Is the PDC worth it?

[RoamingFrancis]

Hi everyone,

Permaculture gets a lot of discussion on this forum and I was wondering whether the PDC was a worthwhile investment. What have your experiences with it been like?

Additionally, what are the best avenues to earn a living in permaculture (or something permaculture-adjacent?) I could see myself quite happy in arborism or forestry, or even doing landscaping.

Thanks!
Best,
RF

[sky]

The lessons that you can learn from studying permaculture are worth your time.

I don't think that a permaculture design course is worth the money it costs.

You can go on youtube and find a number of video series of permaculture design courses.

I think that the promise of being able to make money with a permaculture design course is mostly false. You might make some money as a small farmer, or a landscaper. In order to teach permaculture for money, you should have at least 5 years of experience developing a permaculture homestead and probably need to write a book or otherwise develop an online presence as an expert in permaculture.

If you have property and want to develop it in a sustainable way, a permaculture design course might be worthwhile if you have a lot of money.

[tsch]

It's good for inspiration, sometimes for meeting other like-minded folks, and can be a fun sort of learning vacation. If you haven't physically done anything, a good course that goes hands-on can help you get confident about doing things like building swales. It can be helpful to spend several days on a developed permaculture site as you learn how it got to that point. That is probably all dependent on the quality of the course you take.

But know that it will NOT launch you into a permaculture career. Sometimes they are marketed as such.

Edit to add:

Additionally, what are the best avenues to earn a living in permaculture (or something permaculture-adjacent?) I could see myself quite happy in arborism or forestry, or even doing landscaping.

Entering those careers in some kind of conventional manner is probably the best way. I have often thought that it would have been cool to have been trained as a plumber, and then leveraged that into becoming a grey-water expert. If you want a career where people pay you to do services, you will want to understand some of the legal things involved.

Arborists must be some of the coolest people on earth. Once you know enough to appreciate and notice their work, it's really amazing to be in the presence of well-tended trees.

[white belt]

Entering those careers in some kind of conventional manner is probably the best way. I have often thought that it would have been cool to have been trained as a plumber, and then leveraged that into becoming a grey-water expert. If you want a career where people pay you to do services, you will want to understand some of the legal things involved.

Arborists must be some of the coolest people on earth. Once you know enough to appreciate and notice their work, it's really amazing to be in the presence of well-tended trees.

I agree with this.

In the podcast he did with Paul Wheaton, Jacob covered some of the issues with the common approach for a permaculture newbie to make money; the primary one is that it doesn't scale since making money with courses/books/events is a rockstar business. It also turns permaculture into a ponzi scheme that is always relying on income from newcomers to support the established players.

I think learning a trade/skillset that is tangential to permaculture is a better idea. Things off the top of my head:

-plumber
-engine/machine mechanic
-heavy equipment operator
-electrician
-carpenter
-HVAC
-mason/bricklayer
-arborist
-farrier/groomer
-property manager


Obviously each one of these will have different licenses and certification processes, so some might not be feasible if there is too much red tape involved.

I think of permaculture as a way of thinking (similar to ERE), rather than just a collection of techniques. Therefore, permaculture (systems) thinking can be applied to a variety of activities, but in of itself is not sufficient to make an income. Unless of course you become a rockstar household name like Wheaton, Lancaster, Greenfield, Holmgren, etc but that will take years.

[jacob]

It depends on what is meant by "making a living". If the hype is right, permaculture should be an efficient way to feed yourself with very minimal effort. However, food is a low-margin business ... one of the lowest margins possible. Selling produce is difficult when competing with fossil farmers importing oil-based nutrients---where are you going to recover your nutrient outflows from?

Even industrial farmers find themselves relying on youtube videos and selling crafts, "farmer experiences", and dreams to city-folks. Those who do this well are in rockstar-type businesses. Try writing a 15 page ebook yourself and see how much you can make without a rockstar platform. I kinda felt like a dick pointing this out in the Wheaton interview (it was the second one) but it's better people realize the problem of scaling sooner than later.

