Hi, Geoff Lawton here. And my sympathy goes out to everybody who's suffering out there with this virus, and especially the people
who've lost people. It's a terrible situation
and it's gone global faster than anyone could ever imagine. We were caught in Saudi Arabia, suddenly we couldn't fly out. Eventually we got out
through London and Qatar, and now I'm stuck in Melbourne 'cause I couldn't get a flight home to northern New South Wales. Melbourne was my only option. And here I am, downtown
Melbourne in quarantine, in a hotel room, Nadia,
Latifa and I, 14 days. Not even connected to the outside world, these windows don't open, no airstream. And we're almost a week through and I'm starting to work
online, I want to help. And I put out Instagram, and I
particularly put out Facebook asking people if you want
to ask me any questions, and I'll do my best to answer
'em in my particular style. So here we are. All kinds of questions came in, and I'm going to do my best
to answer as many as I can in this session. And we'll see how many sessions I can do. So we'll try and organize
it so you can ask questions, and we'll try and answer
particular questions and themes. And if you want me to do
a five to 10-minute rave, there's one particular subject that you always wanted
more information on, if I can do it, I'm going to do
it, I'm going to put it out there. Because I think we need permaculture more than any other time now, it's so obvious that these
disconnects from nature give us these vulnerabilities
in our health, in our communities, in our economy, and in every single way you can imagine. And permaculture has the answers. And that problem is the solution. So there we go, let's go ahead
with our first question here. The first one comes in from Sam Nole. And Sam wants to know, "What are your top three "recommendation books on permaculture?" Well I'd have to say the
"Permaculture Designer's Manual" by Bill Mollison is the
definitive work by design. And then I think my second
favorite is Bill Mollison's book on ferment and human nutrition, which is a very special book
about how we preserve food and add value to it. And it really comes in line with today, the ecosystem of the gut. And we know now that that's what feeds us is having a healthy gut ecosystem. So very relevant right at this moment. It's not just the food we produce, but the food we have to
store in valuable ways. It's a very, very relevant
book, fantastic book, totally underrated. And then I'd have to say
Isabell Shipard's book, "How to Use Herbs in Your Daily Life." 'Cause it's my go-to book, I think Isabell was the best
herbalist that ever lived, and she's passed on now. She was a great friend of mine
and a great friend of Bill's. I wrote a recommendation on the back of her three books she wrote, she wrote another book on sprouts and another book on survival foods. They're all classics. But "How to Use Herbs in Your Daily Life", what a go-to book. I always thought I was going to give it the best recommendation ever, and on all three books Bill
Mollison beat my recommendation with a better recommendation
in my opinion. So check those out. "Permaculture Designer's Manual", an absolute encyclopedic classic, this is the book I teach from in my permaculture design student courses. And then the book of
"Ferment and Human Nutrition" also by Bill Mollison, and then "How to Use
Herbs in Your Daily Life" by Isabell Shipard, the classic herbalist. Okay, Justin Murphy has a question now. "How would you convert land "from paddock to vegetable production?" Well the first thing you're
going to do is disfavor the grass so you end up in a germination condition. You may have to decompact it. So depends on the size of
paddock you want to convert. And then you need to know
which climate-analog you're in. The cooler, humid climates you can have a larger vegetable garden. The tropical climates, much smaller. And the desert, smaller again. Now when I say smaller,
it needs to be surrounded by a beneficial ecosystem, and that can be a productive
perennial ecosystem, i.e., a food forest. Okay, but let's look how we do the conversion on the paddock. We've got to defavor that grass. We can go over and
decompact it with a tractor and a deep ripper, or we can
do it with a garden fork, the classic garden fork is a
nice decompacting instrument. Or you can do it with a broad fork today, like a giant, two-handled garden fork. And you don't want to turn it over, you just want to decompact it. Now then you need to disfavor the grass. You either need to rotary
hoe it and turn it over. If you do that, you want to
convert it into a cover crop. Right, so lay down a cover crop, which is usually a leguminous crop that farmers use to
green manure their soils. And they're at a agricultural price, so go to your farm supplies, ask 'em what kind of green
manure crops they put down and oversow it four times
thicker than they say they normally would. So it doesn't matter, if
you're going into permanence, overseeding your green
manure, your cover crops, is a great advantage. You're only going to do
it once, and once is fine when you've got permanence
as an end result. Or you can actually, if
you got a smaller area, you can do your decompaction, you can lay down some manures,
if that's all you've got. You can lay down some
compost if you got compost. 'Course you can make compost in 18 days, and I've got videos on how to do that. Or you can lay down some vegetable scraps, chunky vegetable scraps, some food scraps, chunky fruit and vegetable
scraps with manure, with compost if you like. Then lay down really thick
