Before digging into the actual training, you’ll get an introduction to the approach and thinking behind regenerative agriculture and living.

You’ll be introduced to the basic tenets of farm scale permaculture and some principles and attitudes for success in the field.

If you’re currently looking for a property, you’ll create a completed Site Selection Criteria list, and if you have an existing site, you’ll create a completed Client Data Sheet so that others understand your site and focus.

To entertain a different way of perceiving the world around you, you’ll be introduced to pattern thinking. You’ll hear about the Scale of Permanence as an ordering framework, patterns from the last 10,000 years of agriculture, and patterns in human and cultural development.

A full module is dedicated to writing your Holistic Context, for the simple reason that it’s foundational to all decision making.

Aligning your decisions and therefore your actions with your core values, your desired lifestyle and your ultimate life goals is the recipe for success in its deepest sense.

After clarifying your core values and defining your ‘whole under management’, you’ll write your Holistic Context.

Going forward, with the help of testing questions, you’ll apply your Holistic Context as a filter through which all decision and actions must pass. The resulting clarity of vision will lead to the effective establishment of your farm and enterprises.

By taking the time to create a strong design that you can then ‘3D-print’ onto the landscape, you’re able to take full advantage of the land’s potential and simultaneously minimise the risk of making faulty investments.

You’ll gain an understanding of landform, topography and maps, which is a key element of wider landscape design.

You’ll also be introduced to Keyline Design and how to use the Scale of Permanence in organising farm-scale design.

In Maps and Landform, you’ll learn how to submit each ‘layer’ of your design.

You’ll learn how to use Google Earth Pro to create a complete base map with topographic data, cadastral (property boundaries), scale and any other important features overlaid on aerial imagery, and you’ll write a site specifics document.

There are many aspects to P.A. Yeoman’s work. We detail the key aspects relateable to our climate zones, including the Scale of Permanence.

You’ll gain an understanding of where Keyline patterning is appropriate, how compaction limits the physiological expression of plants, how to lay out Keyline cultivation patterns in varying terrains, and how a Keyline plow functions.

You’ll evaluate whether Keyline cultivation patterning is appropriate for your site and add a completed layer to your design.

After finishing the basic design, you’re ready to add other key elements.

Water is the basis and limiting factor for all life, so you’ll need to make sure you have enough of it, and the majority of farms today could benefit from adding more of a simple but important element; trees.

Without water, no farming; you’ll need to ensure that you have the water needed to run your enterprises.

To that end, you’ll learn to calculate catchments, calculate and construct earthen dams, create systems for getting water to livestock, create a Bill of Quantities to stay on top of everything, and add a completed water layer on your design.

You’ll gain an understanding of the importance of integrating trees into farmscapes and of the many distinct patterns of tree plantings.

You’ll learn how to plant trees correctly and understand the of role of fungi, write a detailed Bill of Quantities, and add a completed woody crop layer on your design.

With the living elements (water and trees) in place, you’ll move onto elements that are typically under-prioritized in development plans, namely infrastructure and fencing.

You’ll need infrastructure and fencing to make operations function efficiently, and this typically takes significant investment.

You’ll also learn about another crucial element that has been largely ignored for decades, namely soil health.

Infrastructure needs are entirely dependent on what you plan to do at your farm. Some examples are home building or renovation, barns and storage, animal infrastructure, accommodations, educational facilities, and regulated storage/packaging/processing facilities.

You’ll learn our simple approach to low-cost solutions and the interception of waste streams locally, clarify your need for enterprise infrastructure, ponder creative options for covering costs and bringing in labour, and investigate planning considerations and legal constraints.

You’ll create a timeline, a budget and a Bill of Quantities, and you’ll add a completed infrastructure layer to your design.

Time for a closer look at fencing strategies, including portable and solar-powered solutions.

You’ll create a Bill of Quantities and add a completed fencing layer to your design.

You’ll gain an understanding of basic soil microscopy, learn to take soil samples, and  get recipes for a number of farm-ready soil improvement formulations.

Then you’ll determine what soil care/building strategies you’ll use on your farm, including soil preparations, holistic planned grazing, silvopasture, taking a no-dig approach, etc.

Over the course of three modules, you’ll take a close look at 13 regenerative enterprises. In these modules, you’ll learn what the  requirements are in terms of landbase, water, investments, running costs and time input, and how to evaluate whether an enterprise is a good fit for you using our custom spreadsheets. You’ll get detailed instructions on how to set up and run each enterprise, including completing a Bill of Quantities and adding enterprise layers to your design.

In this first module you’ll look at 6 enterprises, namely tree crop enterprises, indoor Oyster Mushroom production, forest raised pork, pastured broilers, pastured turkeys and pastured layers.

Two good tree crop enterprises are silvopasture lanes and tree nurseries.

Whilst it takes years to start making profits from silvopasture systems, they come with many benefits and can often be added to areas used for other enterprises, hence creating an ‘enterprise stacking’ effect, allowing you to gain more yields from the same piece of land.

