Miraculous Abundance: A Veganic Ecological Permaculture Perspective
May 6, 2020 by Shantree Kacera, R.H., D.N., Ph.D.
A Veganic Ecological Permaculture Perspective:
Shifting the Paradigm & Creating a Bioabundant Future of Peace
“I believe regenerative gardening is one of the most dangerous occupations on Earth because you’re in danger of becoming free.”
Take a moment to consider that 50% of Americans were farming in 1880. Now, less than 2% of the nation is employed in agriculture. From another perspective, in 1945, Americans grew 45% of their food in their backyard gardens. Now, we grow 0.1% of our food in our backyards.
We created this era of chemical mega-farms that has destroyed our soils, water systems, oceans, and human health. By the same reality, we can transform this planet into the most verdant and regenerative ecosystem in many millennia.
We live in a time on planet Earth where many question whether there is another way to live. Here at The Living Centre (est. 1983) in London, On. Canada, we believe the Earth is asking us to shift our ways of living and tend to the landscape. We look at how we move through our day peacefully and harmoniously with our environment.
Permaculture is a solution-based approach to many of the challenges that are happening in the world. One aspect of permaculture is looking at what plants to grow that will nourish us, sustain us and support the regeneration of the landscape. Our approach uses a veganic practice that we have implemented for 40+ years, and it works! Our bio-abundance is truly a gift!
Shifting from Sustainability to Regeneration
In a world where sustainability is paramount, the Veganic Ecological Permaculture perspective emerges as a beacon of hope, offering a wholistic regenerative approach to harmonizing human activities with the natural world. Rooted in permaculture principles, this perspective extends its ethos to embrace veganic practices, eschewing reliance on animal inputs and promoting regenerative agricultural techniques that nurture soil health and biodiversity.
At its core, Veganic Ecological Permaculture represents a profound shift towards a more compassionate and interconnected way of living. By eliminating animal byproducts such as manure and bone meal, practitioners honour the inherent value of all life forms while minimizing harm to animals and the environment. Instead, they harness the power of plant-based composting, green manures, and other sustainable methods to enrich the soil and cultivate thriving ecosystems.
This approach recognizes that true sustainability cannot be achieved through exploitation or degradation of natural resources but through cooperation and stewardship. By fostering resilient food systems that mimic the diversity and resilience of natural ecosystems, Veganic Ecological Permaculture provides nourishment for the body and nurtures the land for future generations.
Veganic Ecological Permaculture Solutions
In agriculture, Veganic Ecological Permaculture offers innovative solutions to the challenges posed by climate change, soil degradation, and biodiversity loss. Through practices such as no-till farming, agroforestry, and polyculture planting, practitioners work in harmony with nature to build soil fertility, conserve water, and enhance ecosystem resilience. By prioritizing perennial crops, native species, and habitat restoration, they create thriving landscapes that support a wide array of plant and animal life.
Moreover, the Veganic Ecological Permaculture perspective extends beyond the boundaries of growing practices to encompass broader societal and cultural shifts toward sustainability and justice. By advocating for plant-based diets, equitable access to land and resources, and community-led initiatives, practitioners strive to create a more just and resilient world for all beings.
The Veganic Ecological Permaculture perspective offers a compelling vision for a more harmonious relationship between humanity and the natural world. By honouring the interconnectedness of all life and embracing regenerative practices, we can cultivate abundance, resilience, and compassion in our communities and beyond.
Imagine a landscape that requires no fertilizer, irrigation, pesticides, or tractor cultivation and produces highly nutritious, tasty foods. Now imagine the food and medicine that have been grown or wildcrafted. The food is also incredibly delicious, and dehydrated crackers are made from the nutty, sweet edible grass seeds, covered with a sauce made from sun-dried elderberries and decorated with strips of juicy nopales – prickly pear pads. You begin your meal with a green salad of chickweed and lambs’ quarter greens and follow with a dessert of high-protein plantain seed flour cookies. To drink: a tartly sweet pink “lemonade” made from dried sumac fruit from last year’s harvest.
While this may sound like an exercise in food fiction, creating such a culinary cuisine is all in a day’s work for wild nutritionists, ethical foraging herbalists or forest gardeners. Here is what we are exploring and implementing even more this year in our gardens.
What is a Veganic Permaculture Garden?
Gardener and researcher John Jeavons asked, “What is the optimum way to grow enough food for one person on the smallest amount of land possible in a way that is self-fertile and ecologically sustainable in the long term?” After decades of research and testing, he developed the biointensive approach. Biointensive is veganic by default, as raising animals takes up too much space and resources.
