Geoff Lawton: Surviving Collapse, Designing your Way to Abundance

[Music] hi I'm Geoff Lawton I'm a permaculture teacher designer and consultant and I work all over the world I've worked in more than 35 countries helping people understand how they can live in a sustainable way other people come in to us all the time where people who are bankers we have military people we have scientists we have farmers we have people from oil and gas industry professional people and they won't know what they can do to survive crisis that appears to be approaching in many forms food crisis financial crisis water crisis energy crisis climate crisis there seems to be much evidence that that that crisis of all kinds are approaching I don't profess to be an expert in those subjects but I can teach you how to live in a way that can provide your needs and the needs of your family and the needs of your community if necessary in a really beneficial and abundant way so that you can be healthier and secure and really understand what it is to live in a really meaningful way to survive providing all your needs with a system of design we teach permaculture design to people who have and struggle they find it really hard to understand how am I going to provide all my needs how am I going to provide my water how am I going to provide my housing my energy of efficiency in all the things I'm going to need to survive in a civilized way until they find that there is a design system out there and we've got examples on the ground we can teach you how to survive we can teach you how to survive without a struggle in a in an abundant way in a way that provides all your needs and you'll realize that if you follow this system it becomes a very meaningful way to live and the way that you can help other people as well in 1996 I was invited to manage the permaculture institute in Australia at Akari farm in northern New South Wales this was the foundation Institute established by Bill Mollison the founder of this design system a very complex landscape with 48 pounds and 6 kilometres of water harvesting earthworks Wales and this property was a iconic example of what can be done to rehabilitate landscape into real productivity it was a drive property originally and at establishment it had an overflow of water through the middle slopes of 3 2 inch pipes flowing continuously out through fish ponds and aquatic production systems that out produce the original gradient production of the property in protein on just two acres of land use leaving of the hundred and forty eight acres 146 was actually in surplus to our production on protein and here was the training site where we put people through courses so that they could get trained up to go out around the world and work on all kinds of projects from that site we actually established projects worldwide in all kinds of zones not just aid but emergency aid like refugee Camp rehabilitation and large-scale landscapes that have been totally degraded I went from that experience on to work for 8 on 8 projects in the Middle East places like Jordan and the Dead Sea Valley where we still work today we established a project that became famous call and and it got called the green in the desert project so we wanted to add a lot and we know olden know this is like this at the end of the earth this is like no time as you can get this is hydrated and it's 10 acres of almost dead flat completely salted landscape 400 meters below sea level lowest place on earth 2 kilometers from the Dead Sea at night - about 2 kilometers where Jesus was christened hardly got any rainfall we've got temperatures in August's that go over 50 degrees everybody's farming under plastic strip everybody spray spray spray everybody's put in synthetic fertilizer on over grazer go just like maggots eating the flesh off the bone down to the bones of the country literally like maggots giant maggots eating it - nothing so we designed up a system that would harvest every single bit of rain water that fell on it on 10 acres as one and a half kilometers of swale water harvesting ditch on contour and when there's full 1 million litres Lord so teeny laughter and they'll feel quite a few times over a winter and then we heavily mulch those swells with organic matter which was trash from organic fields nearby and put that almost half of me to D so we save that and mulch our swells which is about two meters wide and half a meter deep on the trench then we put micro irrigation underneath the mulch and then on the uphill side of the water harvesting trench we put nitrogen-fixing very Hardy pioneer desert trees which help shade and reduce window evaporation also put nitrogen into into the soil and structure the so forth and then on the lower side of the trench we put fruit trees major inundate farms as the long-term overstory in the end and then we put in figs pomegranates guavas mulberries now some citrus within four months we had figs and meter-high wood figs on which is impossible we've done a course male and female course trained up some locals and we got a translator who's working for the project here his degree in agriculture in the dueling University and he got onto his mates and said in the agriculture the panel well you said we couldn't grow fish we got six grand and we got figs on them you better come and test us all because no matter what you say we're either growing in salty soil what we shouldn't be growing all these salt it's a soil and we like to know what we've done and they came in and the salt levels are dropping so they became interested the salt levels are dropping around as well they certainly must have washed it through so it normally is a huge amount water on and wash the salt through to the lower levels which just makes the ground water more sold it in the end you're sold at 20 meters deep if you keep doing it and then it will take a thousand years to recover and we use only one-fifth the amount of water so the water they salt we've washed it all through now which is one-fifth that really got up when they risks without so much water we hadn't used we with the same amount of water normally use on that much area we should have done 58 originally people last hours because we didn't put straight lines we went on contour wood these swells why don't you put sure you got a bulldozer you can collect in the desert you can strain so we want to go and contour so she's our longer