Obtaining a Yield. Returns on Investments.

What has worked best for You, in Your area?  

What have you been able to produce/provide to bring you the greatest amount of support financially?  

I am especially interested in hearing about profitable crops, but also open to getting insights about other permaculture type products and services.  

And this is not just for me, but for all of you, too.  Lets help each other find ways to make a permaculture lifestyle...dare I say...Profitable.  

In spirit of Capturing and Redirecting Energy.  

While it is not a proven concept yet, I am going to be seeing how selling cuttings fair in my area. I'm getting ahold of some basket willows and I have an existing forsythia hedge that I can try rooting. This can be done on a smaller land footprint, at least in theory. I'll have to circle back by end of year.

Timothy Norton wrote:While it is not a proven concept yet, I am going to be seeing how selling cuttings fair in my area. I'm getting ahold of some basket willows and I have an existing forsythia hedge that I can try rooting. This can be done on a smaller land footprint, at least in theory. I'll have to circle back by end of year.

This is something that has actually worked well for me in the past.  At one point I scored close to a thousand "dibble tubes", and decided to start collecting seeds and cuttings of dozens of different food plants, and native species.  I wanted to create a food forest, and this was a great way to get the diversity collected while i was preparing planting areas.  Because it ended up being way too much for me to deal with, I decided to set up a booth at a nearby farmers market on a weekly basis, and made a small incomeselling the starts!  Occasionally I was also able to sell through social media and Craigslist, and often bartered with friends and neighbors. No greenhouse. It was totally outdoor in an off-grid setting. No electricity or running water, but it was a rainforest environment getting about 150 inches average per year, so there was plenty of water. I did build some tables using tree stumps for the base and old metal roofing for the table tops.  These ware strategically placed ender the tree ferns to minimize impact of heavy rains on the starts. Kind of like having a natural shade cloth.  

Since I was using mostly dibble tubes, the land area needed was minuscule.  I also bought larger pots that would fit 20-22 dibbles, which helped to organize them. 1 sq/ft area would be about the area for the 20 dibbles in a larger pot, and each dibble would sell from anywhere between $3-$10 each, depending on the species grown.  Sometimes people would buy 20, 40, or 60 at a time, and if they did I would offer bulk discounts.  

For something like hardy willow cuttings this would likely work very well i think.  

For me it definitely wasn't a way to get rich, but combined with the many other things I was doing it definitely helped keep the lifestyle going.  

The returns were very good for the materials used because I was able to score the dibbles for super cheap, the plant starts and seeds were almost always free, and I would buy planting media in bulk by the truckload, which was also used in the garden bed areas.  When considering my own time and labor involved - this is where it ended up not really bringing much of an income, as compared to doing something like tree trimming work for hire, or other hourly gigs.  But there was a lot of satisfaction involved, and almost no stress, at my own pace.  

Something that can help significantly with Obtaining a Yield and offering a stellar ROI - is Microbes.

I didn't notice a topic listed for microbes in the forums.  Maybe this is something that could be added? Another one could be "sociobiome", which is a term I became familiar with after listening and watching some of Dr. Christine Jones presentations.  



Two regenerative ag leaders, John Kempf and Dan Kittredge, have both stated that - by far - the thing that brings them the biggest ROI - the greatest gain for the least investment - is biological inoculants.

Plants that are rich with endophytic microbe interactions have greater phenotypic expressions, and enable more rapid genetic changes within fewer generations.  Plus they grow faster.  

So how can we, as permies, go about making these connections in our gardens without having to be dependent on store bought products?  

There are a few methods that I am aware of.  

One of the simplest has been shared by Dan Kittredge in his fantastic presentation at Living Web Farms. This is the first video, out of quite a few in a series, available for free.



If you don't have the time to watch - here are the basics:  Go out into your environment with a bucket and hit as many microclimates as possible. Dry, wet, forest, meadow, etc.  Look for the healthiest plants, dig up a handful of soil from the base, and add to your bucket.  The soil in your bucket can be mixed with water, and that water can be used to soak seed and plant roots, or even as soil drenches, which introduces a wide range of microbes from a wide range of microclimates found in your area.  

Dr. James White and John Kempf had a conversation recently about how Native Americans would do something similar with growing corn.  They would go out and find certain grasses and other plants, dig them up by the roots, and shake off the soil from them, which would then be introduced to the next batch of seeds.  The discussion can be found in Johns latest podcast.  I went ahead and shared about it in a separate thread. https://permies.com/t/237747/Latest-John-Kempf-Podcast-Plant#2199598

A separate method that is considered highly effective is to create your own "IMO" pile (Indigenous Micro-Organism). This comes from Korean Natural Farming techniques, which are definitely worth learning about in my own opinion.  Here is a free PDF that explains in detail: https://www.ctahr.hawaii.edu/oc/freepubs/pdf/SA-19.pdf

Another method coming from Korea is found with JADAM Organic Farming Techniques.  They call it "JMS" (JADAM Micro-Organism Solution).  It is a simple method of gathering the microbes from your environment in a similar way described above, but replicating them even more in a liquid solution mixed with a small amount of sea salt/water, and cooked potato (or starch).  




Image source:https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-role-of-endophytic-bacteria-in-induced-salt-tolerance-by-plants-Endophytic-bacteria_fig3_329042607