Rocket Mass Heaters
Heat your home with five times less wood than a conventional "efficient" wood stove. The outside is often built and sculpted out of earthen cob—a mixture of clay, sand, and straw—these stoves can be sculpted into a cozy thermal mass bench. These stoves give off a lot of heat while producing little more than steam as exhaust. Some people have built these in a day and a half for $20.
At first blush, most people that have a standard wood stove respond "My wood stove is 90% efficient - there is no way anything can be five times more efficient than 90%": consider the smoke leaving the chimney at 200 to 600 degrees while the exhaust leaves the rocket mass heater at 70 to 120 degrees. Most of the wood stove heat is used to move smoke out of the chimney - a rocket mass heater design keeps more heat inside.
More about rocket mass heaters at
http://www.richsoil.com/rocket-stove-mass-heater.jsp Thursday, January 27th, 6:30, Missoula Public Library (301 East Main Street), large conference room.
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Wofati Eco Buildings
A wofati can be a home, an animal shelter, or a root cellar. Imagine a log cabin from the inside. These structures are optimally built in a forested area using thinnings that would otherwise be piled and burned. The wofati building technique is many times faster than conventional building, one fifth the cost, and if built right, will require zero heat in the winter.
More about wofati eco buildings at
http://www.richsoil.com/wofati.jsp Thursday, February 17th, 6:30, Missoula Public Library (301 East Main Street), large conference room.
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Replacing Irrigation with Permaculture
Water For Your Dried Up Farm and Small Gardens: Whether you have some water to play with or your land is bone dry, we're going to talk about how any dried patch of dirt can be converted into a lush jungle of crops and forage without any type of irrigation. The presentation will cover a range of techniques for making the use of the water that falls from the sky, but also give you an understanding for how simple micro-climates can be taken advantage of and created to preserve and create the added water you need by maximizing edge effect, planting trees (right kind and right technique), digging swales, using rocks, and several other techniques for raising local humidity. All yard waste, stumps, sticks, and organics can go back into the construction of hugelkultur beds that can retain and deliver enough water to your beloved plants to produce a food forest in our Montana climate.
For more about permaculture techniques, please visit
https://permies.com/permaculture-forums Thursday, February 24th, 6:30, Missoula Public Library (301 East Main Street), large conference room.
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Making the Big Bucks with Permaculture
We'll cover at least two-dozen ways to make money from having a rich diversity of permaculture farming. We'll start off with how the permaculture model compares to conventional and organic farming. As a permaculturist following in the footsteps of Bill Mollison, Sep Holzer, and others such as Fukuoka, you can attract volunteers, offer internships, and other opportunities to teach others as they work on your land and increase your productivity. Permaculture techniques enable you to limit or eliminate many of your expenses, while offering a market niche for selling a diversity of produce, coppice, weeds, and other products to dramatically increase your profit margin.
For more information, visit the farm income forum at
https://permies.com/permaculture-forums/41.0 Thursday, March 10th*, 6:30, Missoula Public Library (301 East Main Street), large conference room.
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Raising Chickens 2.0: No More Coop and Run
This is an exploration of different techniques for raising urban and rural chickens. What kind of chickens should you raise? How should you build your coop? How to protect your chickens from predators, plant feed you chickens can eat, cut back on chore, cut back on costs. Paul Wheaton will provide a presentation of his many years visiting farms and his own trials with coop design, rotational grazing, and techniques that allow chickens to feed and care for themselves for up to a week. Of course, somebody will have to collect the bounty of eggs.
More on this topic at:
http://www.richsoil.com/raising-chickens.jsp Thursday, March 24th*, 6:30, Missoula Public Library (301 East Main Street), large conference room.
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*Ensuing dates are subject to change so please check the wiki page for updates and info
as the date approaches.
https://permies.com/permaculture/missoula 
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