Employment portfolio
My post school project is centred around different pathways I could take through permaculture after I graduate. Because permaculture is a fairly niche field, my research has been largely hands-on in the form of interviews and conversations.
Many permaculture businesses offer a range of different services to bring in multiple forms of income. These services can vary from selling produce to running courses, to consults and designing clients properties. My interviews with Maplewood permaculture, Limestone permaculture, and the Good-growers helped me form a better understanding of what some of these jobs look like, and what it would take to establish my own business one day.
1. Limestone Permaculture
Limestone Permaculture is a successful homestead in Stroud NSW. They offer a range of services including courses, tours, consults and designs, workshops, project management, and assessments. They are passionate about sharing skills and knowledge to help live a more regenerative life, and their big focus is on education. Brett answered my interview questions through email as shown in the link below.
My key takeaways
- Educating yourself as much as possible early on.
- Money investment - learning how 'not to spend'
- Designing and consulting is his least favourite part because it's doing something for the client instead of teaching them how to do it themselves
- Promotion - word of mouth is best, social media, certain parts of business promote others, giving back to community and joining groups leads to recognition and networks.
- Designs for people who don't understand permaculture - trying to provide education within consultation often through reports that storyboard the design potential and options
Brett also shared with me some tips and resources on starting a business in Permaculture which was helpful when exploring different options. One of the options that stood out to me was ecological restoration specialist. I don’t know if this is exactly what I would like to do but I am very interested in wildlife regeneration and I think it would be worth looking into.
Brett's advice gave me lots of insights into how the kind of work I would be doing in this field and where to start.
Key takeaways
- Multiple PDC courses at different places
- Limestone Permaculture internship
- Have a backup job and be prepared for a lot of financial inconsistency at first
- Permaculture teachers course in Western Australia
- Advertise to rich people
- They try to visit the property at least 3 times in the process of designing
- Multiple things in business (workshops, teaching, tours, designs, consults)
- Get a job at a nursery or somewhere to learn about plants
- They started off for free until they got good at it
- Began teaching as a guest for parts of PDC's while developing skills
- Being a part of the permaculture community, leads to opportunities
I found talking to Will and Anthea really helpful because they gave me a better insight and depth into how a permaculture business is run and what steps they took to get to where they are. They were open to talking about finances; how much they charged per consult, what their income has been, challenges with money they've faced etc. This was very helpful because I haven’t been able to find an average income estimation, so it gave me a good starting point. They also gave me a lot of advice on steps I can take now which was helpful. This included jobs I could look for once I graduate or good research sources. Overall this interview has given me a lot of starting points and ideas that I can begin to work towards now.
Key Takeaways
- People pay for ten weeks up front and then they get veggies every week for those ten weeks.
- didn't have any formal training in growing, just lots of trial and error
- gradually just established a really nice, solid group of people that just keep coming back
- went to the earth market in Maitland initially.
- does require pretty big upfront investment.
- investment and bankrolling people starting is a huge thing
- There's a program through the government that provides business training and funding for people who want to start businesses.
- It was called NEICE but is now something else
- Preparing produce for boxes: harvest day before, cut/bundle up, wash everything by dunking soaking or spraying with cold water, cool room, next day pack them into boxes, back in coolroom, take to stall.
- No food prep license for small businesses under 2 hectares
- looked around the internet at lots of different business models.
- They don't have to harvest anything that's not already sold
- matrix between, the cost of the seed for one, the labour to plant it
- people probably don't realize like like bookkeeping has to happen
- you have to register your business and you register the ABN 35:42. And then you register a business 35:46 name And you register for GST if you're going to register for GST
My interview with Harriot gave me some good insights into how a small farm could work and especially the kinds of things they did when starting out. It was cool to hear that they just went for it and learnt as they went. it was very impressive to see what they'd built in just 5 years. I found their business model really interesting and it works really well for a local farm. Overall if I ever try and start a career selling produce I would want to do something similar.
Overall Summery
Post school study options
With the information I had collected from these interviews I put together a table with different pathways I can take pursuing permaculture. This table was used to compare my options and figure out exactly what I want to do.