newspaper and cardboard, or even old carpet works fine. And that's a sheet mulch that
actually makes the grass rot. So you can lay it right
on top of the grass. If it's really tall grass, you
might want to mow it first. Lay down your organic
matter, manure, compost, veggie scraps, or all of
them, or just veggie scraps if you haven't got anything else. You lay down worm food, all right, and then you've covered
it with a sheet mulch. And I mean thick newspaper,
I mean Sunday edition, front-to-back cover of the
Sunday edition newspaper overlapped, lay it down thick. Too thin, we know about, too thick is almost impossible to achieve. You could lay down old carpet, make sure it hasn't been sprayed for fleas or it's got any chemicals on it. You could lay down old clothes. You could lay down all kinds
of organic sheet mulch. If you only got banana
leaves in the tropics, you can lay down lots and lots
of layers of banana leaves. The idea is to cut out the light, rot the organic matter in position, with the roots of the
grass and the grass itself all becoming worm food. You've stimulated the soil life. You can't feed the plants organically, you feed the soil organisms organically, and they feed the plants. So think about this. You're feeding the soil,
the soil is an organism that's all mouth. And the fungi in the soil eat the wood, but you're not trying
to put a forest down. Forests are fungal dominated, vegetable gardens are bacterial dominated. The two main lifeforms
in the soil, en masse, there's 50 million genus of fungi, 50 million genus of bacteria, we know nothing about 'em. Know a little bit about 1% of them. A little bit about just 1%, 99% we don't know anything about at all. But we know it's full of life. And if we favor the soil life, all this living, dying,
excreting and exchanging of materials is what feeds our plants, so we're feeding the soil. You want to quickly go from
paddock to vegetable garden in a quick snap, and you want
to lay a food layer down, then a sheet mulch, and then deep mulch. And if you want to do it quick, we're talking six to
eight, 10 inches of straw, or just paddock hay, any
kind of chop-and-drop mulch that's not allelopathic, not disfavors the growth of other plants. So straw is fine, don't
worry about the seeds, don't worry about the weed seed in it. We're going to go more fertile than that, we're going to go beyond
the fertility of weeds. So lay it down thick, all right. And then make holes in your mulch, put a little pocket of good soil in there, or compost if you've got it. Put your seeds deep down,
down through towards, you just scrape out a
hole, coffee cup size, down to your sheet mulch, punch a couple of holes
in with your pen knife, it's all wet by this stage,
you've wet it all down. Pour in your good soil or good compost, put your little seed in
there, off you'll go. With that much mulch, it would take 1/50th the amount of water that bare soil would need. And also it will be warmer
in winter in soil service, and cooler in summer. So you've laid down something
that the soil organism feel like a giant forest has
suddenly landed on top of 'em, with all the beneficial
functions of a forest. But you've assembled it fast. If you do cover crop, what you want to do is you want to rotary hoe it over or dig over all your pasture grass, turn it all upside
down, smash it up a bit, then seed into it and water it, and get a quick cover crop
that dominates the whole thing. And there's no room for weeds,
there's no room for the grass to come back through because
this fast-growing legume, going to be a pea or a bean, is just going to take over
like some crazy thing. And you're going to chop that
down as chop-and-drop mulch, and plant into the holes. And leave the green cover,
taking up most of the space. As your crop comes up,
you cut more and more of the green manure crop as
a chop-and-drop to the soil. That's fast function, that moves quick. You just got to have the
confidence to put it down. Now, when you're deep mulching, that six to eight to 10 inches, you're putting one normal bale of straw over 1.3 square meters, it's pretty thick. But if you are scatter mulching
over a cover crop seed, so you're throwing your cover crop four times the density they
tell you at the ag supplies, four times the amount of seed per area, then you put one bale of straw
down as a very thin layer to 40 square meters. That's much less, right
it's just covering the soil. And you just can cover the soil so you can't see the soil itself. But if you just scratch with your fingers, the soil's exposed. It's just enough to actually increase the moisture level at the
soil, cover it up from birds. And that little bit of extra
moisture germinates it faster. And also, it's not too thick
to suppress the germination. So we call it scatter mulching, I don't think there's a name for it. It's a little bit like hand hydromulching. Four times the seed,
then the scatter mulch, water it, wait for the germination, only takes a few days. Once it's up a bit, you
can start planting into it, clear out a little hole,
put your vegetable seedling or all your seeds in there. And keep your eye on it because the legume's
going to grow much faster, the cover crop, the green manure crop's going to go much faster than vegetables. You cut them, cut that back
with a pair of kitchen scissors, and you're in control quick. So both these systems work. You might want to shape garden beds first. If you're in a humid climate