a jewel the water passively then we planted more non prune trees within fruit trees so they last us unproductive things more interactive things what's the point in it in soil that won't even grow anything so you know and then and then we covered all the insiders as well with huge amount of holes where they scrape all the organic matter off and burn it like most traditional agriculture in the middle of winter we got a funny email we've got mushrooms growing in the swamp when they called it fungus but when we saw a photograph of mushrooms because they'd never seen mushrooms who's never had that much humidity in living history in the swirl and when you open up the mold there's all these little animals there you know there's little insects and the soil has come alive and the fungi net that's underneath the mulch is putting off a waxy substance which is repelling the salts away from the area and the decomposition is locking the salt up and the salt is not gone it's become inert and insoluble so we could we could green tree green Middle East we could regrain any desert and we could be salt at the same time and and and if we can do it on an insignificant flat little bit of ten acres of flat step desert if you give us something with catchment or a Wadi or you know Canyon or any of those roses values we can turn it right away completely you can fix all the world's problems in a garden you can you can solve them all in a garden use of all your pollution problems and all your supply line needs in the garden and most it was actually today don't actually know that and and that makes most people very insecure those examples let us on more and more so that people became interested in the inquiry increase and it still increases today that's why more and more people want to know if there are going to be large global crises and you're getting results in such degraded land in small area to large area our design system works with the natural system it harmonizes with the patterns of nature so that we actually repair the landscape as we provide our needs because of that we're helping normal people all the time from those experiences we moved on to the new Institute where we are now the permaculture Research Institute the 66 acre farms a tuna farm and here when we arrived there was nothing there was no road there was no dams there was no water no ponds no no track it was just a burnt-out old farm news there's a basic grazing cattle system we camped here originally there was nothing here the first thing we did was set up water harvesting systems we set up gravity irrigation from high catchment first leading down so that we could put in our first Gardens we put in the long-term system so they could get established like food forests with no connections to the outside world we set up our own energy systems we built our own houses and infrastructure that will work as very efficient systems that call themselves and he themselves and catch our own drinking water more and more people started to come and see what we were doing even when there was a large drought in the area the worst drought in a hundred years our local village was even cut off from water supply and only had basic water and limited amount supplied in the street we were irrigating all kinds of crops here to establish our first garden and run in quite a few sprinklers local people would come and are how are you irrigating you're not supposed to be pumping water there's a shortage of water but we're oversupply because we had gravity irrigation systems for water harvest in wales and ponds and dams uphill with a gravity irrigate as much water as we wanted and it's a simple system yet people thought we were actually lucky there's nothing lucky about that it was often the common but this is dying so we could explain the people you can design a property to be drought proof you can have an oversupply of water to irrigate you can have a supply of all your own drinking water you can supply all your own energy systems we're not connected to the main grid which we're not connected to the outside world at all apart from telephones and now we have crop gardens that supply great diversity of food we have animal systems we have small animals ticking ducks rabbit we even have goats we milk we have a house cows that we milk we have beef cows we have intact we even have horses for an alternative transport system if we need them we have grazing systems that help rehabilitate the land we have food forests that are advancing across the landscape we have systems where the animals help us by cycling the animals first to condition the land so that we can plant long-term food forests and and not only food but forest it will provide future building material people now come here for war for education we provide twenty five thousand meals a year to student staff and volunteers most of which is all provided from the farm we supply this as an example so that people can learn that you can do this for yourself this we can teach anywhere we've worked in climates that are as dry as possible rice hottest degraded tropical large rain areas that have cold climate deep snows from the extremities of climate from the large area to the overcrowded city urban gardens balcony Gardens how you can provide for your own needs no matter what the limitation whether it's a climate limitation or a space limitation whether you're out in remote areas or you're overcrowded in in dense populations there are ways that you can design to provide your needs and help other people do the same with cooperation we can do this for you and now we want to teach more people because there appears to be a tipping point with so many crisis potential backing up in front of us it's going to be important to teach more than just people in a classroom we're training more teachers all the time but we feel I feel there is an obligation to be able to teach more people at once we'd like to include you in that situation so that we can help get to a positive tipping point where we can help the world help itself move towards a much more positive and abundant future you have a pasture a field or a meadow like this this grass isn't a few clovers on the ground because I can show you how to evolve this into a really stable food for assistance here we go let's go forward in evolution I'll step over an electric net fence and here is a 50 meter electric net fence it encompasses a