Purpose: To foster a community of farmers and gardeners whose focus is the development of ecologically sustainable agriculture practices, production of healthy food, conservation of energy, education and the sharing of skills and labor, and creation of community self-reliance. To embrace the permaculture ethic and share the responsibility for restoring a sustainable and ecologically viable way of life.
“Cultures cannot survive without a sustainable agricultural base and land use ethic. Permaculture is about relationships we can create between minerals, plants animal and humans by the way we place them in the landscape. The aim is to create systems that are ecologically sound and economically viable, which provide for their own needs, do not exploit or pollute and are therefore sustainable in the long term.” – Bill Mollison
Imperative: We are at a crucial stage in climate change, economics, energy descent and transitioning to self-reliant homesteads and communities. Permaculture has principles and ethics to help individuals, communities and families develop their resources into stable and continuously viable homes and property. It is time to take an active role to improve our present and future food and economic security. The conventional model of industrial agriculture is totally dependent on fossil fuels for fertilizers, pest control, plowing and harvesting, transport of food, and refrigeration. With the impending advent of escalating fuel prices due to oil depletion, this system can falter and may collapse. Our future food security must derive from a decentralized, localized, diverse system of production and distribution, become grounded in building and maintaining fertile and sustainable soils and environments.
Philosophy: To create an ecologically sound, economically prosperous human community that is guided by the ethic of care for the earth, care for people, reducing waste, sharing the surplus and working towards a sustainable future.
Goals: The Kaw Permaculture Collaborative endeavors to bring together knowledgeable Permaculture practitioners and land stewards with local farmers and urban gardeners who want to learn about and implement permaculture design and practice on their land and urban communities. We plan to develop a series of ongoing workshops on sustainable living, basic permaculture principles and certified courses in permaculture design. We also want to establish a forum for sharing ideas and skills on sustainable agriculture, food distribution, water catchment, creating biodiverse soils, seed saving & exchange, and much more.
Kansas Permaculture Institute & KPC in Collaboration with Midwest Permaculture
Spring 2012 PDC Nine Day Intensive – May 29 – June 6
Description:
This Intensive Permaculture Design Certification Course is 9 days of focused and quality Permaculture training, demonstration and hands-on field work activities. It will take place at a variety of urban and broad-acre farm sites currently practicing principles of ecological agriculture. This course will bring together the combined talents of 3 accomplished Permaculture teachers with many years of combined experience, working with the ecology of the central plains bio-region. Prepare to enjoy 9 days of world class instruction in Permaculture Design from this dynamic trio.
Steve Moring of Kaw Permaculture Collaborative and Director of the Kansas Permaculture Institute, and owner of Vajra Land Management Services. Steve has studied permaculture since 1992, and is practicing its method on his farm. He received his PDC certification in 2008 and permaculture teachers training last year from Midwest Permaculture. He is the founder of the Kaw Permaculture Collaborative and independently teaches permaculture design certification courses in the Kansas City area. Steve has studied medicinal botany and been a teacher of physical and life sciences in industry and academia for over 30 years. He has many years of experience cultivating medicinal plants on a farm and garden scale, and has worked as a consultant to the herbal products industry. He is engaged as a regional land consultant, specializing in the cultivation of alternative crop systems, medicinal herbs, permaculture system design, as well as prairie and woodland restoration.
Bill Wilson of Midwest Permaculture. Bill holds two Permaculture Design Certificates and has taken advanced training in both permaculture design and in teaching permaculture. Bill and his wife, Becky, founded Midwest Permaculture in 2006, and have hosted over 28 PDC courses. Midwest Permaculture is Bill’s full-time calling consisting of managing, teaching, speaking, writing, and providing permaculture design services.
Wayne Weiseman of The Permaculture Project, LLC, is certified by the Permaculture Institute of Australia as an instructor of the Permaculture Design Certificate Course. He is also certified by the American Institute of Architecture (AIA) and the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA). Wayne has taught and lectured internationally for many years. He has worked as a school teacher and as a consultant to educators and administrators in curriculum and professional development. As a primitive wilderness instructor he relied on observation techniques and a thorough understanding of the natural world to ply his trade. Wayne is Director of The Permaculture Project LLC, a full-service, international consulting and educational business promoting the ideas of eco-agriculture, renewable energy resources and eco-construction methods.
