Syntropic Agroforestry Internship Course

After two decades teaching permaculture courses, centropic aquaforestry courses here at Permodynamics, we finally had the opportunity to offer an internship course thanks to help from the regional council with the Climate Resilient Fund. So we were able to bring a crew together that was very enthusiastic, eager to learn what we had to say from our experience with centropic aquaforestry when it comes to climate resilience. I've definitely struggled with climate anxiety a lot in my life. It essentially makes me feel really hopeful about the future and an alternative food system which can provide a lot of abundance so that we can continue to live really good and fulfilling lives and take care of each other. It's definitely kind of expanding my perception of the natural world. Yeah, the principle of being able to plant seeds that help the world. You can turn things around quite quickly on a neglected piece of land. Give people that bigger scale viewpoint of what is possible on their land. Doing the mahi and being in the whenua and revitalising the earth that has been pummeled. Makes you sort of sit back and try and assess things on a whole other different scale, not just what the eye can see but what else is happening. I actually thought it would be a lot more heavy duty, the work itself, the labour side of things and it's not. Having the skills and expertise of the whole permodynamics team, they're constantly feeding you input and direction on all the nuances that you face. Theory and the practical, just work turned in hand and solidifying what we needed to learn that weekend. You can't replace the passing on of knowledge that you get from being here in person, it's just invaluable. Building the connections to then take it on further, like everyone that came together here has shared the same want of being regenerative. The succession of growth. All the science behind what happens within the plant after pruning and that, all the stuff we don't see, all the micro stuff. Refining and honing the methodology, including methods of things they haven't done before like grafting. Focus on food and nutrition was really big, but also focus on the animals, what part they play in the bigger picture. The importance of observation in the beginning, just to stand back and assess what's all happening. More confident within using the tools and the knowledge effectively and efficiently. Familiarising myself with the different tree species and stuff. You can get a lot done in just a couple of hours and nature does the rest itself. We pruned gorse, which just cracked me up at the time, but it just made me realise that you can just get started from anywhere basically, and you can have a weedy, gorsey patch of land. And with the right tools and the right approach, you can turn that into something quite special. Whenever I'm in a mara or doing centripy, I'm like in a mind space that I'm, that I always wish I was there, like I just feel so calm and my purpose is being fulfilled. Everything we learnt about, we applied and so we've practised it, we've been tactile with it and it's now held in muscle memory. Dedicated learning, one weekend a month over the course of nine months, just allowed a lot of practical skills to be reinforced and constantly embedded into your skill set. A lot of it is like soil cultivation, not just the plant cultivation, it's sort of cultivating the soil to have that food crop. There's a lot of joy and fun here as well, we have a really good time. Being in a forest in the Ngahere and you're surrounded by the most abundant possible foods or timbers or vegetation that you could possibly have, while you're regenerating the soil and making the soils better, plus you're just micromanaging the Ngahere to be its most best flourishing self. It's a really, actually like a really joyful way to grow food, it just feels really natural, you're not hunched over picking weeds out of the ground all day, you're kind of standing upright, you're climbing, you're using machetes, like it's a very functional and active way of growing food, feel really recharged at the end of the weekend. Yeah, actually like feeling it in my body and understanding how to use those tools effectively. I can see risks a lot easier, never been up a tree that high and had to prune, so that was a new one for me, but it's not as hard as you think. It was great to get more experience with the climbing gear and we had some great instruction with that and proper safe techniques. You have the opportunity to observe some of these more mature systems and seeing what sort of species have done the test of time sort of thing and just hearing from you guys about what worked and what didn't and sort of saying I wish I would have planted more of this and maybe done this differently. I think that was a really good insight to have, working with nature and the way that nature intends. Mimicking the succession of a natural forest environment, optimising the maximal amount of potential energy from the sun, filtering down through the canopy before hitting the ground. Getting all that biomass down on the ground where it's needed, it's starting to build the sponge. And guiding it to basically encourage that undergrowth to come forth and be fruitful. You know what plants can be included because they're part of the nutrition, your perennial diet that you're working towards. Tool preparation is really good, really important to do that, that sets your foundation for the entire learning journey is having the right tools and the right kit. It's really good that we were resourced so well to do the course. Over the time we also trained on using the software