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Restoration Agriculture 1st Edition
Purchase options and add-ons
- ISBN-101601730357
- ISBN-13978-1601730350
- Edition1st
- PublisherAcres U.S.A.
- Publication dateJanuary 1, 2013
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions6 x 0.75 x 9 inches
- Print length344 pages
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Product details
- Publisher : Acres U.S.A.; 1st edition (January 1, 2013)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 344 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1601730357
- ISBN-13 : 978-1601730350
- Item Weight : 1.25 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 0.75 x 9 inches
- Customer Reviews:
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This book outlines Mark Shepard’s journey from his childhood in New England to life at his farm at his home in Wisconsin. As a child, Mark’s family relied heavily on their annual garden and fruit trees to provide food for the family. He remembers garden work to be hot, laborious and never ending. The annual garden was a constant fight against nature. Weeding, watering, planting, a never ending cycle.
He then recounts the food they foraged. It was cool and peaceful. They mostly harvested. They didn’t have to worry about weeds, as every part of the natural system worked together. These childhood experiences, along with a few books, led him to the restorative agriculture system he uses today.
Mark’s farm in Wisconsin copies natural systems which are conducive to the area which he lives. Within a small area, he will plant chestnuts, apples, grapes, and blackberries. Each plant either complimenting each other, or utilizing different substrates of the area. An area filled with this diverse plant system will produce more food overall. However, if that same area were planted with all apples, you would harvest more apples, but the diversity equals safety. If there is a bad year for apples, the apple producer is completely out of luck. You can even use this system to harvest wood for fuel and building.
He also expand this system to include animals. You an have pigs foraging in between the alleys of perennial woody crops, in a paddock shift system. This means that the pigs move from area to area with just enough disturbance to to enhance the area. If there are too many pigs in too little an area for too long ( or one of any of those three “too’s”), you will end up degrading your land instead of enhancing it.
This book also commented on how these methods can actually nourish the world instead of “feeding” it. He discussed the nutrition lacking in corn and our other mono-crops. This is evident when we see 500 pound adults with Rickets, a disease partially caused by a deficiency in necessary nutrients such as calcium. They are clearly getting enough calories, but not any nutrition. It is possible to be fat and malnourished.
At his farm, New Forest Farm, Mark is also trying to restore the American Chestnut. The American Chestnut was hit with a blight originating from the Chinese Chestnut. The American Chestnut was the East Coast’s version of the Red Wood. When the blight first started to spread, we stupidly decided to cut down all the American Chestnuts to stop the spread. This removed any trees that may have had a natural genetic resistance to the blight.
Mark is planting thousands of trees in hopes of finding one genetic variety that has resistance. He does this over planting them from seeds and then using his STUN technique. STUN stands for Sheer Total Utter Neglect. This allows for the strongest of plants to survive. If any tree wants to die, he lets it. The weeds out the weak genetics and brings the strong genetics to the foreground.
This book is an enlightening read. It gives hope, and also gives a reason to become active in your food choices. It offers a new prospective on farming and restoration to the land. This book is an entertaining and quick read, but beyond informative.
My take aways:
Plant more trees
Plant things you can eat (they still look pretty!)
Plant trees
Eat from a perennial systems. (nuts, fruits, pastured meats)
There is hope.
Plant trees that will thrive in your area.
I do recommend this book. It has opened my eyes and added to my arsenal of information so that I can make educated decisions. As I start to design my property and plant with a plan, I will be keeping Mark’s systems and philosophies in mind.
Currently, we have annual crops that have a lot of calories, but weak in micronutrients, leading to emotionally troubled warmongers, and thus repeated civilization collapse. This food is grown with plows that damage the soil, leading to local temperature extremes, and floods and droughts.
The book describes different kinds of biomes, and how we can create healthier ones with many different crops on the same land, for a higher total yield of much more nutritious food. Our cultural memory is of farms like E-I-E-I-O, many species, not a dozen square miles of one poisoned thing. Perennial polyculture is more satisfying and interesting, and with the help of this book, and others about regenerative agriculture, we will create delightful farms better than parks.
We are in transition from one age (at least 6000 years old) that is DYING amidst great shrieks and pain and utter insanity, to one that will prove far better. Life can be so much fun. Buy this book and help create the future.
That said, this is a Decent intro for why reaching beyond organic ag (to restoreAg) is a necessity, and offers some practical steps for transition
Audience & Focus is more toward:
~shifting mindset away from ChemCorp /PharmAg practices, which comprise the majority of current US production
~beyond tillage farming of organic annual cropping
~feasible, interim strategies for large-scale producers to implement while in transition toward sustainability.
To these ends, it's a good start, and should be required reading in ecology 101.