Immediate inspirations would be Mark Boyle and Helen&Scott Nearing.

[oldbeyond]

There seems to be quite a few people making a decent living off of permaculture/urban farming/regenerative agriculture (from sales of produce, not ebooks/training/courses). The key seems to be managing sales well (CSA:s, reko rings, farmers markets, sales to restaurants), focusing on profitable products, keeping capital investment low and quite a bit of systems thinking. No rockstar effect, but it requires a bit of business sense and quite a bit of drive. See Richard Perkins or Curtis Stone for example.

[jennypenny]

I suspect anyone you've heard of who's a a permiculturist is making most of their money off of books and influencer-type incomes, not from their PDC or their farming efforts directly.

For me, the PDC is helping me connect with other like-minded people and influence people in my own sphere to be more resilience-minded. It gives me a (certified) bartering tool, whether I'm trying to barter for hard or soft items. I also find it helps to explain my lifestyle to the stepford crowd that otherwise would think I'm just taking a 'low rent' approach to landscaping.

[Blackjack]

There seems to be quite a few people making a decent living off of permaculture/urban farming/regenerative agriculture (from sales of produce, not ebooks/training/courses). The key seems to be managing sales well (CSA:s, reko rings, farmers markets, sales to restaurants), focusing on profitable products, keeping capital investment low and quite a bit of systems thinking. No rockstar effect, but it requires a bit of business sense and quite a bit of drive. See Richard Perkins or Curtis Stone for example.

I think this depends on how you define a “decent living”. And I don’t know tons and tons of regenerative ag people, but one of my best friends is a regenerative farmer, and I’ve met a ton of the people in the local circles through her. My partner is also in the food distribution space, and just finished up a huge project reviewing food systems distribution here, so I hear a lot of arguments about the awful economics of being a farmer today at all (regardless of the regenerative label).

I think we can start to get a look at the conditions that lead to food prices (and thus what you have to compete with as a permaculturist when it comes to food pricing) by looking at one of the newly introduced agricultural bill of rights (Obvs these are gonna be from Cali, Washington, and Colorado). I’m most familiar with the Colorado one, so I’m gonna refer to that one, the others are all in a very similar vein. Link to an overview of the bill itself is here https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb21-087. It’s a very “green” document, but I’m gonna try and just pull out my relevant points here.

So things that you are competing against:

Workers do not get paid minimum wage for any state without an agricultural bill of right, there is usually an exemption written into the laws that will allow them instead to make federal minimum wage only. So you, as a permaculturalist, are competing against undercut labor from the absolute beginning.

Workers are not paid overtime rates. Thus, you don’t really make money from this game. Harvest weeks are often 60-90 (I wish I was joking) hour long weeks (especially especially without machinery doing the harvest), and so you are forced into them at these same rates.

So at the absolute beginning, even if we assume we are fairly more efficient than many of these places by our “permaculture practices”, the monetary gain and markup in the food system is so low due to unbeatable labor costs and fairly fixed prices (if your bell pepper is $3, nobody is going to buy it regardless of your ethics if another nice looking farmer is selling them at $0.50 each three stations down at the market. Grocery stores and other places give a fixed price per good, usually drastically lower than the cost at the farmers market) that you are going to be stretching yourself insanely thin to do something like “just scrape by”. Most farmers in the space that make a “reasonable living” through the CSAs etc (best monetary model for the farmer) are still working 60+ hours most weeks of the year (depending on climate), to farm + sell CSA shares + organize the whole shebang every week, and might come out with maybe 30k or something per year on the high end, but generally they just scrape by enough to cover running costs and incidentals and land lease costs.

If the above sounds appealing to you, definitely I get the opinion that it is very fulfilling work from most of the people I’ve talked with. There is something really amazing about seeing all of your hard work getting eaten by the local community and shared among others after being transformed into amazing meals, and it is an incredible way to connect with so many people in the local community (everybody has to eat). So if I didn’t dissuade you now, definitely go for it! I just don’t think you we be under the illusion that it is more chill or low effort to fully support ourselves doing it.