you might want to shape up some raised beds. But if go and broad over that paddock and you want to get a quick crop, and you want to get a result, those are two easy organic methods. And both of them are feeding the soil. Because the cover crop
root stay in this lovely dendritic pattern in the soil as you cut it back to your vegetable, favoring your vegetable production. And they feed the soil organisms. So all of that feeding the soil organisms, and over time you get a
better and better soil, and need less and less inputs. And it gets more and more
efficient with less energy in, the more energy out, over time
the soil increases in quality and actually quantity. Okay. Bit of a rave, that one. Anyway, we can go into more
detail, I think that's enough. All right, now, David Renali. "Should we clone the woolly
mammoth and other animals "to restore Siberian ecosystems? "Would this help with permafrost melting?" Interesting question. I'm not sure that we can
clone the woolly mammoth. Look, the domestic animals of the world have been incredibly well selected, and there's all these different
breed variations out there. So we've got the animals we need. There's a magnificent selection, and it's all about cell
grazing and pasture management in the way that we can use animals to be beneficial to the ecosystem. So their imprinting patterns,
their manural patterns, their sequences across landscape in the density to the area to the movement is what it's all about. And with any animal,
you can manage in a way that actually repairs and
speeds up the successional event of ecosystem recovery. I've even proven you
can reforest with goats, and I did that on purpose. 'Cause that's almost like an oxymoron to say you can reforest with goats. So no problem, you don't
need your woolly mammoths, we can do very well with the
domestic breed characteristics of different varieties we have. And we can speciate more
varieties, and not a problem. It's just a matter of getting
in there and doing it. And what we're really doing is we're imitating the large
herds of migratory animals that have always been in those positions. Whether it's the African
savanna or the prairies, or the Siberian tundra, you look at what the
original animals were like, and you use your domestic animals to perform the same functions, or even better, there's nothing wrong with improving nature itself by design. Because designers, that's
what we're good at, all right? So we're designing an
improved nature, imagine that. More diverse and more functional than nature itself has ever been, wow. Okay. Now we have Stuart Wilson. Here's a question, "Talk
about canopy, forest systems, "berms," now it's spelt wrong, but anyway I think he means berms, "and root systems and
how to integrate them. "Too many people don't
think about the root system "when they plant and have
huge problems later on." Now I'm not sure what problems
Stuart's referring to here. Is is Stuart? No, it's not, it's Star, sorry. I think I'm going to need to
slip my glasses on now and again. Yes, it's Star Wilson. So Star Wilson, who's
question talk about canopy. Now canopy's very interesting
in forest systems, 'cause we need the canopy
as soon as possible. But we can't get a canopy
quickly of the species we want to end up with at climax. So at climax we'd like a canopy that is 90% productive species, most of the time in our
most beneficial forests, our food forests, and
large productive forests, they're very diverse. They imitate the diversity
of a natural forest, but with novel productive
elements, we'll call them novel. But they're not rapid growers 'cause they're very sophisticated. They end up having sophisticated products. So we have to complete a canopy ASAP to benefit those productive
species as they grow to nurse them, to shelter them, to add soil, creative
soil structuring elements. And they're usually
fast-growing leguminous species or beneficial species. Now let's just look at the
tree species and plant species of the world from one
particular aspect right now. There are something like 80% of species, tree and plant species in
the world that are neutral, they don't have any beneficial effect, they don't have any negative effects on either plant and tree species. They're just neutral. And 15% are beneficial, most
of 'em are leguminous species, and some of 'em have
mycelium fungi associates. They're beneficial to
other elements around them. In other words, when you put
'em into, a companion plant in, they benefit other plants around 'em. And then only 5% are allelopathic. They disfavor plants, other
plants and trees around 'em. So this is what we have
to pay attention to. Let me repeat those numbers. 5% are allelopathic and negative to other species around 'em. 15% are positive, and there
are beneficial elements, and of course the peas and
beans and leguminous species are the big one and big number. But there are mycelium
fungi associates and others. And then 80% are kind of neutral,
it doesn't really matter. So what we need to do is we
need to look at the benefit of including other species
in the successional sequence of establishing forests. Now they're going to be
beneficial above the ground, in they're creating shelter,
they're creating shade when it's too hot and
evaporation's over rainfall. But they're going to be
recoverable if we cut 'em, drop their leaf, twig and
woody material onto the ground. Remember, "The soil is an
animal that's all mouth", quote Mr. Sash. I forgotten who I'm
supposed to be quoting now, who originally said that, but anyway. Credit to them. The soil is all animal. Soil is an animal that's all mouth, and the fungi are the
