Loop Farmstead

The Permaculture Design Course

For people who do not believe in PDCs.

Seventy lessons, free, self-paced, no certificate for sale. You finish able to design and run a subsistence farm, and able to name the person who wrote each idea down first. If you would rather keep it offline, there is a build for that too.

• 70 lessons
• 7 parts
• Free forever
• Offline build included

Start at the beginning Get an account

We reject the pyramid scheme of permaculture PDCs

Every permaculture design course sells the same thing: certainty about growing food, delivered by someone who has grown food, to people who have not. The certificate at the end licenses nothing. It is not required to own land, to plant a tree, to keep a goat, or to teach the next course. What it does do is put you one tier below the person who sold it to you, in a structure where their income rises with the number of people in your tier.

That is a pyramid, and the pyramid is why so many permaculture projects need a YouTube channel and a course calendar to stay solvent. A farm that has to keep selling the certainty of food is not the farm this course is teaching you to build.

Our position, stated plainly:

• All pre-industrial agricultural systems are primarily subsistence systems. Permaculture was drawn from indigenous and peasant methods, usually without attribution, so it is no different from them, and how it is capitalised is a detriment to the system.
• None of this means you cannot make money from your work. We are pro-market and pro-trade. We believe subsistence first, and then a fair price for surplus later.
• A permaculture project whose survival depends on selling PDC seats is not a project people should dedicate their time to.
• Good things become pyramid schemes when the reward attaches to the selling rather than the thing sold. Learners should know that, because the choice is theirs to make with their eyes open.

So this course frames permaculture in subsistence first, then in anti-capitalism (enough is a fine amount to have, and no growth is required), and finally as a solarpunk community.

Three frames, in this order

Subsistence first. A household that cannot feed itself is not free to make any other decision. Part 3 teaches the calorie arithmetic, the 10,000 square foot food system, the staple triad of grain, legume and oil, and the crops most permaculture courses refuse to teach. We are not anti-grain. A design that cannot grow its own calories is a garden.

Anti-capitalism second. Once a household can eat, the interesting question is what it does with the surplus. Part 4 covers enclosure, land access, the certification economy, commons governance, and why a design discipline becomes a franchise. There is no growth required, and there is a stopping rule.

Solarpunk third, and last on purpose. Optimism is the conclusion of a working system, never the premise of one. Part 5 is about the community you already live in, appropriate technology, repair, and designing past the end of cheap energy.

What this course is

1. Part 0Orientation4 lessonsabout 85 min reading
2. Part 1The Basics of Permaculture12 lessonsabout 351 min reading
3. Part 2Where These Ideas Come From16 lessonsabout 440 min reading
4. Part 3Subsistence First13 lessonsabout 440 min reading
5. Part 4Anti-Capitalism: The Political Economy of Permaculture10 lessonsabout 295 min reading
6. Part 5Solarpunk5 lessonsabout 125 min reading
7. Part 6Capstone: Design Your Own Subsistence Farm10 lessonsabout 305 min reading

Where the ideas actually come from

Every idea the modern PDC presents as an innovation gets checked against what was written down centuries earlier, and the writer gets named. Swales, sheet mulching, polyculture, guild design, compost, crop rotation, seed saving, water harvesting, terracing: none of it is new, and a designer who knows the lineage can go and read the original. Part 2 works through Hesiod, Xenophon, Cato, Varro, Columella, Palladius, Pliny, Theophrastus, the Geoponica, Ibn al-Awwam, Ibn Wahshiyya, Varahamihira, Crescenzi, Walter of Henley, Fitzherbert, Tusser, the Andean terrace builders, the Persian qanat diggers and the milpa farmers.

Every ancient attestation in the course, in one table.

What you will be able to do

• Survey a piece of land and produce a sector and water plan that holds up.
• Size a food system in square feet and in calories, and defend the arithmetic.
• Grow and store the staples: grain, legume, oil, roots, and vegetables.
• Keep animals at household scale, or decide with numbers that you should not.
• Cost the system, price a genuine surplus fairly, and say what enough is.
• Read an agricultural writer from the 1st century and recognise your own design in it.

What this course is not

• Not accredited, and it never will be. There is no certificate to buy, at the end or anywhere else.
• Not a promise that you can or should be fully self-sufficient. Part 3 says exactly where the ceiling is and what it costs to hit it.
• Not against markets, trade, professional teachers, or a fair day's pay.
• Not a collapse clock. Nothing here says a date.

Your account

Registration is not open yet. The course is finished and free to read now, and accounts open soon, which is when progress starts syncing between devices. Until then the mark complete button on each lesson still works: it saves in this browser, and you can download it as a file at any time and load it into the offline build.

Keep it on your own machine

The whole course also ships as a Linux program. It carries every lesson, keeps your progress in a file on your disk, needs no network, and can export that progress so the online course picks up where you left off. Read it, read the source, copy it, hand it to someone without a connection.

Get the offline build

Still to be shot

The written course is finished. The photographs and the video are not: every visual the lessons need is a labelled placeholder with the exact frame and the exact lesson attached to it.

The shot list