My Permaculture Life and Livelihood

Hi Permies! Thanks for the warm welcome to me and my coauthors of Growing FREE (Financially Resilient and Economically Empowered.) I thought I’d take a minute to tell you a little about my Permaculture life and livelihood.

I grew up in an old school “back to the land” homestead situation, working farm jobs as a kid. Seems like half my childhood was spent weeding, and the other half carrying firewood.


Most of my jobs in college were Ag jobs, too. As an adult, I’ve worked for 20-something years in both the environmental and Ag sectors, with orgs including the Sierra Club and state PIRGS, with a farm credit operation, on a commodities trade floor, managing farmers markets, managing farms businesses, as paid help on farms and orchards of all scales, helping over 300 regenerative enterprise projects, and managing my own regenerative projects full time for the last decade and a half.

What I’ve seen in nearly 40 years in the literal field is that farming and “homesteading” are tough.

Mostly, I saw a lot of people failing at it, being really stressed out, working long hours for no money and barely paying the bills. Farms fail at a faster rate than any other business. People get into this life to escape the anxiety of the “rat race,” then end up fighting against nature, and “hustling” harder than they did in the corporate sector.  

The whole system is literally rigged against us. Honestly, I love nature, but there’s no way I would still be doing this stuff if I hadn’t discovered Permaculture. Classic Bill Mollison style Permaculture offered a whole new set of tools for smart long-term investment and working with nature, which I had never seen anywhere else in studying modern Ag.

The big core idea of Mollisonian Permaculture is this: through the whole history of farming, going all the way back to Cicero, good farming and land-based livelihoods have always been based on a mindset of long-term investment. “Farming” has always been the most direct relationship with “the market” you can have.



And “investing” doesn’t require financial capital, or “money.” Every organism in an ecosystem “invests,” and we can too. That’s what birds do when they sit on a wire and poop seeds from their favorite fruit bushes. It’s what squirrels do when they plant nuts, and trees when they go nuts. We too can invest our time, energy, natural capital, social capital, intellectual capital, experiential capital, cultural and political capital into structures that actually do grow financial capital and real wealth over time.

That’s what “Permaculture” is.



When I discovered Permaculture, I found that there were actually a lot of people out there managing to live my dream of being professional wood elves and bog witches. There are a lot of “profitable farming” scams, but there are also people who are really living beautiful, abundant lives and really making it work by thinking long-term and making good designs that naturally grow wealthier over time. And whether they know it or not, the ones who’ve found ways to make it work are almost always doing great, classic Permaculture Design.

This is why knowledgeable agronomists don’t talk about annual “profit” so much as long-term projections that include appreciation of regenerative assets.

BTW, the pictures here are from my first major professional project, Lillie House Permaculture. We started with only a very small cash investment and a conventional mortgage, and managed to make a positive cash flow return on our plant investments in year 1. We grew a hypothetical complete diet for the household starting in year 1 (“hypothetical” because it was a complete nutritional diet on paper, but we still ate at restaurants and used our income to purchase produce.)



This project allowed me to escape the rat race and basically play with plants and cool people full time, and without all the “hard work” and long hours I did as a kid. In fact, I hadn’t touched a shovel in probably 4 or 5 years before starting my newest project.

My livelihood was more based on long-term investment than a “job,” but my main cash flow source was a Community Supported Permaculture program that was basically a subscription CSA for unusual produce samples, plants, seeds, and community knowledge. The model was based on the site having guilds of over 300 species of edible and medicinal plants, mostly perennials, and largely natives.



Slowly, that program allowed me to finally create the real market for consultation and design services, which had alluded me before. Produce and plant sales rounded out the edges. Most of the plants were essentially perennials I thinned from my system, so that all my “weeding” is harvests and most of my harvesting is weeding.  

All this meant that I constantly had friends coming to visit almost on a daily basis to hang out with me to talk and play with plants. The business functioned almost entirely on my part-time labor (with a few house mates occasionally helping) and used no volunteers or Wwoofers or even any paid labor. The low labor meant I had time for creative endeavors like making art, writing books, and making videos. (I talk very specifically about my income streams, how much I make, etc. in Growing FREE.)



And every day, I got to wake up and go to “work” in an extraordinarily beautiful home forest garden paradise, with no plastic tarps, tillage, or loud machines. Church groups would visit and write me letters that visiting my garden was the most spiritual experience they’d ever had.

So yes, there are some scams, and I do not recommend trying to make a “career” out of farming jobs, or teaching “online classes.” But there really are a lot of people like me out there who have used the more advanced design tools to design really beautiful, FREE lives. I feel like I’m very lucky and privileged to live the way I do. I was lucky that I already had a good enough Ag education and knew enough to recognize the value of the curriculum and approach that Bill Mollison put together. And I’m very thankful I took the time to design my personal support system and then start investing in making it a reality.



You will find some cynical a-holes out there who want to discourage anyone from trying to break free from the system. But I hope a few people read this and go do the creative design work to build Their own escape plan. Probably not everyone can do it. But if you have the privilege to learn and actually engage in that process, I believe you really can design a more beautiful and abundant life for yourself.

For those who prefer their info in pithy videos.

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What amazing photos, incredible work. I can only hope that I could replicate something to even half the effect you managed to do. I'm speechless!

Beautiful photos of beautiful crops. 😍
Nice read, where can I buy your book? Interested in learning more.
What do you use to keep bugs off? To fertilize?
Your crops looks very healthy and colorful. They look delicious. I'd love to learn how to garden like that!!!

Ashley Poole wrote:Beautiful photos of beautiful crops. 😍
Nice read, where can I buy your book? Interested in learning more.
What do you use to keep bugs off? To fertilize?
Your crops looks very healthy and colorful. They look delicious. I'd love to learn how to garden like that!!!

Hey thanks!

My 3 main books, including my 2 gardening books are pinned to the top of this page: https://transformativeadventures.org/

There you can find all the editions, including ebooks and paperbacks.

The Beginner’s Manual is a much more basic book on my approach to gardening.


Beauty in Abundance is a MASSIVE nerdy book on garden design, certainly the largest Permaculture book on garden design out there (the DM is the same size but includes many topics beyond gardening.)

That is a beautiful and inspiring accomplishment - congratulations! I'm looking forward to reading your books.