Courses

This unique workshop offers both producers and consumers (or co-producers) the opportunity to learn how to build resilient, effective and profitable Local Food Systems from the ground up.

Joel Salatin of PolyFace Farms is a world-leading example of how a small family farm can become an extremely diverse and profitable Local Food producer, and how the benefits of Local Food Systems can create resilence, stability and abundance for both local farmers and the wider community.

Featured in Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and in the films FRESH and FOOD, Inc., Joel and his family at Polyface Farms exemplify successful small-scale farming and the growing relocalization movement.

In this comprehensive workshop, Joel will challenge participants to design pathways to relocalisation based on techniques and directions from the emerging relocalisation movement and his own very successful and innovative model at Polyface Farms in Virginia, USA.

Today Polyface arguably represents America’s premier non-industrial food production oasis.  Regarding Nature's design as the best pattern for the biological world, the Salatins learned to arrange the facets of farm life so they don’t operate as independent operations, but rather a system of intertwined cycles.  

Disregarding conventional wisdom, the Salatins planted trees, built huge compost piles, dug ponds, move cows daily with portable electric fencing, and utilize portable sheltering systems to produce all their animals on perennial prairie polycultures.

"A workshop with Joel Salatin is like snorting a large load of logic.  He is an inferno of intelligence and brilliance on every subject whether it be the economics of the timber industry, the most ideal ratio of carbon to nitrogen for composting, or the needed blending of the “holistic, spiritual, ethical eastern modalities with the compartmentalized, individualized, and democratized western methodologies” in order to bring morals, ethics, health, wellness, and spirit back into the way we grow, distribute, consume, cook, and eat food." - Katie Liljedahl, after a Joel Salatin Relocalisation workshop in 2009.

Joel brings a lifetime of natural and profitable farming experience to his first Australian workshop series. An electrifying speaker, he is also the author of six books including "Family Friendly Farming", "Salad Bar Beef", and his latest, "Everything I Want To Do is Illegal - war stories from the local food front". He is a fulltime farmer of the highly successful Polyface Farms, and recipient of the Heinz International Award for Environmental Leadership.

This course is FarmReady approved. Farmers, primary producers, land managers and their families may be eligible for a full reimbursement of the costs for this workshop, including travel and accommodation. Go to our FarmReady page to see if you're eligible.The FarmReady course number for this course is: FRTC783

About the course:

This essential two-day workshop includes the nuts-and-bolts of the following topics:

• Family Friendly Farming - creating a farm your children will treasure
• Polyface's innovative 'Salad Bar Beef' pasture system
• Polyface's innovative 'Egg Mobile' pasture system
• Creating stable local food systems
• Infrastructure
• Nutrient Cycling
• On-farm processing
• Dealing with regulations
• Marketing

Articles and videos:

• Family Friendly Farming, Creating a Farm Life Your Children will Treasure - article by Joel Salatin for Acres USA
  
• Everything I Want to Do is Illegal- article by Joel Salatin for Acres USA
  
• Polyface Farms: Joel Salatin - excerpt from Fresh, the Movie 

During your course:

Your course fee includes curriculum notes and amazing lunches made with the best local food the Mudgee region has to offer, as well as morning and afternoon tea on each day.

Course cost: $750 (earlybird discount of 15% before 1st Oct) - COURSE COST FULLY RE-IMBURSIBLE THROUGH FARMREADY:

Click here to book your place in this course

Milkwood Permaculture are the proud NSW providers of the 2010 Regenerative Agriculture Workshop Series, of which this workshop is a part.