that Permodynamics created, SAP, the tool that we gave them to identify plants and its management requirements. They became part of our online learning platform as well. We read landscape, we read succession and we led our interns to understanding what the situation requires. So we worked in all sorts of different settings and got them to understand what these different scenarios required for management. Of course people have to have the desire to grow their food and it's like why we're doing it. As global food system pressures increase and the price of food increases more, I think we're already seeing that you know the cost of living crisis people are starting to take growing their own food more seriously and I think if those pressures continue to rise, yeah I think centripetal will just be increasingly recognised. Building the soil, we're feeding the microbes. I just don't really see how Northland can really achieve resilience without centripetal. Nutrient density, I think a lot of our sort of standard crops these days are depleted of a lot of the vital nutrients within the food. All the pesticides and stuff that go into it is depleting the soil and again more loss of nutrients. Our unhealthy eating creates such a reliance on big corporations to yeah essentially feed us and they are just taking so much from the land and not restoring it and creating a long lasting environment for yeah for our young ones to grow up in. The whenua from the land with the land being in abundance with yeah with our taiao and giving it its best opportunity to flourish and nourish us. And not having to spend supermarket prices and it's all organic and it tastes so much better. I think the most empowering thing is just although it's detailed and nuanced how kind of abundant and forgiving it is when you start looking at especially plants we think of as weeds it's just stepping stones to something much greater. Being involved in that ecosystem, being an active part of that ecosystem and you start managing plants that are usually out of control weeds and you actually can quite quickly get them under control. Plants that you want to replace them with come in faster. Coming back to the basics of what centripy is of like you know what's working now and what do you need to do to move it to the next stage of succession. How can I improve the condition so that I can then plant my fruit trees yeah. Helping the succession take place is one of the most fun and rewarding things you can do with your time. You know this is a you know an outstanding example of what's achievable. A low input system so it's not reliant on fragile increasingly fragile supply chains and it also offers the opportunity to grow food on marginal land that's been abandoned and that's quite special. This is kind of like the least of what's possible. This abundance is kind of on some of the most marginal you know dry degraded sheep farm in Northland. More people need to be exposed to these forest gardens to these centripy you know examples that we don't have enough of. It's a really great service that I could do with my life leave the world a better place wherever I wherever I go. My mahi landscaping try to put it to practice more just in the garden and stuff obviously it's time to pass on my learnings to family friends and our young one that we've just had. Walking into a food forest now is becoming a lot more instinctive I can just sort of intuitively know where the interventions need to happen and how to use the tools that we've been set up with. Techniques that are used here like some of the things that we've talked about I've just never seen implemented anywhere else and I'm so excited to use it in my own you know space and teach other people perhaps it's just so much more efficient so yeah. Yeah it's given me the confidence to go and approach food forests and do that work myself without needing instruction and that's something I definitely didn't have before going into this course. Like actually just makes me feel awe how plants can be in centripetal like that and work together and just flourish. Last weekend we finished off by putting a map together of what they covered in the course it was a great review and was wonderful to see how much of that learning actually stuck with them and how they're gonna use it from here on in their own career. I'm driven to share what I'm learning with others like I really think that others can learn something from these different techniques of land management. Just feeling so accomplished. I'm feeling confident in the future just knowing that there's people like you making a change you know positive change in the world. You know there's a lot of doom and gloom on the on the television and stuff and yeah it's just good knowing that there's people out there on the other side of the doom and gloom sort of fighting for abundant systems. You know I had no interest in really growing food when I was at high school or leaving school. Someone had told me you can tear into a forest with a machete find ladders with saws and chainsaws and drop big trees and yeah you play around with a machete all day and that was a viable way of growing food. I would have been so pumped. The attention and enthusiasm was high throughout the course. We are creating this network within the wider community of these dynamic enthusiastic practitioners and teachers when it comes to syntropic agroforestry and permaculture topics that we touched on. We're looking forward to watching them develop their own way with that and we're hoping we find a similar crew for the next intake and thank you so much for supporting that program and very grateful for the regional council to facilitate that.