hundred and fifty square meters of ground and we have a mobile chicken house this is your purpose Birds there's good egg layers and pretty good meat birds too we have some food supply we have a eggs production and producing about 30 eggs a day let's feed it on hand the supplement of feed have a solar panel on the roof so it's going to turn energy supply for the fence and they've got their own water supply and they'll process this ground we'll add a few scraps after they've done this we'll move them on we'll pull out a few resistant weeds and this is what the ground starts to look like it's just all scratched up and any weeds that might be here a bit of grass they will just pick it out scuff it out turn it over and this it's just that it's in scatter mops put on it and cover crop seed pudding and we're about to start planning this with fruit trees just three weeks before that is what this looked like and this is the cover crop and here are the bit little beans cow peas they're coming up and they're fertilized in the ground and we've already planted the fruit trees in position every stake is a fruit tree or a support species and there's plants like comfrey in here as an added support mineral accumulator these little leggy 'm trees all the way through and fruit trees so we're evolving if we go back a few more weeks again this is what it this is the same system it's evolved a little bit further and we've got other top and drop plants in here and as we go back again this is what it looked like before it goes to this now we've really got too much going down so we've got all sorts of trees evolving now we can go back again and we go into a larger system if we step back ten years then we go into a major established system we've evolved so we can do this system quicker with the assistance of chicken tractor in large scale on last ten years ago this was bare soil you can do this on just empty land ground isn't a much value you can convert very quickly a hundred and fifty plus meters at a time into a permanent productive stable food forest system when you look at this it looks really untidy and unmaintained but you've just got to trust in an actual system because it's worked forever this is the most dependable system just trust it work with it get to understand how it functions and backs up nutrient and and becomes more abundant all the time it produces more energy than it consumes in our to our benefit if you can live with that little bit of disorder in appearance maintaining a system that moves towards permanence and abundance we can live on this earth forever assistance that we can be proud of and we can tell the future generations we move this forward and we started the new evolution of humanity this is the future and the only future that's possible let's do it well quite Littlefoot look at that that's a healthy breakfast snack everyone should be able to do this should be the the right of humanity to eat food still alive at mulberry screaming must me feel alive screaming I can provide you with a common sense establishment plan with this design system it'll benefit the land it will definitely benefit you sure we can teach you how to put in a vegetable garden a food crop system that establishes really fast and actually builds good soil as it as you provide for your needs but those are annual crops and you have to know how to save the seed to extend those systems and you've got to get that right there's quite a lot of detailed information that you need to understand and you will enjoy learning it you can go from a diverse nutrient dense food garden that will provide you with a lot of food and a lot of healthy nutrition and you can go on to storage crops and main crops where you have to grow bulk food and you've got to understand how to go about that and it's not that hard it's quite far you can go on to animal systems and you can go small animals understanding how to breathe this breed stock on so you have good lines of animal strains so that you've got very good breed lines and larger animals and grazing systems if you've got that much land if you haven't it's okay you can do a lot with small animals you can do a lot with small garden that's all fine we can teach you how to do the housing and energy systems and the water supply fine the food forest perennial systems long-term productive forestry that takes a little bit longer and it's very special because this system the larger system the kind of ecosystem of long term productivity for food and building materials and fibers those diverse perennial systems not much recognized needs to be established quite early because they take a while to establish but there are credibly valuable because they have long-term security if you gain lots of important people wanting to come and take your system down they're hungry they're looking for food they're going to come and eat your vegetable garden now and you're not going to have any seed crop left to grow your next garden unless you know how to save the seed unless you know how to keep that seed and keep it viable continuous they see your animals bigamous they can take two animals they're going to eat them it's pretty hard to hide your bread stops now but if you saw a large forest that's productive in a diverse forest it's kind of even hard to recognize because it's a food forest it's a mixture of food and products and fiber and timber all mix up together it's a whole mixture of stuff there might be some fruit ripe and that might get taken but there's going to be fruit that's right at different times of year and people are only going to rise in one Rob maybe and they're not kind of chopped forests and they are hungry they're not going to they're not going to pull all that extra effort in to destroy your system if it's a large standing forest so you put something of great security you've got something that'll last you've got something that if people do recognize it it's going to be impressive they don't have one no how do I do that maybe you'll got something for sharing maybe you're worth cooperating with and you have got something to help people with from that larger security system you can build back to real survival again this is a great security system it's a major part of understanding how to build productive ecosystem as a design trade within the system itself so your water systems your soil systems your animal system you this is a tree system