What Will I Learn?

How to:

• Turn deserts into prairies within a year or two.

• "Read the land" for its potential.

• Design inexpensive, environmentally sound buildings and incorporate them ecologically into the landscape.

• Find land to farm in your community for $1 per acre per year.

• More than double the yield from your rangeland while increasing soil fertility & the health of your herds.

• Avoid disaster; fully and thoroughly check out a piece of land, inventory its resources and problems before
  buying it.

• Become an Ecological Land Developer and provide as many as three middle class incomes per acre in land-based, value-added, agricultural enterprises.

• Rehabilitate destroyed soils to support limited agriculture in a few months.

• Assemble high-yield food forests.

• Create Oases in drylands-Growing trees without irrigation using only 6 inches of rainfall.

• Desalinate salted land.

Straw Bale Building Bob Theis' firm has been at the forefront in the development of load bearing straw bale roof systems. The 1997 IIEA Permaculture Design Course was the site of the largest strawbale vault yet built (25 feet wide by 90 feet long.) The students, under Bob's direction, built their own dormitory using a pointed arch profile similar to this prototype. Bob will be teaching again this year.

Plus, you'll learn:

• Inexpensive methods for capturing and holding millions of gallons of water for reforestation, pasture improvement, farming, spring and watershed restoration.

• Polyculture designs that improve the soil while producing up to 16 times the yield of conventional monoculture.

• Aquaculture on the farm: how you can make a decent living on a properly designed 1/4 - 1/2 acre pond.

• Changing local climate & making it rain.

• Biological retirement: Long term, low risk, high value crops that could fund a comfortable retirement in 10-20 years.

• Growing/making your own vehicle/irrigation fuel.

• Proven, inexpensive organic strategies for permanent control of farm & garden pests.

• Capitalizing small land-based enterprises without ever setting foot in a bank.

• Low cost, appropriate energy, building and farming technologies using natural or salvaged materials.

• Ways to heat/cool buildings & greenhouses at 1/10 your current costs without fossil fuels.

• Methods to treat sewage biologically from individual scale, to feedlot, to small city scale producing usable irrigation water, high value crops and more.

• The nuts and bolts of getting a small diversified farm off the ground. Community Supported Agriculture and more.

• Ecological entrepreneurism: Design a land based occupation for yourself that heals the planet, heals the human community, raises its own capital and makes a good living.

• Setting up regional alternative economic systems. Keep capital in your community and out of the hands of the multinational corporations.

Why do I need Certification?

Permaculture is a copyrighted word. Only course graduates are permitted to advertise their goods or services with the word Permaculture. If you wish to use this word in pursuing a livelihood, you must successfully complete the two-week course. The copyright is owned by the graduates of the certification courses.