Brett Pritchard

Secondhand round trampolines are often free and ones of around 3.2 metre diameter make great green houses. The ones with the safety netting included are the best as the trampoline safety netting can be used for shadecloth. Pull the trampoline apart then form into two semi-circles. Slip straight lengths of pipe from the safety net frame into the sockets on the semi circles that the legs used to push into. You now have the frame constructed, and can screw a few self tappers in to hold the pipe together. Cut the safety net so it is a rectangle then stretch that over the frame and cable tie into place. You may have to get a bit of extra shadecloth for the ends. Cut the trampoline mat up and use that for weed mat. I've built both green houses and trellising using old trampolines and it is generally cheaper and stronger than similar looking structures built using polypipe.

The secret is to have a sealable drum and use hot water. When you turn the drum pressure builds up and forces the water through the cloth. I used to have a great little hand cranked washing machine that worked really well, and was just a sealed drum on a stand with a handle. I found if I chucked it in the back of the station wagon and drove to town and back it worked just as well.

I originally didn't have the link up to the project I'm doing in Borneo but a couple of people who appreciated the cards asked how they could help me in return. I don't want anyone to feel they have an obligation to help or that they had to pay in any way to access the cards, as the two projects are not connected except by virtue they were both conceived by me. The alley crop trial is actually one part in a greater design, which is detailed in more depth at Permaculture Design for Reducing Emissions

* The PDC is based on Permaculture: A Designers' Manual.
* When teaching the PDC one should cover all the principles and not use a condensed set.
* Through my experience gained ftom 25 years of teaching and thinking permaculture I have distilled the ethics and principles into a 21 card set.
* With Bill Mollison's blessing this set of cards is called 'Mollison's Permaculture Ethics and Design Principles'.
* The cards are free to download from the site I set up at <www.permaculturefundamentals.com>.
* I will be making a cheap e-book available soon of A3 mindmaps that go with the cards.
* The current illustrations on some cards are to be changed once Bill's daughter Frances Mollison completes them.

I have my Diploma of Permaculture in Education amd Community Services and been teaching the PDC since 1993, and have always used the Permaculture Designers' Manual (Mollison 1988) as the base for my curriculum. When teaching the ethics and principles as any permaculture teacher knows it is a matter of dragging them out of the manual and also from Introduction to Permaculture (Mollison & Slay 1992). The majority of he principles are on pages 34-35 of the manual but are not in any special order. A few years ago David Holmgren published his version of the permaculture principles, and condensed them down to 12 simple principles. He also shortened the third ethic to 'fair share', which while being snappy and rhyming with the first two principles it could lead people to assume it means don't over consume rather than devoting excess time, energy and money towards earth care and people care. Getting back to the principles, as there has never been an ordered and clear arrangement of the original permaculture principles this has led to a plethora of arrangements and interpretations. Many permaculture teachers use Holmgren's set, which come with cards and adownloadable e-booklet, but I found these don't include some of the important attitudinal principles. I saw a need for a set of Mollison Permaculture Ethics and Permaculture Principles that was comprehensive, well ordered, and as true to Bill's original vision as possible. I knew I had to limit the number of principles so it wasn't too difficult for people to remember easily, and that it is best to chunk information in groups of 7 or less as that is about most peoples's memory limit. I also looked at other principle card sets 'on the market' and realised many covered techniques and strategies as well as some of the principles, with cards on alley cropping and banana circles, but none gave a comprehensive set of the principles. After months of trying different orders and even names for some of the principles I finally came up with a 21 card set. The first three are ethics cards with the first card covering the three main ethics, ethics of natural systems on the second card, and ethics of resource use on the third. I then ordered the principles into energy principles, functional design principles, principles from nature, and attitudinal principles. To assist in memory retention the cards can be organised into a pyramid with the first ethics card at the top followed by ethics on natural areas and on resource use, then the three energy cards, then the four functional design principles, then the five principles from nature, then the six attitudinal principles at the base. I also noticed that some existing principle cards are difficult to use in a design situation and dont clearly spell out the principle but tries to condense it into a short snappy saying. I designed these cards to be 'information dense' and have included practical examples whenever I could. I have taught a number of short courses using these cards as well as using them when teaching the full PDC, and have recieved great feedback from my students. Most find that it is all they need to revise the whole course and can do a design by going through the principle cards. I also realised that if I wanted people to use them I would have to make them freely available and easy to print. I chose a 6x4 photo size as you can get this size photo printed very cheaply in many areas. You can also get very cheap 6x4 24 page photo album books for putting the photos in, turning it into a photobook rather than a loose pack of cards. To make them available I also purchased a domain name and am slowly getting the web page together. To recoup some costs I will be selling an accompanying e-book of A3 mindmaps that go with the card set, though the cards on their own are fairly self-explanatory and they are posted as full sized images for people to freely save and download. I have given a copy of the cards to Bill, over a year ago now, and he loved them and gave his blessing for them to be called 'Mollison's Permaculture Ethics and Design Principles'. His daughter Frances Mollison has done a few of the illustrations and is working on the rest, so while the names and order are set some of the pictures will be upgraded as they are completed. In the mean time the current draft of the cards can be downloaded from <www.permaculturefundamentals.com>