This intensive constitutes the core 72 hours of Permaculture Design training and culminating in certification through the Kansas Permaculture Institute. For more info contact Steve Moring at (785) 691-7305 or moringse@gmail.com.
In 2008 after reading Dave Jackes’ books on creating forest gardens we became inspired to the same on Vajra Farm. When our property was purchased by its previous owner it was comprised of about 50% field and woodland in mid-phase succession toward a forested landscape. The old fields were being invaded by shrubs, cedars and small trees. After we built our home and moved onto the land in 2000 we began to intervene in the process by restoring prairie where cropland existed 25 years before.
By 2008 we had established vegetable gardens, herb gardens, vineyards and a healing garden. It was time to start thinking about a greater diversity of crops and greater food production. The idea of a polyculture forest garden system that once planted and established would support itself with little intervention from me the farmer and produce an abundance of fruit, nuts and forage sounded fantastic. But could it be done? In my way of thinking, life is a process of becoming, an opportunity for creating something unique.
In the summer of 2008 I started making maps and diagrams for a vision of a series of forest gardens. To the north of our new home was about 1 acre of a 5 acre area that was neglected in my early years on the farm. It was wild, full of young trees, shrubs, thorny vines and cedars. This was to be my place of experimentation. I reckoned that I could clear out the brush and vines where one might plant some pecan, large nut oaks, hickories and chestnut trees. So that year I planted a few chestnuts and shellbark hickories on the margin of the cedar and dogwood thicket and a strip of prairie. These trees survived the winter to leaf out in the spring.
Encouraged, I planned to get more organized and aggressive with a plan to create a food forest. In the fall of 2009 I applied for a USDA Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) farmer/rancher grant to help fund the creation of forest gardens as training sites. To my surprise we were awarded the grant, and I immediately began planning two garden projects. On Vajra Farm I called for a community crop mob. This is a concept where members of the community participate in a rotating farm help program, much like the Amish tradition. In June 2010 about six folks came out to the farm to cut the brush with shears and hand saws, using the chop and drop method. In this way most of the vegetative debris was left in place to decompose into soil. That summer I continued cutting brush, and with help of a couple of our farm apprentices, stacked branches and small trees that we cut into a series of woody berms to impede the flow of surface water across the forest floor. We then began planting sapling chestnut, pecan, chinquapin oak and pawpaw trees. We ringed the trees with poultry wire and mulched them with wood chips. Following tree planting we began planting nitrogen fixing species, including a ground cover of red clover and plantings of Russian pea shrub, wild senna, autumn olive, and chuckling vetch. All the planted species were watered weekly or as needed into the fall and mulched in preparation for winter.
In the spring with some of the funds from the SARE grant, we plan to plant more fruit trees, including Asian pear, disease tolerant apples, cherries, plums, apricots and peaches. This project will be on-going in the years to come with planting of more nitrogen fixing species and the cultivation of tree guilds of supporting perennial fruiting shrubs and herb. Our horizon forest garden layout is shown in figure 3. Representing over 25 edible species so far.
By Daniel Dermitzel, Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture
Here at the Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture we have been growing annual vegetables for many years. We have worked with farmers throughout Kansas City to develop and share better growing techniques to make small-scale urban agriculture more profitable.
More recently, some of us have become interested in soil-conserving agriculture, first no-till vegetable production and now multi-story perennial food forests. For those of us who are dependent on steady incomes from intensive vegetable production, these methods may sound impractical or difficult because they seem to require a lot of labor and / or knowledge, or in some cases produce a smaller harvest per acre than we have come to expect.
But the reasons to switch at least some of our land to soil-conserving techniques including food forests are powerful: less maintenance and inputs in the long run; soil conservation and carbon sequestration as well as insect and wildlife habitat. And perhaps food forests will one day become the way we plant our urban greenspaces and parks?