to housing systems they all work together they give you something that you can work with as a family unit as a community unit even an urban city unit getting people to understand this together we can do this could teach you as an individual and teach you as a group and teacher as a family you can teach yourself once you get an understanding of the information and knowledge we can get you into action let me show you the farm [Music] here we are between two swells in fact there's a third swell there's a force well there's a force well at the top of the hill an old as well that's what I knew as well just above the driveway the driveway on contour then a swell following below on contour that's quite well true and there's actually a swell down below in between there's a walking track on contours it's a lot of elements on contour but right in between the swells front and center in this view you can see a newly planted food forest that's emerging here with patches of mulch trees and cover crop that's coming out nice and green summer cover crop next patch over is an area that system mulched and planted and then we have the chickens so we have our little chicken house where the chickens are all inside an electric net fence there's a solar panel on the roof ten days of scratching in that area and we can convert that into a hundred and fifty square meters of food forest stage by stage this whole section between these two swells will convert into a very productive and advanced in diverse food port we've got the dairy laneway here and this is a really high nutrient packed of ground because the cows are often shut in there at night while the cards are put into the pen that means you can milk the mothers in the morning but the manure flows to either side it's actually an absolute Ridgeline laneway either side of that is a food forest that's been put in leaning towards the mediterranean type of species there's actually plums and peaches as well as citrus and figs and pomegranate and a little bit of a subtropical mix here and there because we are really subtropical but this lower area the property allows you to go a little bit towards Mediterranean this whole area was put in with mobile chicken tractors every move of the chicken tractor was planted up behind with an intense planning of support species and the fruit trees are now the main positions so over a period of time the support species were all chopped and dropped and then the emergence of the mainframe food forest came through and this is now what's left and up and established and the chickens many generations later I've actually come through and are now free ranging throughout the forest so on the Left we have almost an acre of food forest reason you want to study at this stage with now large enough for chickens to free-range fruit under their straw right at the top end and on the right we have and areas it's now free range by ducks there are lots of type 1 errors you could make if you don't approach this the right way it is a system which works with constant principles proven science that actually works with natural systems and you have to follow to the rule if you don't get this sequence correct you can waste an awful lot of time and it can take a lot of time to redo the everybody says once they go through this educational system of design becomes a transformational event you're transformed in the way you think about the process and you know that there is a system that works for you if you're not careful major errors can take place so I really want to help you move forward with this so that you will know exactly what to do and this will work so that I can give you three major approaches are provided with a video in the next week that not only shows you what you can do in the basic approach the main three elements to start a exercise of assessment for purchasing land rural and urban if you want to get on to a large piece of land how do you affect it I can help you with that I can give you a checklist of what to look for I can give you a checklist for largely rural land or an ideal urban garden so you don't buy a property that's going to be a problem for you and difficult to design and not it's not going to provide you with these resources very easily this is something that will really help you get started and give you confidence that you know what to do at least with a foundational mainframe approach to common-sense abundant by survival of a good design system food fires are a really special part of the system if perennial food systems are so secure if you're interested in this pass this information on to somebody else so I'd like you to give us a comment on this we're always interested in your comment and and and and we always will the help has post a comment down below send this to some of your friends or family or people you you might think you are interested we're going to send you more information next week look out for our email and we really look forward to helping you move forward into a very positive cosmic survival future

Channel: Freedom Unbound

Views: 287,019

Rating: 4.8818326 out of 5

Keywords: geoff lawton, soils, designing abundance, surviving collapse, permaculture, design, gardening, gardener, prepper, prepping, doomsday, jeff sokol, homesteading, homestead, homesteader, wranglerstar, survival, bushcraft, sustainable, living

Id: 01N-kBSdiZI

Length: 34min 17sec (2057 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 24 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Hubertus_Hauger]

Food is of utmost importance for us. So securing that for our survival is best.

Permaculture is a splendid idea of organising nature that way, that after a while there is a paradise, giving us effortless in abundance, what we need.

Such an overwhelming enthusiasm I may take with a grain of salt.

While it is clear, that future agriculture will have to switch increasingly towards organic farming, due to the available resources left. But the claims for Permaculture to be more fruitful by a large margin, lets say 100 % to 200 % more, there is no evidence for.

In my final analysis there is more wishful thinking involved, in order to propagate the idea successfully and because the post-collapse future looks so dire in its frugality and shortages to unavailable resources, that a cornucopian dream tries to avoid the pain of loss by painting a colourful picture of a promised land.