I have been told that the EM bacterial mix actually improves the conditions for beneficial indigenous microbes, and that by changing about 10% of a bacterial mix you can alter the rest as that 10% creates the conditions for other bacteria to thrive. I have read about IMOs and they are similar in many ways to EM. I don't know what would happen if you mixed the two but it could be worth trying. As far as being foreign bacteria, my understanding is that the bacteria in the EM naturally occurs all over the world. The main big advantage the EM has is the purple non-sulphurus photosynthetic bacteria that sequests carbon in aerobic environments and sequests nitrogen in anaerobic environments. As far as I know it is naturally occuring in the soil in some sunny marsh areas, so potentially you could find such an area and harvest the bacteria for addition to an IMO brew. The other big advantage of this EM is its stability, but this is more of an issue if producing biofertiliser for sale as farm-made IMO brews are usually used on site. As to the exact composition of the EM I use I don't know if even the developer of it even knows accurately. In addition to the additional purple non-sulphuric bacteria he also managed to incorporate an 8-step circular bacterial process, where the products of one group of bacteria are used by the next and so on finally circling around to the first group again. He said it wouldn't be possible to genetically test it as there are so many different bacteria involved, and that even if you could afford to get genetic testing done on all the bacteria by the time you measured it the composition would have changed.

I can assist you with brewing up some of this modified EM I mentioned in the post on stopping methane emissions ftom rice fields. It fits in perfectly with the organic / permaculture techniques you are already using, and it will stop your methane emissions and pull nitrogen into the flooded fields and carbon into the soil when the fields are drained. The same bacterial mix can be used to turn any organic matter from food waste to animal manures into organic probiotic fertiliser while producing no greenhouse gases. It is possible to brew up a couple of hundred litres ftom 500ml in a couple of months, then it is diluted 10:1 before application. I can buy the modified EM locally here in Australia, and have already posted some to a few 'facebook friends' who wanted to brew it up so they could construct the BioWicked garden beds I designed to utilise the fertiliser in urban food production systems. Send me an email at drytropics@gmail.com and we can work something out. All I'd want in repayment is some feedback on your experience using it, as I am excited about the prospect of seeing if it does stop methane emissions from wet paddy fields as a I theorise. Without a chemistry lab and scientific equipment it won't be possible to measure the paddy field emissions exactly, but you shoukd visibly see a ceasation of gas bubbling through the water from the soil. You coukd brew up a 'mother culture' mix then add organic matter and brew for another month to create the fertiliser. The mother culture on its own will have the bacterial action but contains very few nutrients.

