permaculture

[Jason Gerhardt <jasongerhardt@gmail.com>]

Cory,
I appreciate your response!  I too have given much work to ecovillages,
schools, farms, and non-profits for no financial reward (or worse, promise
of future reward) so I completely understand what you are saying.  I will
also preface this post with the fact that I am by no means exemplary of
making a good living from permaculture design.  There are others out there
that are I believe.  If any of them wish to comment, that would be welcome.

As a young person, late twenties, I am still figuring out how exactly to
make a living doing permaculture.  In addition to teaching, consulting,
implementing, and serving on a community garden board, from 2007-2009 I
worked full-time as the Seed Business Manager for Abbo-Regional Seeds (a
Front Range bioregional vegetable seed growers company).  At that time I was
very comfortable financially.  I was way over working myself however and
paid the price in a serious illness that I am only now getting over.  In the
beginning of 2009 I quit the seed business to further develop my
permaculture consulting business and to take on more teaching duties.  So
for the past two years part of my income has been derived from co-teaching
our local Boulder, Colorado PDC, teaching workshops, guest teaching in other
PDC's, and the other part from design projects for clients.  Now is a fairly
opportune time to write about this as I am seriously wondering, "how the
hell am I going to get through the Winter"?  For the past two years I have
had additional expenses in medical bills paying for running myself
bed-ridden, trying to do good!  I also live in a city that is not well-known
for affordable rents and a low cost of living.  I do whatever I can to
reduce my cost of living though- my partner and I share a car, live in a 500
sf. urban apartment (with a huge patio for gardening of course), buy bulk
foods, volunteer and consult with organic farms in exchange for copious
amounts of food, preserve food, bike and walk more than drive, use the sun
for heating as much as possible, etc.  I just thought that background might
help.

Most importantly, I am in no way opposed to making a living doing
permaculture design and education, it is in fact exactly what I am
struggling and striving to do right now.  It is what I aspire to do!  The
vision that I wrote about in my previous post is something that I strive to
integrate into my design work and teaching.  That vision is also based on my
personal desire to see more people designing and implementing rather than
trying to make it solely as a teacher (this is partly influenced from living
in an area where people like to talk about doing permaculture instead of
actually doing it).  Currently I have a client who lives in an older
suburban part of Boulder where we are doing the exact work that I hope to
see happen on a bigger scale.  In short, we ripped out the front lawn and
installed a water harvesting forest garden this Spring, and are now putting
in a mandala style intensive garden in the backyard with a 25 ft swale
catching the downspout runoff for another few fruit tree guilds.  The
neighbors have gotten on board (very much the do-it-yourself type) and are
experimenting with sheet mulching, rainwater harvesting, beekeeping, etc.
 They come over and help occasionally, I gave them a copy of the new water
issue Pc Activist, we borrow their truck, borrow tools, etc.  This is an
ideal client situation I should say, I've had a few of those over the years.
 So what I am saying is so far so good, but the next few months look rough.

It is my hope to avoid taking on clients whose goals do not line up with the
work I want to do.  I see permaculture designers taking all kinds of
landscaping work only to find themselves not doing the work they envisioned
and getting burned out or keeping on going to pay the bills.  In avoidance
of that scenario I have kept my business small, mostly word of mouth, I have
very little overhead and infrastructure to keep up.  For instance I don't
have truck, but a small subaru wagon, which I share with my partner.  So I
either make do with the albeit spacious back of the subaru or ask my
clients, "who do you know who has a truck"?  This usually makes a connection
with a neighbor or relative who then takes an interest in the project.  Or I
bike with my trailer loaded with tools to the site on days when there are no
bulky materials to move.  As for labor help I try to incorporate the client
to help with implementation, get their kids involved, use the help of
permaculture students and colleagues, therefore, I don't have a crew to
manage.  I am not the guy who shows up at a site and is gone the next week,
I prefer to establish a relationship with my clients where I can come and go
to plant gaps, prune, re-mulch etc. I also look for clients that want to be
involved in making their site exemplary of permaculture, then I can afford
to have less clients and do higher quality work all the while deeply
educating the client about permaculture systems.

That was probably more than you wanted to hear.  Essentially, I really like
my situation right now, and money is tight, but I feel happy and deeply
satisfied.  Today has been one of the rougher days, where I am worrying more
about Winter funds, but writing this has helped so thanks for the prompt :)

I am in no way saying there is one right way to do this work.  A diversity
of approaches sounds great to me.  I do think that in order to teach
permaculture, one should be practicing it at least as much or more than the
time spent educating others.  If the bills get paid by teaching permaculture
then great, more time to do ideal permaculture design and implementation.  I
do think there are a lot of communities that are in need of permaculture and
will never have the money to pay people to do it or teach it, so we will
need to find solutions to reach those areas.  I think this is where working
with corporations and other well funded institutions pays off to channel
that money flow into the communities that are not being served.  I think we
just have to work where we are comfortable and effective at it and design
our outreach systems according to the ethics of permaculture.

I appreciate the dialogue and am very open to more thoughts...

Jason Gerhardt