posted 5 days ago
Hey, I'm looking for like minded people to start a permaculture village in Portugal.
The idea would be to group multiple communities and/or homesteads in one area, where we can then share knowledge, tools, help each other out, spend time together, and collectively have a bigger impact on rewilding the land, managing forests to prevent fires, increasing water infiltration, and so on.
Not a community where everyone lives under the same roof and shares a communal kitchen (though such initiatives would also be welcome), but rather more of a village, where each person, family or community can have their own personal space, but we can still come together for some common projects, be it a library, a market, land management projects, or whatever else.
I think it's too difficult to do everything on your own. Putting on many hats is part of permaculture, in a way, but being a famer and a plumber and an electrician, and knowing about beekeeping and herding goats, and local laws, and everything else is in my opinion not so viable in the long term. Even if you were to manage it, you are one injury or illness away from having everything fall apart again.
Instead of 20-50 different people all investing in beekeeping equipment, we could have one or 2 people who know about beekeeping, and who set up or move hives all around the place.
Instead of loads of people having 2 goats, and the others using brushcutters and other mechanical equipment to clear the land, we could have one or two people with larger herds, doing rotational grazing, coming to clean people's land.
Are we all going to have a forge, and a kiln and whatever else? It's such a huge investment each time. It seems like it would make more sense to have community initiatives and infrastructure for some things, and some private stuff that is shared or rented out to others.
Ideally, someone who for example is working remotely, but wants a more natural lifestyle, would be able to move to the village, and benefit from buying locally produced honey, eggs, cheese and vegetables from others who live there and want to work the land.
Meanwhile the homesteader next door gets to have some income from selling their eggs and cheese and olive oil and whatever else.
And both get to have some company.
It can get really lonely and expensive trying to homestead all alone out in the middle of nowhere.
Let's get together and talk and figure something out, we can help each other!