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Trailing Seeds: We Gather, We Sow!

"We live surrounded with ideas that, if we actually did feel them, would  turn our lives upside down."

 - Albert Camus

 

Clio & Olivia had an idea. It turned their life upside down. They would like to talk to you about it.

 

For the first time in modern history, geopolitical stakes go beyond borders and affect humanity at large. Our consumerist economic model threatens the essential means of human survival: water, soil, and seeds. Even more, the development models that we use in order to alleviate poverty export consumerism, and persist in the destruction of precious resources. Today, we can already discern the shapes and lines of tomorrow’s conflicts. In this present system, human energies are mostly employed towards destructive rather than creative means.

 

A lot of things need to be re-imagined, and it is up to everybody to take their stand, and do their part. 

 

We want to make our own bit of a difference, and benefit from the surprising combination that our backgrounds offer. From this wish, Trailing Seeds ws born, and it takes innovative agro-ecological practices as a point of entry. 

 

Our plan is to trail agro-ecological project that have proven their solidity, and then to disseminate the sustainable practices that we will have observed and acquired in established and nascent permaculture sites around the world, and specifically in developing countries. Our first step will be to go and meet permaculture pioneers in Australia. Thanks to the work we will be doing on the farms, combined with the analytical work we will apply ourselves to, we aim to understand the tools that permaculture offers us in transitioning to a more sustainable, humane and efficient production system.  We believe that these tools will be particularly pertinent in development and poverty emancipation project, so as to promote sustainable and biological productions at various levels, enhance food security, and facilitate resource creation and distribution. 

Milestone 1: Australia

 

…where we can find the most accomplished permaculture projects that we know of. Permaculture pioneers, who have taken the risk to opt out of conventional agriculture 20 years ago, are to be found there. We have a lot to learn from them at a technical, educational and personal level. We want to understand the motivations behind their choices, the incentives, and the rewards that they obtained from facing that much professional risk in experimenting with permaculture. 

 

Notre itinéraire est déjà tracé pour l’Australie. 

 

Our itinerary is already mapped out for the Australia chapter:

We will work on 4 different farms:

 

These 4 farms have different production scales, and they work towards different educational, social and economic aims.

 

We will be working on these farms as wwoofers (volunteer agricultural worker). In turn, the farm owners agreed to contribute to our project by imparting their techniques to us, and telling us about their life stories, and about their production models.

 

This chapter will last for 5 months, from November 2013 to March 2014. 







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Milestone 2: Kenya 

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Following a consultancy missin which Olivia worked on during May 2013 in Kenya, she was lucky enough to meet with the founders of the Kenyan Permaculture Research Institute (www.pri-kenya.org), and to visit permaculture farms that are integrated at the heart of social and development projects supported by international donors. 

 

We are presently talking with PRI Kenya on how to cooperate and engage in common research strands. Kenya is a fertile ground for innovative ideas and practices in the realms of agro-ecology and agro-forestry. The UN agency for the environmental programme finds is housed in Nairobi, and Kenya is the African country with the most permacuture and agro-ecological projects to date. 

 

According to our current plan, we hope to spend 3 months in Kenya to work in various projects there, and to consolidate the professional network around Trailing Seeds, as much at the level of agriculural projects as with the international agencies present on the ground such as the UNEP, UNICEF or the FAO. 

Milestone 3: Latin America

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We will then be taking Trailing Seeds to Latin America where we aim to work with a farmer who plans on transitioning from conventional agriculture to agro-ecological practices. 

 

In order to do so, we would need to work on a given project for a full season. Throughout this process, we would like to understand in practice the challenges and opportunities that transitioning represents as per the marketing and economic strategies, the creation of social links, and the networking opportunities. Our aim is to have concrete tools in our hands to defend transition initiatives and the lessening of conventional methods. 

 

During the Latin American chapter, we paticularly plan on trailing projects in Brazil. Indeed, this country is presently capitalizing on its agricultural power and puts itself forward as a model of successful development, transferable to Sub-Saharan countries. Brazil is currently looking to export this model, and donors are currently studying its "recipe". Yet, there are reasons to be skeptical about yet another development model. One of them is the massive investments into research about genetically modified crops in the case of Brazil. We will therefore go there in order to meet with development and permaculture practitioners, as well as politicians who are promoting the exportation of the Brazilian development model. We will take this opportunity to question the links between agri-businesses and the political world, as well as understand the political perspective on "alternative" agricultural practices. 

 

Milestone 4: Palestine

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At the end of the road, we plan on going to Palestine... Last but not least, for we plan on making it a new beginning.

 

As the saying has it: "Now that evetything is desperate, everything is possible!"

 

Permaculture offers a new prism for mediation in resource-related conflicts, thanks to the change of production and distribution paradigm it provides. There is one place where mediation attempts have failed, and that is Palestine. Civil society is already very active and conscious there. Upon having acquired solid experience thanks to the previous milestones, we plan on working with the permaculture project based in Bethlehem. 

What will come out of it all? 

First, the practical experience we will have acquired will need to be relayed and disseminated. We will have met agriculture practitioners who possess an exceptional savoir-faire that needs to be transmitted and that is applicable to the smallest of gardens to multiple hectare terrains. 

 

Australia is our project’s raw material, its breeding ground. We will then complement it by the experience we will acquire in other projects around the world. While working on all these projects, we will connect them as well as learn and disseminate ideas and good practices. We will also create a network of professionals in agro-ecology and development, who need greater coordination to share and spread their practices. 

 

We have yet to determine how we want to transmit our learning experience, all of these savoir-faire, and our analysis of permaculture’s and agro-ecology’s utility within development projects and food security matters. It is a choice of ours not to determine the vector of knowledge transmission before we know what the knowledge will impart us with. 

 

Depending on the material we will have collected, we will then decide what “product” will be best suited to deposit our learning: book, documentary, training, network, conferences... We will keep you updated.
 
Looking ahead, we plan on combining our respective professional perspectives: housing a mediation center for international conflicts on a permaculture production site so as to demonstrate, proof in hand, how agro-ecology can support natural resource creation and distribution. 

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