Here’s our pick of articles about all things to do with working with Animals to enhance your permaculture system in all kinds of ways.
From nutrient cycling to pollination and companionship, as well as tasty yields from eggs and honey through to home-raised protein.
What do you get when you cross a sustainable fisheries bloke with a Permaculture Design Course? An Aquaponics system enthusiast, advocate and entrepreneur, that’s what. Matt Spalding took our PDC last year and since then he’s been going gang-busters on learning + building home aquaponics systems, with a focus on fish health, as well as…
It’s fab, it’s new, and the honey flows straight into the jar. It’s so easy. But then, powdered instant potato is easy, too. Does that make it a good idea? Despite my mission to focus on positivistic messages of change, at Milkwood we’ve got a charter of calling it like we see it. And to call yet…
We’re very excited to announce we’ve figured out a learning path for all of you remote + time-poor folks who want to get the nitty-gritty knowledge of setting up regenerative + ethical animal systems for small farms. Joel Salatin webinars! In these intensive webinars, Joel will go straight to the heart of the matter and discuss…
So just how relevant or valuable IS an American farmer like Joel Salatin coming to Australia to talk small farm skills and enterprise planning? As it turns out, quite a lot. The techniques + thinking of Polyface Farms’ founder has influenced many amazing small farm enterprises in Australia that we know of, helping them to thrive,…
It’s many a city dweller’s long-lived dream. Skip out on the hustle and bustle and set up a life of clean air and green space in the country. Peter Brandis held that dream for 25-plus years – and one day, finally made the move. He then set up a funky little permaculture homestead and off-grid home…
Since we left the farm, our attitude to meat has shifted. Out of necessity, mostly. No more chest freezers full of home raised + slaughtered pigs + lamb, no dispatching + plucking of ducks or chickens, no random haunches of feral venison, home cured bacon or roadkill kangaroo backstrap.
Is it possible to recycle 100% of a small family’s organic kitchen waste with just a simple, single worm farm? I’ve always wondered. I’ve done 50% of our scraps easily – but the whole lot? That’s… a lot of scraps, in our house. Well, it seems you can, if the design is right. We’ve been…
More than ever, the world is waking up to the importance of bees in our ecology. More and more folk are exploring beekeeping, whether it’s for the honey harvest, the extra pollination of our food thanks to those bees working busily on all things pollen, or purely for the fascination of these brilliant insects.
Why are muscovy ducks so awesome? Let me count the ways… They’re quiet and friendly, they hunt flies (seriously), are hardy in all weathers, and produce fabulous eggs and the best duck meat ever. Convinced yet?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDXZc0tZe04 This is a great little video from Gaia Bees, an American natural beekeeper doing some very interesting work in bee colony resilience and apicentric beekeeping. The super interesting thing about this video is that it clearly shows how, in a ‘wild hive’, the colony starts at the highest point of the cavity, and draws…
It’s the pace of everything, that gets you most of all – everyone is busy – doing a task that needs to be done, right now, then walking purposefully to the next task, which also needs to be done. Joel Salatin often describes the interaction between his rotational beef grazing and egg mobile systems as ‘ballet of…
Sun Hives are a hive design coming out of Germany and now gathering interest in Britain. They’re part of the world-wide movement towards ‘apicentric’ beekeeping – beekeeping that prioritizes honeybees firstly as pollinators, with honey production being a secondary goal. The Sun Hive is modeled in part on the traditional European skep hive, and is…
We’ve been researching egg mobile models for a good while now, in order to figure out how best to get our small (but growing) flock of layers rotating through our paddocks, enjoying fresh pasture and laying eggs aplenty. In the end, as with most things, it came down to working with what we’ve got. Enter…