permaculture

["Suraj Kumar" <suraj@sunson.in>]

Hello!

I'm relatively new to permaculture and I'm pretty new to this list as
well (joined about a week ago). Infact, I haven't even been able to
read in depth about permaculture except through wikipedia and such
online resources. I've just placed an order for Holmgren's
Permaculture book from Amazon. Besides that, I can only say I'm fairly
worried about the future given the multitude of crises humanity as a
whole is facing on this planet (warming, energy crisis, resource
depletion, etc.,.). I'm from India and permaculture seems to be a
thing of the 'past'. Yes, of the past. I can find news items on the
web about permaculture-related stuff from the past but I see none at
present. Nor do I know of anyone who is interested / practising
permaculture.

So, the purpose of this mail is to see if there is anyone from India
out here talking / doing permaculture.

Secondly, I recently read about a practice called 'Zero farming'
which, given the lack of information about what it exactly is about,
makes me think its very similar to Permaculture. Maybe not 'as
inspired by nature' as Permaculture, but quite close in practice.
Here's an article I found related to this:

http://www.theacademyofnaturalfarming.com/Zerofarm.html

I'm planning to buy some farmland (2 or 3 acres) down south in India
(Tamil Nadu) and keep buying additional land as I save up more money.
To begin with, I plan to stay employed the way I am employed because I
need a regular salary and have the land taken care of using a friend's
friend who has been a farmer for generations. The idea is to gradually
become less dependent on my salary and be able to smoothly transition
to doing agriculture (permaculture :) ) on this land.  So, short term:
I'm trying to devise ways to reduce my time spent in my current job
and gradually start visiting this land and thereby understand
agriculture.  Given I'm going to buy land, is there any specific /
general piece of advise that pops up in your head? If there is anybody
out here from India (I'm in Bangalore) who would like to experiment
permaculture on a small portion of my land, I'd definitely welcome you
to join me in the experiments :)

I'm hoping to learn from the collective knowledge of this community :)

Cheers,

  -Suraj

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