teeth that eat the wood. And a forest grows on a fallen forest. So we have to make the forest fall. Now we don't want the
productive elements to fall, we want them to go through the canopy. But there's lots of elements we can choose that are beneficial, and when
we cut them, they recover. And we can do that in such
a way that they recover and put shade over the productive species as they come through, they become nurse crops in this function. Not just producing material to the ground and growing a better forest floor, feeding the forest floor, a
forest grown on a fallen forest. They're also, in function, when we cut 'em at the right time, they grow shade to nurse the productive species coming through. And you can kill any plant or animal without any pharmaceutical
chemical products. By just cutting it and
stopping it growing leaves, you cut any large tree, doesn't matter how big and how prolific, cut it down, abuse the trunk, stress it. When it regrows, cut the
branches off regularly, every month, every three months, even every six months, and it will die. It won't take long to die. So we can do this to these productives, to these support species when ready. So as the canopy of our
intended long-term canopy comes closer and closer to climax, our support species are
cut out, are manipulated, we're designing the way the forest falls. It's a forest falling sequence. It's a successional sequence, we're designing in space and time. You're stacking time, space
and time in the same place, as the same event. That's sort of sounds a
bit woo woo, doesn't it? Stacking time within the
sequence of succession. Lovely words. But it's true, this is
what we're orchestrating. You can do it in all the
climates, it's a wonderful thing. And you can take the large logs and put 'em on the edge
of your contour footpaths, a little bit of sort of syntropic
farming, syntropicesque. Not so many footpaths as syntropics, which usually go north,
south, but on contour. They'll get wider on the ridges and get narrower as it
goes towards the valleys, making like a bow tie pattern. Your ridge lines will be the dissection of fallen ridge tracks. 'Cause your falling down
the center of a ridge track is the most stable track
going up and downhill. Your footpaths through your food forest will be more or less on contour, and they'll get closer in the valleys where it's better to have steps
and ponds and little dams. Beautiful set of harmonic patterns. So you can put your
larger logs on the edge of your forest footpaths, and the smaller branches
and twigs and leaves can go as mulch to your fruit trees, your productive trees,
whatever, they're fruit trees, productive trees, whatever. They've got some kind
of productive element. So we're managing the canopy, it goes up. Now our root zone of our support species become compost corridors in
the soil as dendritic patterns going out from the trunk
into the root zone, are wonderful, are
wonderful, amazing pattern. You can't even take that with a machine. Only growth patterns will do that for you. In industrial agriculture
will never achieve a dendritic pattern going
backwards like a root zone that we can put down into the soil as compost corridor soakage, amazing. Star, I hope that sort of says
something about your question. It might do, hope so. It's all about chop-and-drop, and a forest growing on a fallen forest, and we being the ones
that manipulate the time, spacial sequence event. Okay. I thought I'd have fun with this. Okay, next one. Now it's a mate of mine
here, Tanya Sprill, Sprill? Sorry, Tanya, I hope I've
got that pronunciation right. It's respectful, Tanya,
with southern states, respectful approach. "Dear sir and family, my question. "We have run out of soil and
it does not get hot enough here "for four big bins of compost to process. "We have to wait two to three years. "Temperate climate,
Otis, Oregon Coast, USA." Well, Tanya, check out
my Berkeley compost. I can guarantee if you follow
my videos on Berkeley compost, you can make compost in 18 days. It might take 30 days to start with, and then you get more practiced at it. Compost is an art form. There is no question at your climate, you can make compost in 18 days. Now if it's cold in winter,
you may have to move it inside. Now you can move it into a
polytunnel or a glass house and the heat of the compost,
although it being a bit smelly, a bit of a pong sometimes
in the early stages, it will partially heat the
glass house, polytunnel as well. Now follow my instructions. Now, if you can't do 18 days in a row, which is make the pile at the right size, at the right moisture, with the right proportions of ingredients, with the right amount of
chopping up to size ratios, and then you leave it for four days and turn it every other day for 14. If you can't do that, right, and you can't work out the size you need, make a wire cage that's about
1 1/2 cubit meters minimum. Don't go to one meter, one cubic meter, go 1 1/2 cubic meters. One meter is a minimum,
but go 1 1/2 cubic meters, work out a calculation on
a round cage of strong wire that clips together. Fill that up with a sequence. A layer of green, a layer
of brown, a layer of manure. A layer of green, a layer of brown, a layer of manure. So you've got it up to the top, the 1 1/2 cubic meter bin full. Get it wet, get it to the right moisture, cover it with a tarp,
leave it for one week. Then turn it on Monday,
turn it again on Wednesday, and turn it again on Friday. Take the weekend off. Do that for three weeks. So it's one week in a cage, turn it Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and the next week turn it