As for a tree nursery enterprise, it’s an often overlooked option by people considering going into farming. But we need more local tree nurseries, and the fact that it doesn’t require much of a landbase or inital investments will be interesting to some.

Indoor mushroom production is another somewhat ‘niche’ enterprise option, but it’s gaining in popularity, perhaps because of the minimal land needs and relatively low investment costs.

Raising pigs in their natural habitat means happy animals and tasty meat and fat.

This enterprise stands out for its ability to improve pasture and the high value/quick return ability to act as a cash flow ‘balancer’ on the farm.

Raising turkeys from poults is perhaps the easiest way to get started with pastured poultry, and they can be the most profitable of all pastured poultry ventures provided you have the market to sell them.

Pastured hens is an amazing enterprise; quality eggs are a ‘gateway’ product and the positive benefits to the pasture are overwhelming if managed well.

The second enterprise module focuses on grass and 4 grazing operations, namely pastured micro-dairy, pastured lamb, pasture raised beef and pasture raised veal.

Getting carbon back into soils is synonymous with bringing soils back to life, and this is the baseline of regenerative farming. Using grassland to sequester carbon can be very fast, producing a lot of quality food at the same time.

You’ll gain an understanding of the fundamentals of grass physiology related to grazing, learn how to make a holistically planned grazing plan, and create an accompanying map indicating your pasture sizes and divisions.

Calf at foot and mother bonded calf rearing are becoming more popular as increasing numbers of people shun the conventional dairy industry. Sharing the milk and integrating pasture raised beef makes it possible for small farms to produce a useful economy on a small scale.

Pasture raised lamb can be one of the more challenging enterprises to make economical for a small farmer, but nonetheless one that many consider.

For small farmers to make a reasonable profit from grass-fed beef, the herd needs to be small and the meat sold as a premium product through direct sales.

There’s a strong ethical and economic case for pasture raised veal, especially for new livestock farmers with limited capital to invest.

In the third and last enterprise module, we move into 2 plantbased enterprises, namely no-dig market gardening and microgreens.

Market gardening is perhaps the most popular farming enterprise of all at the moment, probably because of the limited knowledge, landbase and investments needed to get started. You’ll learn a no-dig approach which will allow you to grow annual vegetables in a way that builds soil.

A microgreens enterprise requires very little space and very low initial investments, and if you can sell at a reasonable volume, it can be very profitable.

Designing a farm and producing food is relatively easy. Marketing and sales not so much, and managing cash-flow and finances definitely not. Managing other people can also be challenging.

In this module you’ll learn things that most other trainings leave out, but that can take up just as much time as the actual hands-on farming and without which you won’t be a farmer for long. A farm is a business and a  particularly complex one at that.

Many different factors need to be considered when evaluating whether an enterprise is right for you, and you’ll be given a unique data-based comparative analysis  that you can use as an initial guide.

It’s not enough to be a producer, you also need to be a salesman. You’ll learn about different selling strategies, namely on-farm sales, subscriptions, CSA’s, REKO and selling to restaurants.

Planning and maintaining a successful small farming business is challenging. Financial planning is usually the weakest link in all operations, closely followed by decision making and communication.

Here we get into the nuts and bolts of your operation, including setting up a business, monitoring cash-flow, handling marketing and sales, and managing operations.

You’ll create cash-flow plans for your enterprises and complete a Whole Farm Master Planning sheet.

Farming often requires working with others, and almost always requires working long hours and living with high levels of uncertainty. This section offers advice on working with people and avoiding burnout.

Seeing what others are doing is both hugely inspiring and very helpful when you’re in the process of setting up your own farm. In this final section you’ll find 12 case studies of small farms owned by students of Richard, and many more are waiting for you in the bonus program Farm Like a Hero.

Richard is known for his pragmatic no-nonsense approach to profitable system design, and his dynamic teaching, efficient project management and organisational skills. He advocates small-scale, diversified farming and mainly uses Permaculture Design, Holistic Management and Keyline Design. His approach to no-dig market gardening and pastured poultry production has been emulated by thousands of people in all corners of the globe and many of his students have started their own successful farming businesses.

He has worked professionally in every major climate zone across several continents consulting to projects, farms and industry, and his experience ranges from CSA production to whole-farm planning, from agroforestry to water catchment and irrigation systems, from regenerative business design to Keyline planning, and from Holistic planned grazing/decision making/financial planning to community building work.

He has led over 50 solo Permaculture Design Courses (with a focus on agricultural production) as well as countless other specialist courses, practicums and seminars, and contributed to over 1000 course participants’ site plans.

He has also run the first internationally accredited regenerative agriculture training programs in Dominican Republic, Poland and Luxembourg, and introduced concepts of Regenerative Agriculture in Poland, Belarus, Croatia, Latvia, Denmark and Finland as well as pioneered Keyline Design and aspects of Regenerative Agriculture in cold-climate Sweden.

He has grown food since his teenage years, holds a Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design (UK) and in HND Organic Crop Production (UK) and has studied extensively in the fields of Keyline Design, Holistic Management, Ecology and Anthropology.