Permaculture for Profit

In an unpredictable world with rampant inflation, rising unemployment, climate chaos—and worse!—many people are turning to the land to take their lives back, and escape the rat race. In complicated times it’s no surprise that many of us are dreaming of a simpler life of living off the land. 

In the last 20-something years, I’ve met countless inspiring families who have created beautiful, abundant lives for themselves, free from the rat race. For almost all of us, (whether we knew it or not,) one little-discussed Permaculture tool, “regenerative assets,” have been the key to making that dream a reality.  

The truth is many back-to-the-landers end up going back to the drawing board when the farm fails. I suspect that if you’re reading this right now, either you’ve already taken the leap to the land and now you’re struggling to figure out how to make it work, or you’re dreaming of the lifestyle and wondering how you’ll pay the bills. 

In homesteading circles, we often give people a lot of encouragement and hope, but skimp on the difficult realities of land-based livelihoods. So called “celebrity farmers” publish their “$40,000/year” incomes, but only tell us in the fine print that they split that between 2 full-timers working 70 hours/week and 3 part-time seasonal employees. New farmers learn that reality the hard way. 

The fact is we have to contend with 100 years of global government policies designed to push down agricultural wages to drive families off the land, and force corporate consolidation to keep food cheap and free up cheap labour for factories. For example, here in the US we have agricultural labour exemptions which mean farm work hasn’t had a minimum wage increase since the 1960s, so workers can still earn as low as $3/US dollars/hour (that’s less than $4.80/hour AUS!) Because the American “bread basket” is such a major player, anywhere in the world, if we pick up a shovel to go to work, that’s the wage we’re competing with. So around the world, governments suppress agricultural wages to compete. To quote Permaculturist and author of Restoration Agriculture Mark Shepard, “almost no farms make a profit off their produce. Why should we (Permaculturists) expect to?” 

This global difficulty of earning a fair wage for work on the land was one of the major “problems” Permaculture founder Bill Mollison worked his whole life to solve. The solution he came up with, and that a whole global community has continued to develop, is use holistic design so that we grow naturally regenerative wealth over time. 

The key to that is investing. That certainly doesn’t mean investing in the stock market, and it doesn’t necessarily even mean investing cash. We can invest without a single dollar. It means we invest our time, energy, social capital, resources, and yes, also some cash, into creating a whole rich ecological and social support system for ourselves that is resilient, beautiful, and abundant. 

Or as Bill Mollison put it: “Permaculture is where your environment becomes your retirement.” 

The key insight here is that if we want to create a thriving, resilient livelihood in a field that pays $3/hour, we’ll need to escape the delusion that we can do that with our incomes alone. 

Keep in mind, that good farming has always been about long-term investing, not just cash flow! Many American farmers will start out in debt, then barely get by, losing money every year for 15 years, then suddenly wake up one morning and find out they’re millionaires! 

How? 

Because their “assets” (their farm land, business, and equipment) have appreciated in value. Many arrived at this happy point from sheer luck and determination. But we can do so  much better if we actually design for it and invest in better lives intentionally. 

In other words, good Permaculture is not about how you make your money, it’s “about how you spend it and where you bank (invest) it.” Or to quote that age old money advice: “the poor look for jobs, the middle class develop careers, the wealthy invest.”

And to be clear, I’m not ONLY talking about sort of hippie idea of investments like having a beautiful home, and a beloved community, though those are extremely important, too. In fact, when we talk about Permaculture being “profitable,” we’re always talking about the value it creates for our ecosystems, our communities, and everyone around us. They bring us far more than cash!

But the secret truth is that these sorts of investments can be GREAT investments for real people, and in fact, they can absolutely trounce the stock market when it comes to real cash value. 

This chart shows the S&P 500 (popular for index fund investors, because of its high earnings) from when I invested about $2000 in my last Permaculture project to when I sold my share to reinvest in a new project. That period of time saw unheard of growth in the American stock market! if I had invested my money in an S&P index fund at that time, my $2000 would have turned into about $9000! A huge $7000 return. 

But while extremely impressive for the stock market, that’s not the kind of return that will allow somebody like me to support myself well off of regenerating soil and growing plants. 

Luckily, I invested in regenerating the world instead, and my $2000 turned into somewhere over $100K at the time I partially cashed out. In my knowledge, this is actually not even a particularly great return for a regenerative investment! But it is the sort of climate-resilient regenerative wealth that can allow a first generation college grad with little cash and few resources from a background of generational poverty to create a fairly secure and free lifestyle while doing community activism full-time.

To shift his students’ thinking from “making an income” to “investing in the future,” Bill Mollison taught a tool called “Permaculture asset class analysis.” To keep this rich tool simple enough for this introduction article, asset class analysis gets us to think about whether the things we’re investing our time, money,  energy, and resources in will make us poorer over the long term, or make us holistically wealthier. 

Whenever we invest our time or money into “degenerative assets” that are “made for the landfill,” which break and need to be replaced, we’re literally investing in making our world worse off, and ourselves poorer! When we invest in one of the 3 “regenerative asset classes” we’re investing in this that will make us wealthier while regenerating the earth. For example, if we invest in a perennial permaculture garden, it will become more and more productive over time, while actually requiring less care, so that it brings us money and more free time. 

Now this is a super-simplified example of a tool kit that can become incredibly rich and nuanced. But when we get it really right, and fill our lives with regenerative assets like this, our financial lives start to look like a healthy ecosystem, which actually grows in health, energy, productivity, and resilience over time. In other words, our financial lives become “regenerative.” 

And this isn’t just about land values! For me, my investment stack was a mix of real estate, an established business model with good cash flow, and a collection of highly valuable plants useful for Permaculture landscapes. I’ve seen people do this off of dozens of different sorts of investments, as artists, activists, foresters, craftspeople, smallholders, plants-people…. These folks have created customised investments as unique and diverse as they and their lives are, including highly valuable plants, regenerative clothing businesses with highly valuable antique sewing equipment, flash freezers, commercial kitchens, regenerative restaurants, art-farms, fair trade import businesses, a Permaculture concert venue, huge tomatoes, environmental organisations…. I could go on and on! In fact, for those who want more detail, I’ve worked with a team of 4 other Permaculture designers to fill a massive 500-page tome (Growing FREE) with 147 pages of detailed examples of regenerative investments from the real world. 

Look around! Virtually anything that isn’t working in this world is an opportunity to invest in a better future. Many of these can be better than the stock market. Opportunities abound. 

But the point I hope you’ll take home from this is that we absolutely can design to create thriving lives while working to build a better world. It takes some thoughtful design, and to shift away from solving our problems with a paycheck to investing holistically, long-term in the kind of lives we want to have.

So if you really want to make the lifestyle work, don’t ask yourself how you’re going to “make money.” Ask yourself what investments you can make in creating the life you want and the world you want to live in.  

(Thanks for reading part 1. In part 2, I’ll tell you about how I redesigned my business with Permaculture, to start earning real cash flow.)