Today’s episode has been a long time coming for me. I’ve followed Eric Toensmeier’s work since I first started learning about permaculture and I found his first book “Paradise Lot” about his work in transforming a tiny suburban dirt patch into a perennial food oasis at his home in Massachusetts. 

Since then Eric has written many other titles that have kept an eerie pace with my own work and focus over the years. “Perennial Vegetables” was great fodder for my learning in Guatemala with indigenous plant cultures and companion plants to coffee and avocado. The Carbon Farming Solution” helped to turn my attention to the potential of regenerative agriculture at scale, and his contributions to “Project Drawdown” helped me to put agriculture in perspective with the rest of the essential steps to addressing the climate crisis around the world. 

In this session, because of its relevance to the work I’m doing with Climate Farmers, I decided to focus on the conclusion of “The Carbon Farming Solution” Part 5, which outlines the implementation of regenerative, perennially based, agriculture. We’ll explore Eric’s three point plan for scaling up carbon farming, his ideas for ways to support farmers and organizations in the transition, effective financing, removing policy barriers, as well as strategic next steps. We also cover some of his work with Project Drawdown in looking at the global picture and where regenerative agriculture stacks up in the priority list they’ve created to reverse the effects of climate change. 

There’s so much more I could say in an introduction to Eric and his work, but instead I’ll put all the links to learn more about him and the projects he’s involved with in the show notes for this episode and I’ll jump right into the first question to start this discussion off.

Get the resource packet for this episode!

Join the discord discussion channel to answer the weekly questions and learn new skills with the whole community

Links:

http://www.perennialsolutions.org/

http://carbonfarmingsolution.com/

https://www.drawdown.org/