Monday, Wednesday, Friday, the next week turn it
Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and it will be fine. And I will guarantee 100%
that you can make compost where you are in Oregon, and
anybody can do it anywhere. We've proved it all over the world. If you want to take the weekends off, it's going to take 28 days. If you don't, you can
do it in 18, no problem. We've got the information
to share with you. Okay, now. Nasir Shafe. "How would you revive
a sun-stricken plant?" Well, prune the leaves a little bit, take some of the strain off it. So reduce the leaf surface area because it's got to
transpirate off those leaves. So if you reduce the leaf surface area, it will reduce the stress straight away. And saturate the roots, all right. So make sure that you've
got an absolute saturation of the roots and let it drain. If you can put some worm juice
from your worm farm on there, all the better, right. Any kind of organic liquid
fertilizer in dilution, just to give it a little bit of a tonic. And if it's really stressed, put a cover around it or over
it, like a shade cloth cover, to reduce the sun even
further and it should be fine. That's the best thing you can do. All right. Hannah Gajdosova. Cags, Cag, I might not
get the pronunciation of everyone's name right. Gajdosova, all right. Hannah. "Hello, Geoff, I was wondering
if you had any good examples "of permaculture farm or
resources in tropical islands. "We are based in Iringa, Tanzania, "and we receive 1,100 millimeters
of rain in six months, "then we have six months
of cool, dry weather. "Thank you." I worked in Musoma for
Global Resource Alliance, a wonderful small NGO
based in Ojai, California, and they do some great work. But they're right down on
the shores of Lake Victoria. Now what I need to know is, Tanzania's almost on the
equator, right on the equator, and if you're at an altitude,
we need to know how high. 'Cause you're just about
wet tropics at sea level, but a climate-analog is
based on, one, your latitude, and I know you're more
or less on the equator, and then your distance from the ocean. And then your altitude above sea level. As you get further away from the ocean, you get hotter in summer
and cooler in winter. But also as you go up in altitude, every 100 meters up is like one degree away from the equator. So if you're at 300 meters, you've moved three degrees
away from the equator in temperature range over the year, but day length doesn't change. You still get sunrise at
six and sunset at six. So you're looking for
equatorial projects, right, you're looking for equatorial
projects at your altitude, at your distance from the ocean. So if you whip around the equator and see whether there's
anything in Indonesia, but you can't get far from the ocean on those Indonesian islands. Other parts of Africa. Now east or west coast can
make a difference, too. East coasts are generally
wetter than west coasts, generally, it's a generalization. Then you've got Ecuador on the
west coast of South America. And there's a lot of
climate-analogs in Ecuador, we have a lot of projects in Ecuador. But when you tell me that
you've got a wet season and dry season, it sounds
like you're quite high and you've moved in latitude
because of that 100 meters, every 100 meters up is one
latitude away from the equator in climate temperature range over a year. You've moved to the wet-dry tropics, an analog that is similar
to the wet-dry tropics, but you still got the same day length as the equatorial zone. It's not that complicated
if you know those formulas, I have to do it all the time. So that's the areas. You might find projects
in New Guinea as well, because they're also high
altitude next to the tropics. Colombia, Ecuador, they're high altitude. Just depends how high you are. We've got plenty of wet-dry
tropics around the world. And then what I'd advise you to do is to go on Permacultureglobal, which is one of our websites, and search for those type of projects because people register their projects. And people as individuals
register on Permacultureglobal, and projects register
on Permacultureglobal. And it's got a Facebook-type
of Ruby on Rails software so you can have followers and following. And it has Google Maps and
satellite Google imagery like Google Earth where you
can fly in and see all the dots across the world of places and projects that are going to be similar to yours. And that's a starting point anyway. We have Arloc Setti. "Hi, Geoff Lawton. "It is Carlo and Agnes. "We think a good topic
would be how important "is it to be self-sustainable
in so critical a time now, "and how permaculture and
more resilient approaches "can help crucially on the next future. "Big hug to you all." Well, big hug to you guys too,
but it's not hugging anymore. Not even hand shaking anymore, it's like I'll touch
my heart for you, okay? That was right on the mic,
it's going to sound loud. Okay. Well it's absolutely crucial. I was just trapped in Saudi Arabia where there's not a lot
of local diverse food. And I could see if it went much further there'd be difficulty with food shortages. If planes aren't flying,
transport goes down, you really need to have the
largest diversity of species growing where you are. Ironically, I'm in a
hotel room in Melbourne, and it's Zaytuna Farm. We're not connected to the outside world. We have our own drinking
water from rain water tanks. So we have 96,000 gallons of rain water catchment in water tanks. We have our own electricity,
