We're really excited about our Broadacre Permaculture Course coming up in a few weeks, and want to encourage you to further your permaculture training by joining us.

The course is an opportunity that doesn't come around very often! The curriculum is packed with advanced permaculture training that is helpful if you're working on your property at home, building your skills as a designer, or intrigued by advanced levels of thinking in these fields - and essential to advance your knowledge base if you're a permaculture trainer/teacher. A slightly different version of the course was taught at The Farm in Tennessee just recently: see their blog for some interesting video of Darren Doherty and details on what they did each day during their course. 

Now the teaching crew is on the road, to converge here at Commonweal Garden in West Marin County (Bolinas, in the Bay Area). The 12-day course starts October 9 and is offered in two 6-day parts. You can sign up for the whole course or take one of the two parts. See our website for more information on costs and how the course is broken up. 

Part One

Keyline Plowing and Water Management (Oct 9 - 11) 
Instructor: Darren Doherty
The keyline plow breaks up hard packed soil that can develop from repeated plowing and other activities. By breaking up this layer, the keyline plow allows plant roots to grow much deeper into the soil, breaking up the clay pan further. The result is a dramatic increase in topsoil depth over time, particularly in rangeland soils, where the added pressure of grazing causes grass roots to reach deep into the soil. This part of the course will address keyline design applications, agricultural machinery, site analysis and survey techniques, methods of design and GIS applications, client communications, agroforestry, and carbon farming techniques.

Holistic Resource Management (Oct 12 - 14)
Instructor: Kirk Gadzia
Contrary to popular belief, ranching does not have to be damaging to grasslands - in fact, grasslands have co-evolved with grazing animals, and grasses and cattle need each other to thrive. Using techniques that mimic the way wild herds used to roam across the land, you'll learn how to "orchestrate" a score that has been playing for eons, putting us in a role as land steward rather than in conflict with the natural world. Even if you're not a rancher, this course will help you to understand how using animals can help you create your landscape goals and provide a powerful tool for affecting landscapes both large and small. The course is based on the work of Allen Savory, who pioneered the idea of Holistic Resource Management more than 40 years ago to offer land stewards a way to make grazing, land management and financial decisions that positively impact land health and productivity. 

Part Two

Soil Food Web Analysis (Oct 16 - 18)
Instructor: Elaine Ingham
There is a whole world under the soil – and no one knows this cast of characters better than Elaine Ingham! Elaine is one of the world’s leading soil microbiologists, with 30 years of experience researching and teaching and an easy and enthusiastic style that brings the soil food web to life. Elaine literally wrote the book on compost teas: The Compost Tea Brewing Manual.

Integrated Earthworks (Oct 19)
Instructor: Brad Lancaster
Irrigation water can come from free on-site rain, stormwater, air conditioning condensate, and greywater in a way that turns wastes into resources and liabilities into assets. Earthworks harvest water in our easiest, largest, and least expensive "tank" - the soil. Free gravity takes the water to the soil. Living pumps of vegetation then enable us to access and use that harvested water in the form of beauty, food, shelter, wildlife habitat, and passive heating and cooling strategies, while controlling erosion, increasing soil fertility, reducing downstream flooding, and improving the quality of the water and air. We will cover site assessment (including calculating your site's rainwater, stormwater, and greywater income), and the selection, sizing, construction, and planting of various home-scale earthworks that will make the most of your site's regenerative potential and resiliency.

Agroforestry: A System of Diverse, Sustainable and Abundant Yields (Oct 20)
Instructor: Penny Livingston-Stark
Agroforestry is a system of agriculture where the main production comes from trees, woody and herbaceous understory plants as well as self sowing annuals and bulbs.  These highly productive diverse systems work with nature to create ecosystems for many layers of functional plants, shrubs and trees. These perennial polycultural systems result in a level of diverse abundance that can provide food, medicine, building materials, fuel and many uses for humans, domestic animals and wildlife year round. During this day, you'll learn how to design such a system in a way that works cooperatively with the surrounding landscape including existing farms and ranches.

Thinking Like a Watershed (Oct 21)
Instructor: Brock Dolman
'Slow it - Spread it - Sequester it' applies equally to the cycles of water and carbon as we re-learn to harvest the bountiful flows of the living planet and put them to work in support of all life’s processes upon which humanity is fully dependent. With this final day of the Broadacre Permaculture course we will explore the integration of the preceding class topics and how they nest within a comprehensive whole that exemplifies some of the best of broadacre watershed management concepts. Watershed planning and policy issues will be discussed  as they relate to opportunities for participation by students, empowered with this information to actively engage with existing larger community land use and development processes.

Happy Equinox!
Penny Livingston and the RDI Staff

Regenerative Design Institute
P.O. Box 923 | Bolinas, California, 94924
415-868 9681