The Polyculture Project

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We're super excited to announce The Polyculture Project, a research project dedicated to developing and promoting practices that provide nutritious affordable food while enhancing biodiversity. With your help we hope to expand and excel our experiments with various regenerative/permaculture practices and publish our records with aim to supply solid empirical data for the community. Please check out our crowdfunding campaign and if you appreciate our work please donate and share the campaign page that you can find here.

https://www.thepolycultureproject.com/


What are we doing?

We'll be running a 3 year study in our first perennial polyculture research garden to find out the following:
How productive are fruit and nut trees/shrubs and perennial vegetables when grown in polycultures?
What are the best plants to grow for mulching these polycultures?
What are the best trees to grow for nitrogen fixation within the polycultures?
How does polyculture growing influence soil fertility?
How does polyculture growing influence biodiversity?
What are the costs in time and money of growing in polyculture?

You can find an overview of our perennial polyculture trial garden here - https://www.thepolycultureproject.com/p ... earch.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB24pRgFP1k


Rewards for our Donors

€5 - €49 - We’ll send you a pdf. copy of our “Essential Guide to Growing Fruits and Nuts ” - and you will be credited as a project sponsor on our website and in all of our publications (print and digital). You'll also receive biannual updates from the project.
€50 > - A generous offer from the fine folks of Permaculture Magazine - Get 10 permaculture books, worth £130 for just £25 (+ postage) and all of the above.​
€200 > - 25% discount from our courses or events and plant and seed orders over €200 (not including postage) from 2018 - 2020 and all of the above.
€350 > - Join the project for a week from July - October and get involved in the day to day running of the project. We’ll provide accommodation to you for 5 days, as much as you can eat from our gardens and a personal tour from the project leaders of the various trial gardens and all of the above.
€1000 or more - Have one our research gardens named after you or in a name of your choice. Your chosen name will appear on the entrance of the garden, in all future publications, a dedication in our "Polycultures" book expected to come out in 2020 + all of the above.

Why is this project necessary?

A ton of great work has been achieved by the pioneers of permaculture and regenerative design but in order to achieve wider spread adoption we need to overcome a fair criticism leveled at the movement, that being the lack of supportive evidence and of working models.
Research and experiments for industrial farming are well funded by the companies that produce machinery, seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. They tend to look for data they find useful to sell their products and grow their business. It seems we can't rely on governments or institutions to provide unbiased research or ask questions that relate to localizing food production or beautifying our landscapes as they depend on the money from these companies to prop them up. But we can undertake this research ourselves.
Our experiments and study will provide clarity and help advance the widespread legitimacy of our community and practices.
We are but one of many organisms that share this planet and our goal is to develop and promote practices that provide nutritious affordable food for us while providing habitat for a wide diversity of other organisms to flourish, something our current food systems are falling very short of.

Please donate what you can and help us build a research center dedicated to permaculture and regenerative practices.