we're standalone, nickel-iron battery bank, all gallium, indium, selenium panels, which are very high tech panels that don't deviate with temperature. So we're standalone on electricity. We're standalone on our drinking water. We have our own waste systems 'cause we have reed bed greywater, which are biological reed beds
filled with our grey water from our kitchens and our
showers and our sinks. And that goes into swales that fertilizes areas of the farm that are in production. And we have compost toilets
which don't use much water. And the compost from the compost toilets gradually goes down into forest systems as that converts into tree fertilizer. We're standalone. Oh yeah, by the way, we grow our own food, and produce our own
vegetables and our own fruit, and our own eggs and our own
poultry and small animals, our own fish and our own dairy cows, and our own beef cows. And we've had goats and we've had turkeys and we've got ducks and geese, and we've had rabbits
and we've had pigeons, we had all of those things. But generally we got all
our own small animal meat, our large animal meat, our
poultry, our eggs, our milk, all our own herbs, all our own medicinals. And it's not hard to do, it's easy. There's seven to 10 people on the farm, most of the time a lot of us are working to set up demonstration
systems to teach people. We've got our own nursery, of course. And we feed ourselves. We don't try and produce surplus much. We preserve our own pickles
and our own ferments and our own vinegars,
and our herbal tonics and all those things. And obviously in this situation, it feels like the safest place in the world. And I'm keen to get back there next week. Oh, we have our own horses, so we have our own
sustainable transport systems if we want. We have dogs and cats as
well, and we love 'em all. But that's, you know, if all of a sudden it seems like, yeah, and we
can do this in a small way. I mean, I'm going to quote
one of my great students, Angelo Eliades, and
DeepGreenPermaculture is his website. He produces enormous amount
of food on a small garden here in Melbourne, 64 square meters. He has a food forest garden that produces the equivalent of 13 1/2 tons per acre. He has 30 fruit trees on 64 square meters. They're all crammed in close and dwarfated and pruned four times a
year, so they're all low, highly productive, and spreads the season
through varieties of apples and plums and different citrus. He has 70 to 80 varieties
of vegetables and herbs, and 12 different types of berries. And he's documented every gram that comes off the property. And it doesn't take him more
than two hours work a week to produce all his own
food on 64 square meters. So don't tell me you can't
do it in a small area 'cause you can. The diversity that you get out
of a small area is greater, the production you get per
square meter is greater on the smaller area. The smaller the area, the
greater the diversity, the greater the nutritional quality, and the greater the
production per square meter, and the less transport because you're growing it
where you're eating it. So there is no transport. The larger the area,
the more difficult it is to get good production ratios. So most of the time we're way too big, in fact we're out of scale,
which means we're out of order. We're out of sizes of
order of relationship to natural systems. That's a whole 'nother discussion. Ratios of order of size in nature. But, yeah, so this is very, very relevant. And the inquiries are coming in, and this may be a tipping point. Or it's a definite move
closer to the tipping point that we should all be involved. And because we've gone more online, and we've been online with
our teaching for a while now, quite a few years. And we're getting better
results for our online course than any other teaching I've ever done. Now we're going to be more
online about sharing information and how we do it, that's
what we're doing right now, that's what this is about. But I also think I've been very keen in setting up local permaculture groups. I'm very privileged to have
started the most successful permaculture group in the world, it's 27 years old this year, and it's still very active. And it influences local government. So I've got a drive to set
up local government area, 'cause you influence your local government more than any other government. Forget about that federal, forget about the state government. Your local government's
the one you really change. I only ever change things
at the local level really. So I'm developing a startup kit. So I'm going to do it more online so we can have local government
area meetings online, like this, and get 'em fired up quickly, 'cause people are after
local relevant information. And we don't have to
meet physically anymore, as this virus has proven. We can meet online as a group. And I think those software
platforms are going to improve because of this, so that's
another great result. And I need a hair dresser. The deficiency of hair
dressing at the moment. Nadia's had to cut my hair for me 'cause I haven't been able
to get to a hair dresser. But that's all right. All these things, we're
getting more self-sufficient in every way. All right. Next one now. Angela Gibbons. "How to create permaculture
community in times of lockdown?" Oh, Angela, I think I just answered that. I think it's local community
permaculture groups, and we can set 'em up. Hey, anybody here want to help me? We can set this up as a
network quite quickly, right, using platforms that
are already in position. So, you know, we can have
a local government area. And I want to emphasize this, this is one of my successes,
local government area. Call your permaculture group permaculture and the name