The veganic permaculture garden is a lot more than an organic garden. Yes, an intelligent design system uses free, sustainable energies and resources. It is energy-wise and collaborative, minimizing a site's impact on the surrounding environment. Good design has great potential.
What is a Permaculture Plant?
A permaculture plant is usually a perennial or biannual. If it is a native plant, it further enhances its nutrient potential. Native vegetation has four main benefits or values: economic value, ecological value, social value, and aboriginal heritage value. In some instances, native vegetation has been clear-cut, leaving a few individual trees scattered across the landscape. They use fewer resources, and wild native plants have more nutrient-density potential.
What is Wild Intelligence?
For a long time, we have known that mycorrhizal fungi connect the trees in a forest. Fungi live symbiotically with the roots of forest trees. The forest trees can’t grow without them because they haven’t got enough access to the minerals in the soil, and the fungi can’t grow without the trees because they have no chlorophyll and, therefore, can’t manufacture sugars. It’s a beautiful symbiosis in which all trees are involved. It’s a partnership that supports a nutrient flow, a cycle that promotes nutrient-density from one to another to create great harmony.
We now know that mycorrhizal fungi don’t surround just one tree. Using radioactive trace elements, the researchers showed that the fungi were passing nutrients between different species of trees over a large area. The trees that were not so good in the winter, like aspens, were being given food manufactured by the conifers, which do much better in winter, and vice versa. Thus, the fungus helps distribute food amongst forest trees so that they all benefit at the right time.
Why a Perennial Polyculture?
A perennial polyculture is a dynamic, self-organizing, multi-species community. Designed and tended to by the grower to produce food or other yields. While annual crops are sometimes included in the mix, perennial species predominate those that live for more than one year. It is much more comfortable a three-meter diameter perennial polyculture would be approximately one hour of work a year. Grow nutritious food through this fantastic and effective way of growing healthy food. That stands a chance with the changing climate and folks who want to increase local organic diversity of food crops. We are building data sets to present our models to provide healthy and nutritious food while promoting increased biological diversity in the growing environment.
The challenges of our annual monoculture:
1) Soil Loss and degradation
2) Energy input requirements
3) Inefficient nutrient and water utilization
The Advantages of Perennial Polyculture
1) Mixed Fruit and Nut Orchards
2) Perennial Vegetables, Berries and Cane Fruits
3) Perennial Seeds and Grains
A Local Wild Living Design – Embracing Native Foods
Restoring native plant habitats is vital to preserving biodiversity. By creating an edible native plant garden, each habitat patch becomes part of a collective effort to nurture and sustain the living landscape for birds and other animals. Our wild natural landscapes have many native plants and perennials – delicious native foods. Native plants are a savvy choice for enriching your yard or business landscape. There are hundreds of hardy and eye-catching varieties to choose from. Native plants – fruit, nut trees, delicious berries, herbs or colourful wildflowers – are well-adapted to the local climate and have natural defences to ward off our region’s pests and diseases.
Our Permaculture Forest Gardens Bioabundance
2017 Goals & Harvest
The Living Centre 2017 harvested and foraged 886 kg (1953.3 lbs.) of fruits, berries, vegetables, wild edibles and medicinal herbs from June to December 1. Many of our leafy greens or sprouts and missed foods were not recorded. In 2017, we did not keep track of our work hours, but taking a rough estimate, we would say we put in full 40-hour weeks times 24 weeks/6 months, making it about 960 hours. We intend to increase our tracking method of harvest time and the entire operation from planting, pruning, and maintaining to harvest in the upcoming years as our first year of launching this research program – keeping a record of our yields.
Our design plan is to continue creating abundance and sharing our passion, demonstrating and inspiring a new generation. As Benjamin Franklin stated, “By failing to prepare, you’re preparing to fail.” An abundant forest garden will always require robust planning and a vision of biodiversity into a beautiful future deep down; our hearts know it is possible.
2018 Goals & Harvest
Then, in 2018, we harvested and foraged approximately 1200.00 kg (2645.54 lbs.) of fruits, berries, vegetables, wild edibles and medicinal herbs for the year. Imagine 170 kilograms of fresh sprouts, microgreens and baby greens grown indoors in our kitchen and passive solar Earthship greenhouse. Approximately 27% of our food and medicine harvest was wild and native foods. In 2018, we kept track of our harvest hours. A rough estimate would be that we put in about 120 hours in 36 weeks/9 months. We intend to increase our tracking method of harvest time and the entire operation from planting, pruning, and maintaining to harvest in the upcoming years—our second year of launching this research program of keeping a record of our yields.