At KCCUA we have received funding from the Audubon Society and Toyota to take small steps toward converting a suburban quarter acre field from annual vegetable production to a food forest. We are starting from scratch, with little prior knowledge of perennial crops and we’re learning as we go along. We’ve read a lot of books to learn the basic principles of forest gardening and, more importantly, we have consulted with many local experts (many of them members of the Kaw Permaculture Collaborative) and we thank them and the Collaborative very much for their guidance.
The site for the KCCUA food forest is located in Merriam, KS, just a few minutes from our main Gibbs Road Community Farm. We used to grow tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, onions, edamame and many other vegetables here until 2009. But the frequent trips for planting, watering, weeding, harvesting, etc. cost us a lot of time and energy, so the idea of a lower-maintenance perennial food system appealed to us. Now we’re looking to plant a small experimental food forest beginning with the canopy trees in Spring 2011.
Our hope is that we can document our learning experience and share it with others. We’ll start that effort with a workshop on forest gardening in May 2011. Stay tuned for details on that coming very soon.
More information about the design process and the plants we will be growing at the KCCUA food forest will be posted soon. Check this website and www.kccua.org for information.
You can also contact Daniel Dermitzel, Associate Director and Farmer at the KC Center for Urban Agriculture (daniel@kccua.org) for more information or if you would like to volunteer some time at the food forest.
Here are some pictures (above) of the site we’re developing and an image of the canopy and shrub layers as it is currently planned.
Daniel Dermitzel, Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture
daniel@kccua.org www.kccua.org
What is “Permanent Culture” and what are the pieces that go into building real local sustainability?
For those already familiar with the term “Permaculture”, the leading descriptions would likely include the term “Design”. Permaculturists design whole system sustainable environments…and as a whole system, that can expand out about as far as your imagination.
Good design, driven by creativity, can expand and renew even the most archaic and decrepit failed systems, environments and locales. When we discard the Tyranny of Either/Or, and work together to fashion a vision of action geared towards helping our communities, amazing transformation can happen.
This TED talk by Emily Pilloton, of Project H Design is one such example of the power of community, creativity and good design.
Ran across this EXCELLENT video from another food activists website. It’s an interview of “Farmer Brad”, a local farmer in Texas that is operating a CSA for a few hundred families.
NOTE: There has been a lot of folks weighing in on local food safety issues because of the Food Safety and Modernization Act (FSMA) which came out of the Senate as S 510. I’ve seen folks disparage the spokesman on this video because he is “a conservative”.
We are talking about Local Food here. We all eat it… we all need it… and many folks want to be able to grow it without being hampered by excessive regulation, or the need to apply for a “permitted exception” to grow food for our communities.
This is about growing food, not about peoples politics. Anyway… nuff said
If you are interested in hearing what a farmers take is on new regulations… one that touches on all the issues that matter to folks who believe eating food is good, give a listen to “Farmer Brad” of Home Sweet Farm.
21 November 2010
at Forest Floor Permaculture, 1311 Prairie Ave., Lawrence KS
Present: Ben Stallings, Lori Zell, Marie Bunning, Jason Aarons, Hilary Noonan, Pete Maynard, Christine Shuck, Mike Hoey, Daniel Dermitzel, Dave Yates, Steve Moring (facilitator), Michael Almon (note taker)
Introductions and Review
After we each introduced ourselves around the circle, Steve gave a brief history and vision of the K.P.C., which is a project of the Sustainability Action Network, a 501(C)(3) not-for-profit. He then gave a review of the discussion from the August 8 meeting, and a recap of the past season activities. One of the highlights is that the Kansas Permaculture Institute is now a part of S.A.N. also, and will provide training certification within that context.
