham and
Annemarie Brookman we've been there
quite a while let's go
he is playing on chip oh hey you're
going good good to see you yeah all
right fantastic one of the day you're
looking evil ha ha ha as usual so I'm
here with Graham Brookman and we're on a
farm called the food price where Graham
farms with his wife and marine you've
been here something like 30 years about
30 years amazing isn't it but to develop
a full permaculture you really need
about 30 years well we're in the main
crop obviously and you grow a few
vegetables for sale but this is called
the food forest well the food forest was
a term that Bill Mollison used in one of
the early lectures that I went to and I
thought that just really says it in
three short words the food forest and
and so it's this multi-layered
construction where you've got animals
canopy trees trees that give shelter to
the understory the root crops and so on
it's a complex beautiful kind of term
and and it's really pretty dry lands
we're in South Australia but kind of on
the same latitude as kind of California
and Middle East you're less than 18
inches of rain in less than half a meter
of rain nowadays we had 360 mils which
is semi-arid yeah we're semi-arid since
the Mediterranean climate so we have a
warm dry summer and a cool wet winter
that enables us to grow field crops and
dryland species for forestry and things
like that but if we want to produce you
know really abundant vegetables and
fruit and so on we need to irrigate so
we do use water from the aquifer which
is recharged in the hills back behind us
here and I guess on average a commercial
fruit farm would be around using around
11 10 or 11 mega litres per hectare and
we use 10 or 11 mega litres per seven
hectares so that's what we can do with
mulch or
during at night drip irrigation and your
compost all your food wastes as well
well what the what the Chuck's don't you
don't eat we compost we also send most
of our food we'll take most of our food
to the farmers market singular and
Adelaide and we get back the waste from
Adelaide so composted food waste from
Adelaide along with green green waste
and that is our nutrition you've got
chickens you've got geese you got sheep
and you've got woofers and you've got
employed staff you've got quite a few
people here so could you just run
through what are they what it is you've
got in total in your commercial harvest
trees I won't go through all 160
varieties but we do have stone fruit and
vines we have the odd things that don't
really fall into categories things like
Caribes and hoe hobo which are not
really nuts but they're not really beans
we have a lot of cultivars of of
pistachio and we have lots and lots of
stone fruit so that's sort of roughly
and capsulate sit you've got fig figs
too yet forgot about the figs and you've
got pears apples and pears
that's all Sammy I think about it and
you've got olives of course we have
olives yeah I've seen some pretty good
pomegranate white sapote it's also known
as the ice cream fruit and then then
there's another potential I think there
we got the the jujube this is you should
also known as the Chinese date we're in
the Middle East and so forth and they
have another zoo so far in India which
they I think called burrow and really
the Chinese date for us could be a big
rescue species because we have climate
change happening faster and faster and
it's taking away our cold winters now if
a star chose in particular need a cold
winter to set up the flowering for the
following season and three out of the
last
years we haven't had it this year we've
been lucky but we can see that try as we
may select varieties as we may we are
going to confront climate change and we
need to find varieties species that are
less needing of the winter chill and so
there we have things like olives Caribes
and and jujubes
and then palms you've got a few dates
coming on but you've also got wine palm
jelly palm boutique a potato which is
even more drought tolerant most people
expect the date to be the one but that
you know the jelly palms incredibly
great tolerant yeah this is too really
weird palms that kind of must have got
caught somewhere on a continent that was
changing and instead of dying they they
just evolved over thousands of years and
so you've got yet a palm and jelly palm
so is it you don't actually find it very
limiting diversity is a big thing in
permaculture connectivity of diversity
in these dry lands you send a plenty of
diversity on this one look we have so
many species I can't keep up with it so
anyone who thinks oh it's going to be so
boring and climate change has got us in
a corner completely wrong there's all of
this unexplored stuff that we can surely
use to adapt to climate change before it
kills us great stuff all very positive
there you go
now that's commercial dryland
permaculture
real diversity real production real
economy supporting the community great
stuff that's what we need to see