Our Future Goals: From Organic to Veganic & Beyond
Our goal for 2022, from March 21 to December 21, is 2,000 kg (4409 lbs.)
We are excited about fine-tuning our record-keeping and sharing our practices and results in the future. We will begin this record-keeping process for the first day of spring on March 21, 2022. We are sharing this project’s development with all of our student mentees – we will continue to be posted as we go through the seasons. We love sharing our journey and passion for creating a way of life that sustains and nourishes us. Our experiment thus far shows to grow and forage the nutrient-dense food of this landscape – being of the wild and native plants. This is one of the most ecological ways possible and a model that can carry us into a post-carbon future through decades of living and exploring. We aim to produce fresh, organic, local food, wild edibles, and plant medicines this year, including a bioabundance of thousands of kilograms of peace so that all beings can live in happiness and joy!
The Question?
What is the optimum way to grow enough food for one person on the smallest amount of land possible?
John Jeavons has demonstrated that a person on a balanced vegan diet can grow all their nutrient-dense food on as little as 700 square feet.
Our Methodology
Modelling a living system
Practicing organic veganic methods
Using only hand-tools
On-site fertility mulch, compost and making our weed tea
Forest gardening practices
Using a no-till approach
Growing in All Seasons
Perennial Plants, Wild Plants
High-Density Polyculture Planting
Utilizing our Earthship Greenhouse
A Change of Scale – Small is Beautiful
Decades before, the terms “eco-friendly” And “sustainable growing” entered the vernacular. Shantree has been practicing and demonstrating that small-scale, high-yield, all-organic methods can yield bountiful crops over multiple growing cycles using resources for almost 50 years.
An Organic Regenerative Biointensive System
”An entire balanced diet could be grown at intermediate yields on as little as 1,000 square feet per person in an 8-month growing season.” ~John Jeavons, How to Grow More Vegetables (and fruits, nuts, grains and other crops) than you ever thought possible on less land than you can imagine
Using regenerative biointensive techniques has the potential to:
Use 67% to 88% less water than conventional agricultural methods.
Use 50% to 100% less purchased (organic, locally available) fertilizer.
Use up to 99% less energy than commercial agriculture while using a fraction of the resources.
Produce 2 to 6 times more food at intermediate yields, assuming a reasonable level of the gardener’s skill and soil fertility (which increase over time as the method is practiced)
Produce a 100% increase in soil fertility.
Reduce by 50% or more the land required to grow a comparable amount of food. This allows more land to remain in a wild state, preserving ecosystem services and promoting genetic diversity.
An Inspiration
To determine how much a market forest gardener working 1000 square meters of land might earn. The final report as of 2015 shows that during the last 12 months of study, 1600 hours were performed in the garden, and an additional 800 hours were consumed with related market forest gardening tasks, for a total of 2400 work hours. The value of the product sold was $59,497. These results confirm that one can earn one’s living on a tiny piece of land without mechanization using permaculture forest gardening methods. They also confirmed that it is possible to engage an extra-paid worker if the workload demands it. ~Ferme du Bec Hellouin
Land required to feed 1 person for 1 year:
Vegan: 1/6th acre (674.4 sq. meters)
Vegetarian: 3x as much as a vegan (1/2 acre) (2697.9 sq. meters) (0.2 hectares)
Meat Eater: 18x as much as a vegan (3 acres) (12,140.6 sq. meters) (1.2 hectares)
~Cowspiracy & Earthsave
The Miracle of Veganic Forest Gardening:
Toward a Bio-Abundant Future
My invitation is for each of us to rethink our role within nature. To embrace a bioabundant future and “take the best of the many traditions of humanity, and the best of modernity, to shape a world that has never existed.”
This future is what veganic forest gardening permaculture offers, both a science and art of living. We are in the very early stages of this adventure. The rest of the story remains to be written, and each can contribute to creating.
The foremost challenge is not technical; it is inside us – just as the solutions are. We all tend to endorse limiting viewpoints: The past is past, development is always proper, the West is better than the rest of the world, and intellectual occupation is better than a blue-collar career. Dare to imagine a new way. Consider the question of the future we are creating with a higher perspective. Now, step back from the mental formatting that we all matter. Take the best of the many traditions of humanity and the best of modernity to shape a world that has never existed, a brand new world. Become voyagers of the future. To create peace is to be peace.
Creating Foraging Gardens of Peace
Gardens are also sanctuaries of peace. When we step into a garden—abundant with beautiful harmony and filled with songs from all living beings—we shift our culture’s paradigm to wholeness, true healing, and peace.