Part 0 · Orientation
Why This Course Exists
The permaculture design course industry sells a certificate that teaches design without food. This course teaches the food, and names every source.
The permaculture design certificate is sold as the way in. Pay the fee, sit the seventy-two hours, collect the certificate, and the course is supposed to leave you able to design a permanent system. The certificate is real. The claim attached to it is the failure.
A PDC teaches zones and sectors, water and earthworks, soil, guilds, and the design process. It rarely teaches what you eat in February. A learner can finish with a beautiful base map, a food forest plan that ripens in year five, and no stored grain to reach that year. The design is complete. The pantry is empty. This course exists to close that gap, and to name who is served by leaving it open.
The four positions
This course is built on four positions, stated plainly so that nobody has to infer them.
One: the certificate is a pyramid. We reject the pyramid scheme of permaculture PDCs. A PDC is sold as a credential, and the credential's main economic use is to license the holder to sell more PDCs. Every pre-industrial agricultural system is primarily a subsistence system. Permaculture is drawn from indigenous methods, usually without attribution, so it is no different from the systems it borrows from, and how permaculture is capitalized is a detriment to the system it claims to teach.
Two: markets are fine, extraction is the problem. This does not mean you cannot make money from your work. We are pro-markets and trade. The order is the argument: subsistence first, and then a fair price for surplus later. Selling the surplus of a farm that feeds its household is trade. Selling the promise of a farm to people who do not yet have one is a different business, and it is the one the certification market runs.
Three: a farm that needs the course to survive is not a farm. Permaculture projects that need YouTube and PDC courses to stay financially solvent are not permaculture projects people should dedicate their time to. If the land cannot feed the household, the tuition is subsidizing a demonstration, and the demonstration has become the product.
Four: the frames come in order. We frame permaculture first in subsistence, then in anti-capitalism (enough is a fine amount to have, no growth required), and finally as a solarpunk community. The sequence is not decoration. Each frame rests on the one before it, and the lessons after this one build them in that order.
The short version is the name we gave the course. This is the PDC, for people who don't believe in a PDC. It is the anti-PDC-PDC.
What this course promises
Two things, and only two.
You finish able to design and run your own subsistence farm: yours, on your ground, in your climate and your rainfall, and then to run it. That is why every lesson ends with something done on real ground.
You finish able to say where every idea came from. Permaculture did not invent swales, guilds, chop and drop, sheet mulch, or stacking functions. Earlier writers put those ideas on paper centuries and millennia before Mollison and Holmgren gave the tradition a modern name. This course names the older writer or the older system for each idea and cites the text. If an idea is new, the lesson says so. Most are not new.
Subsistence first, and why the order is not negotiable
Subsistence means the household produces the food, fuel, water, and materials it needs from the land it works, as the first claim on that land. Surplus comes after. That order decides what a farm is for. A farm that grows food to sell and buys food to eat is a business. A farm that feeds its household first and sells what is left is a subsistence farm with a market, and that is the older model.
The history supports it. Varro reported that smallholdings of thirty to sixty iugera, worked by the families who lived on them, out-produced the great slave plantations per acre. The direction of the data has not changed since. The plantation and the PDC share a business model: concentrate the revenue and externalize the cost.
Where you start
Observation before intervention. Spend one growing season on the ground you have before drawing a permanent plan. Walk it in every season. Watch where the water stands after a hard rain. Watch where the frost settles. Watch what grows without being planted, because that is what your soil wants to produce.
The first thing to build is not a food forest and not a certificate. It is a store of calories that will still be there in February.
What to do before the next lesson
Exercise
The February pantry
Write down everything you ate in the last seven days. Beside each item, mark where it came from: your own ground, a neighbor within fifty miles, or a supply chain longer than that. Total the calories and the money in each column. Keep the page. It is the baseline this course measures against.
Exercise
Name the source of one idea
Pick one permaculture technique you already use: a swale, sheet mulch, chop and drop, or a guild. Find a written source older than 1970 that describes the same technique. Write one paragraph naming the technique, the older source, and the year. If you cannot find one, say so, and note that the idea may be recent.
Fieldwork
Where last month's food came from
Open last month's bank and grocery receipts and total every dollar the household spent on food. Then go through your own store and your growing ground and count what you ate that came from it, and put a store price on that food. Write the two totals side by side. Bring back the dollars spent and the share of the month's food that came off your own ground.
Failure mode
A design that looks like permaculture is not a food system. The failure mode is a beautiful base map and a food forest that ripens in year five, with an empty pantry in year one. Courses sell the diagram because a diagram can be taught in a weekend. Calories cannot be taught in a weekend, and the calories are the part that carries a household until the trees bear.