The Resilient Farm and Homestead: An Innovative Permaculture and Whole Systems Design Approach by Ben Falk. 

3/5 rating. 260 pages.

Book #43 of 2023. Read October 17, 2023.

This book is all about using permaculture and system design to build a homestead for yourself.

Ben lives in Vermont and has managed to make his own 10-acre oasis with a plethora of food crops and a few animals all while treading lightly on the land. Within this short textbook, there were a lot of good ideas about site design, best practices around food and animals, as well as water and shelter. I think that this book would be a powerful tool if you are actively in the process of building your homestead. From the discussion in here, Ben’s classes at his home I am sure would be incredibly beneficial.

Apart from this, I think that giving some of the quotes that I wrote down might be the best way to give an idea of the array of tidbits Ben offers:

“A permaculture can accurately be said to be any system in which ‘the whole function of each part is fully realized.’ This often takes the form of a landscape in which fertile topsoil is being produced, water quality enhanced, and wildlife promoted while humans also garden valuable yields of food, fuel, fiber, or medicine from the system.”

“Why are trees – especially nut trees – at the basis of these regenerative land-use systems and highly adapted human cultures? In the simplest terms it has to do with inputs and outputs. A nut tree is simply more effective and efficient at converting sunlight and precipitation into value, over the long term, than any other technology humans have yet designed.”

“All in all, you can grow three to eight times the product value (protein, fat, carbohydrate, Btus and other nutrients/values) via a tree crop system than with an annual, input-dependent crop such as corn, and you can do so while improving the land from decade to decade.”

“Planted for $100 and tended to at a cost of $50 per year (in your time), [an apple tree] will yield roughly fifty thousand pounds ($150,000 worth at $3 a pound) of fruit in its first century – a total return on investment (ROI) of 2,841 percent and an annualized rate of return of 7.1 percent (almost exactly the same as a 50/50 bond/stock portfolio over the last hundred years). That’s not counting any wood/timber value from the tree upon its harvest, which can be enormous in the case of a nut tree such as black walnut, oak, and chestnut. If you didn’t count your time pruning and harvesting, and chalked that up to family fun, your overall ROI would be 150,000 percent in a hundred years. Over fifty years your APR would be 15.8 percent – not slow money.”

“Embracing what the land we are working with can truly do best is a large part of learning to inhabit a place well…”

“You clear a forest, you get a desert.”

“Forests actually produce their own moisture, including rainfall and cloudy humidity – all of which can be harvested by plants, through evapotranspiration and the ‘wringing out’ effect they have on the atmosphere.”

“Forests make rain, and removing them creates drought on multiple levels – in the climate and in the soil.”

“Species particularly well adapted to wet conditions include currants and gooseberries (Ribes spp.), elderberries (Sambucus canadensis), cranberries (Vaccinium spp.) and highbush cranberries (Viburnum spp.), Chokecherry (Aronia spp.), willow (Salix spp.) and alder (Alnus spp.) for fuelwood and craft wood, and many others.”

“The productivity of swales and mounds is astounding. We have noticed that all species of plants respond positively to being on a mound, and the increase in growth and health seems to vary from moderate to extreme. On average it can be said that a given plant at the research farm will grow at least half again as fast as the same plant rooted in flat, unmounded, and unswaled earth nearby.”

“‘Weed’ and other plant identification is also a great way to understand what nutrients may be in abundance or lacking in your soil – check out the literature available on that subject, as reading the weeds is an important aspect of general ecological literacy and will greatly aid your land development and maintenance work for a lifetime.”

“You only build soil as deeply as you can get plant roots to penetrate (what comes up must go down), so the taller you let your yard or pasture grow before it’s cut or grazed, the more soil you’re making (and CO2 you’re sequestering).”

“Not surprisingly, perennial-based systems such as a woodland/savannah system with three dimensions of crops, from grasses to shrubs to trees, and grazing in the understory typically captures between three and seven times the amount of solar energy as a field of annual crops.”

“Instead, it means that we evaluate how to feed seven billion humans while honoring and also feeding the thousand trillion other lives that exist in the land community.”

“Our ability to remain here well into the future depends greatly upon our ability to participate within the living world of which we are part and parcel. Being a nonparticipating observer attempting to maintain the world around us in a static condition is simply not an option.”

“Human presence can be regenerative, not just less bad.”

“Under average conditions it takes about one year or more to dry sixteen-inch cordwood thoroughly. Under good conditions cordwood will dry within five to seven warm-season months.”

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