[Blackjack]

Counterpoint to myself is Epic Gardening and others like him who claim a decent income off a tiny market garden using ethical principles / etc. Seeing as they are generally people selling non-gardening products and making successful YouTube videos, I imagine they fall more on the “rockstar” spectrum than the “making a good living on just food production” spectrum. But some of them might be legitimate too (and game the farmers market system while only producing low effort high value crops). I’m not certain these are ethical or good for the whole food distribution system (in my opinion), but that could be a decent way to make money out of food production in permaculture.

[Quercus]

I have worked as an arborist/urban forester for several years for a business and municipality. There is a lot of variety in the type of work and ways of earning a living. There are a few arborist/companies/communities I have known that are utilizing permaculture principles, but that seems to be the minority of arborists.

In terms of getting started, I would recommend joining an apprenticeship with a company that can give you a wide range of hands-on training (planting, pruning, pest management and removals). Two-year or four-year degrees are also options. After gaining the basic skills, if you are business minded, I don’t think it would be that difficult to start a company that does a better job of integrating permaculture principles into standard arboriculture/forestry. From what I can tell, there is plenty of work/demand for tree care.

[sky]

Some suggestions as to what to do rather than a permaculture design course:

Find an area of land on which you can garden, either through ownership, renting, sharing or even guerilla gardening. Study the Grow Biointensive method of gardening and try to implement as many of the principles as you can in your garden. Try to build skills of double digging, composting, seed saving, companion planting and general cultivation of plants which you want to eat. The Grow Biointensive program includes growing plants which provide food and compost material, which builds soil and creates the sustainable aspect of this method. Even if you have to start small, or start on a plot which you can only use for one year, this plan will build skills.

Go to permies.com and sign up for the Wheaton Labs Permaculture Bootcamp. For $100 you can sign up, go to the farm, have a place to stay, be fed, see lots of interesting permaculture projects and meet people. In exchange you will work at the farm.

[oldbeyond]

@Blackjack: I can’t claim much insight beyond ”the internet” and talking to a few producers when making purchases. There seems to be niches where you can net something on the order of your 30k number, granted with a lot of hard work and risk and after acquiring a lot of skills. I guess what I wanted to convey was that there might be ways to live that sort of lifestyle and earn a modest living without peddling eBooks (dependent on local factors like climate and access to land and markets). But perhaps better thought of as a long term pursuit along the lines of ERE rather than some prepackaged career unlocked by a single course. One can of course focus on self-sufficiency and lowered expenses instead.

I guess one alternative to a course is helping out someone running a farm and learning as you go, which seems like quite a common approach.

[white belt]

Counterpoint to myself is Epic Gardening and others like him who claim a decent income off a tiny market garden using ethical principles / etc. Seeing as they are generally people selling non-gardening products and making successful YouTube videos, I imagine they fall more on the “rockstar” spectrum than the “making a good living on just food production” spectrum. But some of them might be legitimate too (and game the farmers market system while only producing low effort high value crops). I’m not certain these are ethical or good for the whole food distribution system (in my opinion), but that could be a decent way to make money out of food production in permaculture.

Epic Gardening has 1.5 million subscribers and 105 million views on YouTube. Rough estimate is they are raking in $75k-100k a year from YouTube alone. They also have other social media platforms, blog/website, books, and online store with merchandise. I can guarantee they are raking in way more money from any of those than from actual gardening.

In terms of the niche high value crops, I think 2 of the most lucrative are microgreens and gourmet mushrooms. The issue is that everyone can learn to grow microgreens (very easy) and mushrooms (not so easy) online so competition is probably fierce in any area. The demand probably isn't there to support very many suppliers of microgreens and specialty mushrooms in most areas. Having said that, microgreens and mushrooms are both things with relatively short shelf life that can be grown indoors in urban areas. This means you might be able to set up an operation profitably by growing in a basement and selling direct to restaurants to take advantage of reduced cost/time associated with transportation. I would look into those if you're interested in establishing something you can make a living with relatively quickly, rather than the traditional route of growing crops in a rural area.