Holistic Management for Financial Permaculture

Fresh from Darren Doherty, visionary permaculture + Keyline designer at www.permaculture.biz, we would do well to take a look at Holistic Management for the financial side of Permaculture & Ecological Agriculture.

http://www.holisticmanagement.org/

Holistic
Management^® Works.

On 30 million acres worldwide.

HMI works with people around the world to heal damaged land and increase the productivity of working lands.

By
healing the earth’s desertified lands, and by managing healthy land in
concert with natural processes, we can repair our malfunctioning
ecosystem while achieving a “triple bottom line” of economic,
environmental and social sustainability.

Darren says: "What permaculture lacks is a decision-making framework. What holistic management lacks is a design framework. Let's put together a dowry."

Farmer's Market Report for the FPC

Here's the link to a Winrock report on Farmers' markets in the mid-atlantic:

http://www.winrock.org/agriculture/files/wallacemktrpt.pdf

Should be useful for the farmer's market folks...

Permaculture Agriculture Search Terms

Here are the most useful search terms I've found for the current phase of Permaculture Agriculture research I'm doing:

"small farm enterprise budget"
"organic enterprise budget"
"organic crop budget"
"small farm crop budget"


Basically I'm developing an excel-based  ecological agriculture design tool to provide, in phases:
1. basic economic information & budgets for new eco-ag projects
2. detailed sensitivity analyses and a decision-making tool for eco-ag elements
3. triple-bottom line accounting for eco-ag projects

anyone else doing this sort of work?

FPC Ethanol Resources

Some great stuff here for the Ethanol team at the Financial Permaculture Course::

http://www.extension.iastate.edu/agdm/reethanol.html

Processing Kitchen - Product Budgets

Financial Permaculture Course -- Green Business Research --

Here are some budgets for individual products that meet be processed in a Community Kitchen. From the INCREDIBLE British Columbia Ministry of Agriculture and Lands...

Value Added
& Food Processing: (pdf format)

ENTERPRISE	LOCATION	DATE
Apple Juice	Okanagan Valley	Fall 1996
Apple Juice	Fraser Valley	Fall 1996
Salsa	Okanagan Valley	Fall 1996
Fruit Pie Production	Okanagan Valley	Fall 1996
Fruit Pie Production	Fraser Valley	Fall 1996
Fruit Leather	Cottage Industry	Spring 1996
Jam Production	Cottage Industry	Spring 1996

http://www.agf.gov.bc.ca/busmgmt/budgets/value_added.htm

Agile Development

Some fascinating stuff on Agile Development, Agile Project Management, Extreme Programming, and Scrum.

Extreme Programming Explained describes Extreme Programming as being:

• An attempt to reconcile humanity and productivity
• A mechanism for social change
• A path to improvement
• A style of development
• A software development discipline

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_Programming

the Agile Manifesto (as read from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development) includes many elements similar to the Principles of Collaboration that are developing:

Some of the principles behind the Agile Manifesto^[6] are:

• Customer satisfaction by rapid, continuous delivery of useful software
• Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months)
• Working software is the principal measure of progress
• Even late changes in requirements are welcomed
• Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers
• Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (Co-location)
• Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted
• Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
• Simplicity
• Self-organizing teams
• Regular adaptation to changing circumstances

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)

Patterns of Regeneration

Permaculture Designs -- whole systems solutions to the complexity of challenges facing our planet. Designs that harmoniously integrate humans into the landscape to produce food, water, energy, shelter, and all other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way.

First up: Financial Permaculture. A lower-right approach to local economic resilience.