Mainstream awareness is obviously critical to shift markets from lowest price to favoring suppliers who follow humane, sustainable practices. The transition is most economically sound for the consumer:
~sustainable practices make production less costly and a higher quality product
~shifts a "gourmet" to the mainstream, improving the standard and eventually price
Market shifts pressure big Corp 'Pharmers' to clean up their act and improve product in order to compete.
~To these ends, should be required reading in any intro economics class, especially home economics.
Silvopasturing is touched on in prose, but follow-on poly-culture mob stock grazing (a cornerstone practice for economic and ecologic stability) is given far less attention than i hoped. The few examples that only elude to actual nuts&bolts of specific RestoreAg practices, their economic impact or projections, and scalability are only a good start, and left me wanting for more hard data.
I recommend it, i enjoyed it, give it 5 stars, but I'm not in the large-scale Ag commodity production business.
For my far smaller-scale aspirations, I've found books by J. Salatin, M. Phillips, Bill Mollison or Yoeman more helpful for my circumstances and stage of learning.
Top reviews from other countries
That is why I am always very thankful for down to earth approaches like the road Mark Shepard is walking on.
This is certainly not a text book on which alone you can errect your farm.
BUT: the points he works through are very thoroughly worked through and one can learn a lot from this „Real-World Permaculture for Farmers“ as the subtitle claims.
A wonderful story-driven book with a great reading flow and an inspiring abundance of useful information whether you want to errect your own farm or only dream and talk about it. After reading this book you know what Permaculture is, what problems it might face and how it compares to classical annual agriculture.
Just read it, you will not regret it.
I love this book.
It's not a 'how to' / instructional book - but I think it has something for both the interested outsider looking to find out more about the subject, as well as the experienced permaculture/regenerative agriculture practitioner.
Mark's experience developing New Forest Farm over the last few decades contains invaluable insight for the rest of us and serves as an example of what no-nonsense, science-based, thought-through permaculture is all about. While he many never have met him, Mark definitely has some of Bill Mollison's spirit about him in the way he approached things (and like Bill draws on a background in studying ecology).
It's refreshing to read someone who not only knows what they are talking about but who is able to convey the reasons why it is important in such a clear and engaging way.
The main value of this book I feel is not to teach the reader how to replicate what Mark has done exactly (though with some training and experience you could), but rather to make a really compelling case for why we need to understand the trouble our food system is in around the world and how we need to change the way we think and act in order to fix it. The fact that (apart from maybe a small handful of others) he is the only one to have actually created a fully functioning, closed loop, ecologically healthy, food producing, economically viable polycultural farm, only makes it more compelling.
Definitely well worth a read.
Of special interest to me were chapters 11 and 12, in which he deals with questions about the capacity of a perennial agriculture to provide enough calories to feed people. Can 'permaculture' really feed people or must we subsidize the permaculture fantasy with destructive annual tillage and a diet based on annual crops? Shepard admits his figures are a bit rough (yields for polycultures will change as trees mature), but corn produces about 13 million calories per acre annually, and Mr. Shepard suggests that a perennial system with perhaps a few annuals alley-cropped, can produce 6 million calories per acre. He says nutritionally there is simply no comparison between a monocrop of corn and the variety of a perennial system - the nutrition of the perennial system is vastly superior to a corn-based diet. The benefits of a perennial system are reduced cost in seed, gasoline or diesel fuel, and tractor maintenance, along with drastically improved soil, minimal tillage, greater capacity for photosynthesis, and an astonishing diversity of yields over a greater period of time. His findings give me hope that there truly is a different way to feed large numbers of people in a way that builds rather than destroys soil, is comparable to annual agriculture in caloric yields, is superior nutritionally, requires FAR fewer fossil-fuel based inputs, and is better for people. The type of thing he is doing seems to be the foundation of a relocalized economy that empowers the everyman rather than enriching elites. To top it all off, the 'New Forest Farm' is a giant informal research station for new varieties of fruits, nuts, and for appropriate-scale nut processing equipment.
This book comes highly recommended if you have already been introduced to some of the ideas of permaculture and are interested to see how it really does work on a large scale. Even if you're unfamiliar with permaculture it could serve as a decent introduction to some key concepts as long as you have a bit of farming experience already. If someone you know seems to think permaculture is a joke, lend them this book. The icing on the cake is the book itself is well bound, has a beautiful cover, has the right margins so you don't have to break the spine to read it, and the book just 'feels right' when you hold it. Mark Shepard seems to be the real deal. I really enjoyed this book.
P.S. - He is based in Wisconsin, so obviously the species one might incorporate into something like he is doing will vary from climate to climate.








