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

Future Scenarios & Spiral Dynamics

Doing some research for a talk at UMass Amherst tomorrow, and reading David Holmgren's excellent Future Scenarios essay at www.futurescenarios.org.

Here is a summary of the four potential scenarios along 2 variable axes: (All images by David Holmgren):



And here is a summary of the characteristics of each scenario:



What I'd like to quickly propose is a Spiral Dynamics vMEME mapping based mostly on the 'culture' column of this last chart:

Brown Tech: BLUE-orange
Green Tech: GREEN-orange
Earth Steward: GREEN-yellow (not sure about this one -- maybe YELLOW-turquoise?)
Lifeboats: RED-purple

Whad'ya think?

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)

Financial Permaculture Begins

Integral Regenerative Design - whole systems solutions to the complexity of challenges facing our planet. Designs that harmoniously integrate all four quadrants of exstence 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.