Plans for 2011
Apprenticeships – We discussed apprenticeships that would rotate among several permaculture sites such as Prairie Lovesong Farm, Vajra Farm, Forest Floor Permaculture, Karlin Family Farm, and the K.C.C.U.A. Food Forest. Such an apprenticeship could be part of a Permaculture Design Course leading to certification. K.C. Permaculture Guild – Now that Sara Shmigelsky has moved away, the group is dormant. Hilary Noonan volunteered to try to restart it. P.D.C. Course – Steve is planning a Spring course. It could be sixteen sessions spread out over weeks as done previously, an intensive weekend, or a typical 10-day session. But if it includes field trips, it’s easier if they are spread out, and the practicum seems easier during Summer months. The certificate will be issued through the new Kansas Permaculture Institute. Grants – Now that S.A.N. is 501(C)(3), we will more easily qualify for grant funding. The idea is to apply for a block grant for various sites, through S.A.R.E., S.B.I.R., or others that we may identify. Workshops – These would be informal, collaborative learning efforts in: cold frames, solar food dehydrators, rain barrels, high tunnels, etc. We could do these during the winter, inside somewhere such as at the Karlin’s, if they are willing. Seasonal tours – We want our Summer tour to reach out more widely beyond the Lawrence area. We could include Pete Maynard in Leavenworth, Linda Hezel in Kearney MO, and the K.C.C.U.A. Food Forest in K.C. Kansas. We also may do a single-site winter tour, if it works out.] Crop Mobs – Crop mobs have been effective several places around the country. We had a brief taste of it last Summer, but it wasn’t sustained. For it to work, it needs to be egalitarian so that participants commit to helping at the farms or gardens of each other in equal share. Participants set a calendar and choose a sequence of sites to mob. Tasks need to be planned in advance, and be something that benefits from the intensive labor of many. Food Forests – Several are in the works. Two that are in process with a S.A.R.E. grant are at Vajra Farm and Prairie Lovesong Farm. Steve has designed both, and the second involves swales constructed last Summer, and trees and nitrogen fixing plants going in this winter and next spring. Forest Floor Permaculture was established some years back with canopy and shrub layers, but is now incorporating swales and nitrogen fixers and ground covers. The K.C.C.U.A. Food Forest is being planned by Daniel Dermitzel with a grant from Together Green of the Audubon Society. He will be planting this winter and spring. Growers’ Land Consortium – This is an ambitious food security effort to acquire farmland near the Lawrence perimeter, and make it available to land-locked urban growers needing garden space. A few folks have discussed it for a couple years, and a meeting is scheduled for 9 December at the Lawrence Public Library. To make it work, four key elements must be coordinated: possible sites to buy, a legal structure of how folks participate and share responsibilities, a business plan to make it financially viable, and the finances found to buy the site(s).
Organization Issues
Kansas Permaculture Institute – The purpose of the K.P.I. is to be a certification agency within S.A.N. It allows for multiple teachers, but who are using consistent curriculum and standards. So far, those of us who want to participate as instructors are: Steve Moring, Michael Almon, and Ben Stallings. Ben is beginning to teach short courses in Emporia where he lives, and Michael has begun an apprenticeship program at Forest Floor. The K.P.I. already has an advisory board, but others are welcome to volunteer. Websites – Both S.A.N. and K.P.C. are revamping their websites. Send content and comments to for both sites. Ben said it would be very useful if the sites had event calendars. The sites are at http://www.sustainabilityaction.net/ and http://www.kawpermaculture.org/. List-serve – Sometimes the list-serve gets inundated with partially relevant posts, and usually comes from just a few persons. Is this too much, or do folks feel okeh deciding on their own when to hit the big “D” button? Steve will send messages to the few who are posting too much.
Collaboration and Outreach
We would like to work more with other organizations like Transition Kaw Valley, the K.C. Permaculture Guild, and Transition K.C. Youth education is another area that we would like to expand into. Reskilling – This means that most urban dwellers have lost most of the practical life skills that their grandparents knew extensively, and could not survive in the face of energy and/or food disruption. This includes folks who have chosen condo living, and those powerless from socio-economic factors. People will need access to resources and skills to use them, and the learning curve will be steep. Transition training addresses this need, but it requires the marketing of the situation to target audiences. Some public institutions are beginning, such as the K.C. Food Policy Coalition and the Douglas County Food Policy Council. Upcoming Conferences – Kansas Rural Center “Cows, Carbon, & Carrots”, 20 November 2010, in Emporia KS. Great Plains Growers Conference, 6-8 January 2011, St. Joseph MO. K.C.C.U.A. Annual Meeting, 29 January 2011, Kansas City KS.
