Mark Shepard, Permaculturalist and author of Restoration Agriculture, takes us on a tour of his 100-acre property in Wisconsin.

Mark discusses the many deficiencies of annual, grain-based agriculture and the transition to perennial systems designed to mimic pre-agricultural biomes like the Oak Savana of the mid-west.

Through his own living systems, Mark demonstrates that restoration (regenerative) agriculture can provide more total calories per acre than our current monoculture cropping systems. Not only can we produce more food, the food we grow is far more nutrient-dense, which means we are restoring human health and ecosystems at the same time.

A key part of any regenerative food growing system is letting mother nature do her thing. Mark calls this the STUN method (sheer total utter neglect) which works a bit like this: plant thousands of seeds and let the strongest survive. By saving seeds from healthy trees we get varieties that are better suited to the local conditions and naturally resistant to disease and pests. Some will become diseased along the way which is fine, instead of applying chemicals we simply let nature run its course – let the weak die out and those that live will only become stronger.

In this way, we can create food growing systems (based on trees) that may produce yields for hundreds or even thousands of years. This is permanent agriculture to sustain permanent cultures and is the very foundation of Permaculture.