Permaculture is our design tool

All practices such as permaculture, agroforestry, regenerative farming all come down to more or less the same thing: mimicking nature and producing food without hardly any fossil fuel input. The term permaculture (as a systematic method) was first coined by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in 1978. The word permaculture originally referred to “permanent agriculture”  but was expanded to stand also for “permanent culture,” as it was seen that social aspects were integral to a truly sustainable system as inspired by Masanobu Fukuoka’s natural farming philosophy.

Permaculture is an ethically based design science that is used to develop sustainable/regenerative landscapes and human based systems. A Quinta is the perfect place to learn everything about permaculture by exploring the systems we have up and running. Here you can get hands on experience in our gardens, food forest and polytunnel. You don’t have to learn from a piece of paper but by doing. If you want to learn more about this, head over to our workshops and courses section.

Ecosystems are very very efficient at capturing, storing and using this quality from energy as it cycles it through the complex relationships within ecosystems. This is the basis for permaculture design, you are capturing, storing and using this quality energy before it leaves and eventually dies (entropy)  Our job as a designer is to cycle energy in as many ways as possible through a complexity of interdependent relationships.

This is made possible through design, through the assembling of interactions which form the systems you implement. The deeper you go the more you understand and then everything manifests itself together as a whole.

Regenerative is basically a system that is always improving. Improving from an ecological perspective is increasing in diversity, complexity of interactions or moving from simple to complex. In our case soil is being built, biomass is increasing which in turn is sequestering more carbon and improving the soil biology. Bare soil moving to a forested state is behaving regeneratively. This is why disturbance is a natural, necessary process in ecosystems as it knocks it back to a more complex phase.