of the local government, 'cause it's your local
politicians who make the decisions to say you can't have a compost toilet or fruit trees in the street. So local government area permaculture groups
Facebook pages network, or something like that, let's
get it done, we can do it. We have 27 years experience
with Permaculture Noosa, in the Noosa Shire on the Sunshine Coast. And we even have articles like birthing a permaculture group. And let's get it up to
speed with online startups, 'cause it's required. Now once you've got a
local permaculture group, which meets and shares
happy little accidents and sad little failures
about how permaculture works within your bioregion, you
get a bioregion identity. You can even end up
printing your own money like they do in Totnes,
with the Totnes pound that they've spread all over the world, and even have local currencies. There's nothing wrong with that at all. You've got the Ithaca
dollar in Ithaca, New York. And many, many things can happen. But once you've got that
group of people interacting, you start to realize
who you could live with. I mean, you could love
everybody in your community that's involved with
permaculture, that's great. But you probably find you
can't live with 95% of 'em. That's just honesty, right? You look at a group, they're
all lovely, they're great, you know, but you think, "Oh, couldn't live with 95% of 'em." When you've got a bit of a guilt feeling from thinking that, you can then go, right, where's the 5% I can live with? 'Cause that's one in 20,
and that's not a bad ratio. Who's the one in 20 I could live with? 'Cause I could go through
the group and go, yeah. Look at them, these people, that couple, I could go through
thick and thin for them. Like I'd risk everything
to help those guys. So they're the people you can live with, and you can settle a community once you've set up a community
group that's successful. It gets past all that
miscommunication rubbish that we go through. Another thing you can
do is what we've done at Zaytuna Farm, and that's taken almost 20 years, right. This is our 18th year, this
is our 19th year I think, 2020 at Zaytuna Farm. And we've developed the place
with all the infrastructure in position already. So we've got 20 plus dams, we got three kilometers of swales, we got a cattle laneway, we
got a commercial nursery, we got an education center, we
got a commercial campground. We got permission to put in
five accomodation cabins. We got a great big workshop, we got this huge solar system. We've got header tanks, we
got drinking water tanks, we got all kinds of things that, you don't have to make
any kinds of decisions about developing Zaytuna Farm. And as I got into my 65th
year this year, 66 in 2020, I decided I better do
some forward planning to make sure this all
goes ahead without me having to be the champion of it. So we divided the property as a community. And we have shares for sale. So we have seven extra houses
we can put on, our house, plus another seven. So the local government allowed
us to develop an approval as a community development
of eight shares, equal shareholders owning the farm. And equal in the income
generator of the campsite and education infrastructure. So everybody who invests
in a share of Zaytuna Farm also gets a share in the company that now owns the farm,
and sells the shares, but also a share in the company that runs the income generator part of it. So you get a bit of
security as you buy in. But you get the security of 20 years of my mad development
of the infrastructure, we're drought-proof, we're fireproof, and we're property starvation-proof. We're pollution-proof, nearly. But that's a long process, and not everybody wants to invest in that. But if they did, you got a
few billionaires out there who want to do it fast, we
can do it, we can do it. You want to sort of develop
the whole land first, then sell shares. And developers are
coming after us for this. I'm getting inquiries, "Can you put in Geoff Lawton
signiture landscaping?" Even in urban townhouses in Melbourne and developments in Adelaide and Perth, large subdivisions that
want permaculture mainframe infrastructure as the planning mechanism, like Village Homes,
Davis, California have. And we should have copied
Village Homes, Davis, California years ago, I mean it's an icon. It's a pilgrimage site for
permaculturists actually. Anyway. Let's carry on. Hope that answered your question, Angela, in some form or another. Matt Johnson. "Where should I got to get "all of your Greening
the Desert knowledge?" All of it? Going to go mad. "And your takeaways from the Saudi trip." Mm. "I been asked to go for some consultation "in the future on the agenda, "and there are some things
I'd like to put in practice "here in the Central Valley, California." Well, everything is an
anti evaporation strategy when it comes to deserts, especially ones as hot and as
dry as the Arabian Peninsula, where your rainfalls can
vary between 70 millimeters, 2 1/2 inches, to 115
millimeters, 4 1/2 inches. And a desert is a flood waiting to happen. And that's what you're waiting for, you're waiting for that flood. And you need systems big enough to capture as much water as possible,
and soak it into the soil. Water that's open to the
sun is a waste of time, it's just increasing the evaporation. Any open bodies of water
should be as small as possible, as deep as possible,
and shaded as possible, and that's kind of rare, rare positions. Everything's about rare
positions in these dry lands. You want to pick the