Next Meeting
We will meet again on February 12 at the Delaware Street Commons.
11 year old Birke Baehr grew up wanting to be a professional football player. Now, he wants to be an Organic Farmer. His reason is simple… but you’ll have to hear it from him. 5 minutes of brilliance.
Wikileaks reveals U.S. sought to retaliate against France and the E.U. over the ban of GMO foods in Europe.
Democracy Now interviews Jeffrey Smith on the U.S.’s strategy to merge U.S. trade policy with Bio-Technology firms machinations to dominate global food supply.
As many of you know three members of the KPC received a USDA SARE Farmer Rancher grant to create demonstration sites for broad acre permaculture. The project involves emulating natural ecosystems in the establishment of forest gardens for the production of fruit and nut crops.
Digging Swales
At the Hjersted farm near Linwood, Kansas, we developed a permaculture plan to establish a food forest of walnuts, pecans, chestnuts, hazelnuts, paw paws, apple, pear, peach and a variety of other fruit and berries.
The site for our project consists of about two acres of pasture land on a 4% slope that had been used to organically graze a combination of a few cattle, sheep, pigs and free range chickens. The soil of the acreage consists of two different types in transition moving down slope.
At the top there is a Pawnee clay-loam that is classified as moderately well drained and near the bottom half there is a Sibleyville silt-loam soil that is moderately-high drained.
Finishing Swales
What does this mean for growing nut and fruit trees? A moderate degree of water runoff, and difficulty holding nutrients in the soil. Pecans love a moist well drained soil.
In order to better hold nutrients and moisture in the soil we planned to create three large swales on the landscape.
In theory the swales collect the water and allow it to slowly percolate into the soil as opposed to running off into a creek basin below the area. With funds provided by our SARE grant we hired an excavator to dig the swales on contour. In late July we broke ground. We surveyed the area and pegged out the keylines on contour.
Then a 1 ½ ft trench was excavated with a back hoe and the soil piled on the downhill slope.
Spreading Mulch on Berm
To finish the swale the uphill lip a portion of the top two swales we encountered areas of hardpan in the soil. Fortunately we were able to punch through a 2 -3 inch layer of fine sandstone-like material. Breaking the hard pan will allow water to move in the subsoil to nourish tree roots.
The swales were completed by the 1st of August , and a team of permaculture students set out to cover the swale lip and berms with red clover seed and straw.
Our plan is to plant as many nitrogen and carbon fixing short lived perennial cover crop species to build up the soil in preparation and support of fruit and nut tree species that will be planted in the spring.
Water Harvesting in Swales
Our next step in the process is to wait for rain to learn how well the swales hold water and how quickly it percolates into the soil. On Aug. 31 the farm received about 4 inches of rain over 24 hours and the swalesfilled with about a foot or more of water. In two days the water receded about six inches, indicating a good perc rate.
To fully understand the value of the use of swales for conserving and holding moisture on the landscape see Geoff Lawton’s “Water Harvesting”.
As the fruit and nut tree forest grows through phases of succession from nitrogen fixing species to mature bearing trees the amount of material and energy input will decline and the productivity of the food forest will increase.
In 15 to 20 years the food forest may look from above like this layout design with fruit trees
Food Forest Layout between Swales
on top of the swale berm and pecan and walnut trees below. Paw Paws will be nestled under the walnut trees and berry bushes in the understory. We are planning for hazelnut hedges on the upper edge of the swales (not shown in diagram) and insect nectaries of wildflowers in open spaces between.
To learn more about the ethics, principles and methods of permaculture consider attending the Kansas City Fall Permaculture lecture series, “Introduction to Permaculture Ethics, Principles and Design” with Steve Moring of Vajra Farm. The course consists of a series of 9, three hour sessions with lectures and video screenings held every Thursday beginning September 23 from 6 – 9 pm at the Matt Ross Community Center, 8101 Marty St. Overland Park, KS.
