A permaculture plan should also be a financial plan

I started out on this journey in the 1950's in my mothers 4-H club.  We had to make a plan and keep financial records of our projects. My mother taught the club to apply the methods of the Rodale Institute back to the land instructions.
So basically the same ethics as Mollison's permaculture.  Emphasis was on the homestead producing what was needed to produce what was wanted.  So each project fed one or more other projects.  Taking the animals to 5 fairs and showing them in both 4-H and open class won enough prize premiums to buy winter hay for the goats. What the goats  wasted dropped to the basement level of the barn and fed the less fussy sheep and horses. The manure fed the garden and the weeds and excess plants fed the rabbits.  The horse cultivated the garden and between the rows of berry vines.   The horse also pulled the cart on my sisters vegetable route. Mine was on the waterfront so I used a rowboat which also gave me access to the recreational boats in our popular anchorage.  Oysters started to grow on our beach so that became an additional income source.  The chickens kept the corrals free of pests and the ducks kept the garden slug free.
So while most of our contemporaries turned in record books showed a loss or barely coming out even by counting the value of what was consumed by the family ours won awards for the most profit without counting the value consumed by the family.

Hans, what a wonderful and financially viable closed loop system your family created that not only benefited you all, but your community as well! You emphasized how

each project fed one or more other projects

. This model draws on much of what we cover in our book Growing FREE, particularly the concept of stacking incomes, talents, and markets and the role of community organizing in a financially viable permaculture plan.

I wanted to share my boyfriend Albert's (sub)urban example of this approach. He is a yoga instructor, beekeeper, and runs a back yard plant nursery. He's been leading what's became a very popular donation based yoga practice on the beach just a one mile bike ride from his house for ten years now. Sometimes his class attracts over 100 people and the regulars have formed what they've come to refer to as a sangha, a Sanskrit word for community. Those yoga students also happily purchase Albert's honey and plants (and they also support each others' businesses). And when plant buyers find Albert through Facebook Marketplace it's not uncommon for some of them to start attending his yoga classes.

There's so much potential with the regenerative mindset we Permies apply to the world to recognize and harness the true wealth that surrounds us in non-extractive ways and build beautiful lives and communities while doing just that.

I love it.  At a young age you learned to apply a needs and yields analysis so the outputs of one piece of the puzzle fed into another.  I believe that when we use more of those yields more effectively we don't need as much of the financial capital to progress through life.

My Permaculture plans are a bit light on formal planning and documentation, although it certainly has value as an organization and evaluation tool.  I absolutely agree that financial planning is perhaps even more important.

For me this started when I learned accounting in college.  I developed a budget, recorded expenses and began to save 10% or more of my income.  I ran across the book The Wealthy Barber, from which I learned the principle of “Pay Yourself First”.  This really changed my life.  I discovered others who explained the destructiveness of debt. These were the keys to real personal prosperity where paying yourself first enables you to avoid debt slavery.

In 2007, with a bit of help I saw the GFC of 2008 coming from a mile away.  I developed a much deeper understanding of our credit based monetary system.  I saw that the only value that money had was in a bond that must be repaid.  There are so many of these bonds that no one is actually willing to endure the sacrifice of time and energy required to pay them!  This means that a dollar is worthless, but most people don’t know that YET.  In this light, holding dollars as savings or investments denominated in dollars  does not free you from debt slavery.   So I switched to saving silver and gold.

As for Permaculture my most financially successful project has been my chickens.  I had 3 old hens and I needed to replace them.  I had to order 25 pullet chicks as a minimum.  I didn’t want 25 so I needed to sell most of them.  So I had the cost of the chicks, shipping cost, electricity cost of the brooder lamp for 8 weeks, and feed costs.   Most of the other cost is in the coop construction costs which were low and most importantly my time.  It’s a good thing I enjoy looking after my birds, and they do an awful lot of work cultivating and fertilizing my garden, and how do you put a price on that?  From my perspective they work for chicken feed and when I sold 16 of the ready to lay pullets for $25 each it paid for the entire cost of the feed, electricity, chicks,  and the eight ready to lay pullets that I kept were also fully paid for.  I even had some money left over and added it to some egg money to buy them a nice new electric poultry net!   My chickens continue to pay their own way in this world and I am amazed as a result.

Totally agree! In fact, to me this is what separates a Permaculture plan from a conventional farm or garden. These days, a master gardener type garden is considered to be a hobby for rich people. If you do everything right, you end up like the journalist who found each tomato he grew cost $30!

That’s not practical for real people who want to garden for economic benefits.

A Permaculture plan starts with the idea that it will really be economically viable and helpful to the family. If we get that right, Permaculture will be available to more than just rich people.