Sorry if I wasn't clear but I was only referring to stopping methane emissions from rice fields completely, not all of nature. In addition to stopping much more methane than conventional SRI techniques it could be used to enhance the ability of SRI techniques to sequest carbon, except where chemical inputs are used that could supress the bacteria and mycorrhiza. It could also reduce nitrous oxide emissions as some of the beneficial bacteria that replaces the methanogenesis microbiome fixes nitrogen in the soil, reducing the need for nitrogen fertiliser. While composting is usually considered carbon negative the EM process goes one further and locks up carbon and nitrogen that is oxidised during most composting systems. It is the combination of the EM composting system (using this improved mix) that produces no greenhouse gases and the carbon sequestering using the organic liquid fertiliser that creates a carbon negative food-waste-food cycle. When trialled on croplands in Australia this fertiliser boosted soil carbon from virtually nothing to over 3% in just one year. The organic fertiliser is cheap and easy to produce, and also deals with food waste in an efficient system that loses none of the nutrients to the air. The BioRegen machines the Australian company developed to easily convert food waste to this probiotic fertiliser have alreasy been introduced to a few rice growing countries in SE Asia and is currently being rolled out in China. The unit has two grinders to finely mince the food waste and it is automatically inoculated with the improved EM and washed with a small amount of water into 1,000 litre IBC tanks. The food waste ferments anaerobically in the closed containers so there is no smell or insect pests or rodents. During the 28 day fermentation the pH drops to 3.5 which kills e-coli, salmonella, and other pathogens then it returns to pH 7 once fermentation ceases. Very soon large amounts of this probiotic organic liquid fertiliser made from EM fermented food waste will be readily available in many rice growing areas and sooner or later someone will begin trials, as it is the most climate friendly way to both recycle food waste and to grow organic rice. I'm just putting the information out there for someone better resourced to take the idea and run with it. I will hopefully be discussing the establishment of a small trial in Sarawak this October, but would love to see a large well resourced group such as the SRI coordinators or the IRRI begin widespread trials. We already know from trials in Australia that this probiotic fertiliser sequests soil carbon faster than any other known system, now we just need to test if it is as efficient at stopping methane emissions from flooded paddy fields.

Scott - While SRI can reduce methane emissions by 30%, mainly through reducing the amount of time the fields are flooded, the method I outlined would stop 100% of the methane emissions. There is no reason it couldn't be incorporated into existing SRI techniques to further improve both the fertility and reduce the greenhouse gas emissions. The carbon sequestering bacteria also improves the soil carbon faster than SRI techniques, and as the probiotic fertiliser is made from fermented food waste it also closes the food-waste-food cycle saving further emissions. While SRI is an improvement in rice growing it is still incapable of sequestering more emissions than it creates. When the warming potential of methane is considered over a 20 year period it has over 100 times the warming potential of CO2 and to avoid a climate spike we need to reduce methane emissions from rice fields to zero, and SRI on its own is incapable of achieving that. In contrast the method I detailed is carbon negative as zero methane emissions are created and carbon is locked up in the soil, and as an extra bonus the use of food waste to produce the fertiliser diverts that waste food from landfill where it would rot and create methane.

Eric, the non-flooded intensive rice system sounds great. While minmising the flooding period would reduce methane emissions it wouldn't stop them completely like the method mentioned above. While changing wet paddy farmers to intensive systems incorporating dryland rice is a solution, I believe there would be less resistence from many farmers to convert to the system I describe where they can continue much of their same practices. It is also a very cost effective way for wet paddy rice producers to convert to organic growing, as the probiotic fertiliser is made from food waste and is very cheap to produce. Farmers who are used to backpack spraying could just convert from spraying agrochemicals to spraying the fertiliser, or it could just be added to the water as it flows into the fields. This system also deals with urban food waste in a method that converts it to the required probiotic fertiliser without creating methane or other greenhouse gases, and creates a market for the fertiliser. One part of the system doesn't work without the other, as there is no point making gallons of liquid fertiliser from food waste if it is not being used. The good thing is that the Australian company that makes the modified EM and the Bio-Regen unit is rapidly expanding and it will hopefully soon become the standard way urban food waste is processed. They opened a Malysian branch a couple of years ago and recently opened their branch in China. This probiotic fertiliser when used on farmlands in the Burdekin area in Australia substantially boosted soil carbon, with one seeing a soil carbon increase from 0.09% to 3% in just one year. We know then that this will sequest carbon into the soils of the drained paddy fields when they are fallow, and we just need to do trials to see how it effects the methane emissions in the flooded fields. As the system also diverts food waste from landfill, stopping methane emissions from that source, it has a much greater effect of reducing emissions than systems that don't close the food-waste-food cycle. I have been told by the developer of the modified EM that I should only have to inoculate the saturated soil in my BioWicked urban grow boxes once to permanently stop the methane emissions, so it could be used as a one off treatment in fields using other organic methods or used regularly for the nutrients.