eyes out of the desert and pick the spots that are easiest. But then if you're doing
rehabilitation earthworks where you've got lots of
industrial agricultural landscapes that have been totally changed, so you want to rehabilitate them. Often you're dealing with
center-pivot irrigation, which are big circles
that are absolutely flat or more or less flat, close to flat, because that's the only way they work, which are totally unnatural. And it's going to take a long
time for wind and water flows to bring 'em back into
harmonic desert patterns. Also, there's a lot of earth mounds put up to buffer those big floods when they come. 'Cause you often get a
year's rain in one day. You often get half a
year's rain in one day. Every other year you'll get that, easy. And every few years you're
going to get all the year's rain in one day, which is massive. But that's 10 years worth
of rain if you hold it all, compared to what you could normally soak. So it's a matter of stop
it, spread it, soak it. So apart from picking the
right geological spots, which have the catchment,
and putting in gabions, and you have to put big ones
in, big rocks, well built. And they're proven earthwork technology, it goes back thousands of years, so you can't say they don't work. They only don't work if
you're not brave enough to make 'em big enough. Because people don't realize the power of the desert flood. If you ever get a chance to walk around in one of those floods
during the day it's raining, it's a lesson you'll never, ever forget. So I think you're in those
geological positions, or you can take, which
I've just been able to do, take the advantage of the infrastructure of the center-pivot, the
pipe is usually there, and start at just downhill, on the downhill side of the
large pipe in the center-pivot, and run your levels out from there. And don't hold 'em straight, go with nice curves of
the slight variations and level on the center-pivot
that's been abandoned. I mean this is center-pivot
work that's been abandoned or people want to abandon. And run out swales as far as you can 'til you hit water flows on wadis, no matter how small or large, and build there your gabion
walls at that accurate height. That the overflow on the gabion is at least half a meter higher than the entrance to your swale
coming into the silt field, which is going to build
up behind the gabion. Put a small gabion
entrance wall to the swale, so that it doesn't fill up with silt. And the water percolates
through the small gabion wall, floods the swale, and
soaks a lot of your water from the flow coming down the wadi that's built your silt field. It's pacified once you got the silt field, 'cause it's perfectly
leveled a silt field. And that then allows you to fast track your tree establishment. Because it's all about
reestablishing desert ecosystems that are then beneficial to add to once you've got extra shade, once you got organic matter, and once you got wind buffering. But with the industrial
agriculture infrastructure still in position underground
and pumps still there, you can flood with the
water that was being misused to grow annual crops and
was salting the landscape. Because all desert aquifer
water's a little bit salty. If you aim it at highly
evaporative systems, you salt the landscape. But if you aim it at
anti evaporation systems, which have very hearty desert
pioneer trees initially, you don't necessarily salt it, greatly diminished the amount
of water you need to use. And any surplus soaks back to the aquifer, because you got rehydration
soakage systems, earthworks. But you're also growing
shade, wind buffering, and organic matter production. And now we're going back
towards a repatterned ancient desert forest scenario that we can start to interact
with between the patterns. So that just given you a
golden nugget of advice here that can be very, very useful, because there are
millions of center-pivots around the world that are going
to have to be repatterned. And there's a convenience
here where the problem is potentially the solution to move the deserts into recovery rapid. Now once we do that, we can go up into our geological positions where there's ideal spots
in wadis and canyons and high catchments, where you
can put in the fancy stuff, that's actually a little
bit more difficult to do 'cause you're in constructed space. The rocks are there, now have
to ship the rocks very far. But the earthworks is a
little bit more constrained. And as you get higher,
you go into manual work. Which we can do once we
see success, it's fine. There's mass employment
capabilities there. And the desert's become a very,
very healthy place to live. Deserts always have
been very, very healthy to live in their natural form. It's some of the best food,
some of the highest in nutrient. There's not many diseases and funguses and problems in deserts, if you live in those ideal positions. But they're also the easiest
to damage and keep damaged, and once you go into chemical agriculture, it's some of the most toxic food. So, you know, it's a balance. The best becomes the worst, the worst can become the best again, that's the wonderful
thing about the world. So, I'm going to pull up there,
and I'm going to carry on. I only got to question 11. And on this run, I've got, let me see, I've got 112 questions. So I've got 101 to go,
just on the first innings. I'll try and do a bit better tomorrow, but let's see how this goes. And we'll keep plugging away. And I like it, I like
answering your questions, I'm having a bit of fun,
hopefully you're enjoying it. And I'll see you on the next round.
