Patterns of Site Establishment

The first concept of this article was published five years ago. This is a revision based on my experience over the last decade consulting with projects primarily in Costa Rica. The original article can be read in full here.

Ten years ago I had the opportunity to join a land-based project (Rancho Mastatal Sustainable Education Center in Costa Rica) already eight years into operation. Upon my arrival I found a site that had focused on infrastructure and program building through its early development. This was an important leverage point in building a financial base as an education center, but it meant that some aspects of the campus were still in their infancy, such as the agricultural and food preservation systems. I arrived during a shift in focus to the latter systems, which enabled me to participate simultaneously in different phases of site establishment.

The Permaculture Design Course at Rancho Mastatal

The Ranch was populated by a long-term crew of returning community members, many of whom had been helping to build the site from the first few years onward. They narrated stories to me of the rustic lodging, tight kitchen, and general inefficiencies of the infrastructure establishment years. The classroom turned into a bedroom at night, the tools were stored in the only secure building far from the workshop, and one (quickly filled) five-gallon bucket served as the main house composting toilet.

What luxury I felt to have joined the community during a phase of infrastructure abundance. To have a private room with my partner, a large fully operating kitchen, workshop and library at our fingertips; it all came together to create an ideal learning environment.

Today I have transitioned to begin work with two new projects, located side by side, that represent the other end of this spectrum. The Brave Earth community, in its infancy, and Finca Luna Nueva Eco-Lodge, one of Costa Rica’s most well known eco-lodges and a certified organic and biodynamic farm for the last two decades.

My work with all these projects has come at different stages of their internal development.

The Pattern Emerges

Over the last decade of work I have seen dozens of projects in various degrees of site development, and I’ve begun to recognize a pattern during these stages of establishment. With each stage of development there are various skills, choices, and design considerations that stand out as most pertinent. Through the use of pattern recognition and application, permaculture designers can use this information to organize resources, forms of capital, and people’s skills more efficiently. For example, if you know a certain stage of establishment requires a specific dedication to organizational skills, then you can look for this in the team you build around yourself and invest in the proper tools. This is what we mean by pattern recognition and application in permaculture design.

This pattern is a tool for permaculture designers as the establishment of any site is most likely the most energy and capital intensive period. Earthworks, soil building, infrastructure development, brand creation, market generation and so much more fall into the heavy lifting of the early years of site activity. These activities coupled with the common trade-off of short term (annuals) for long-term yield (perennials) in permaculture designed sites makes this a daunting task as your yield for all this up-front investment is delayed.

Phases of Abundance

Bill Mollison wrote a short piece entitled Phases of Abundance. It describes the energies of abundance through a three-year window for a multi-acre garden. Year one is highlighted by species abundance through early experimental trials, to see what grows well and what is mediocre. Year two is abundance of propagation material. We learn what grows well and we propagate those species. Our species abundance decreases as we remove what doesn’t work so well. Year three and onward, finally, is an abundance of yield. From here on out we feast, we have a livelihood.

This model, albeit simplified, provides an example of how the plant material on a site might move through the establishment phase, and more importantly how to see the “forest from the trees” as you are struggling through the sheer amount of work needed to jump start a site.

With this lens in place, and our experience on the ground, we can formulate a pattern of site establishment that:

begins with Abundance of Experimentation
moves to Abundance of Feedback
finally arrives at Abundance of Maintenance

Abundance of Experimentation

Brave Earth is a newly formed community with 20 shareholders and a focus on cultivating medicinal plants in their retreat center. I arrive at the start of the second year of operation. It is a site full of ideas. A diversity of just started, on the horizon, nearly finished, and nearly forgotten projects dot the forested landscape and cluttered retreat center. Tarps are used as temporary roofs when necessary. Coconuts are planted but no one knows who planted them. Abundance of Experimentation reigns supreme. Community members and friends come and go throughout the days, bringing with them attempts to organize the kitchen systems, throw together a well intentioned but poorly organized sweat lodge build out, and look for guidance on how to get involved. Branding activities dot the evening, meetings on how to run meetings drift through afternoons, while dreams of future food grown, apothecaries filled, and digging garden beds fill my conversations. The abundance of sheer ideas, needs, and possibilities is both exhilarating and overwhelming.

The Experimentation phase of site establishment requires:

lots of energy
a willingness to take risks
organizational skills
great goal setting
understanding your team’s purpose, mission, and vision
saying yes to new things and new ideas
positivity
investing upfront time and resources into design and planning
the ability to prioritize.
developing initial invisible structures: decision making, conflict resolution, financial agreements, exit strategies
writing down all agreements between parties

Temporary tarps as the site gets up to speed

Many projects don’t get out of this phase. It helps to recognize you are in this phase, that the chaos is normal. It helps to visit other projects, work with subject matter experts, take workshops, hire a consultant, so that you can stand on the shoulders of those that have already walked through this phase of establishment. You are building a pattern language, a culture of what works and what doesn’t for your site or community. You are building this from scratch in a world that has disregarded this type of work. It will be messy and challenging and ultimately very rewarding.

Don’t overlook the importance of making a first attempt at creating a mission and vision statement. Absolutely take the time to write down the invisible structures that will formalize your community and site relationships.

Resources for the Experimentation Phase

The Keyline Scale of Permanence becomes a powerful tool for prioritizing action; a place to start when there are limitless chess moves in play.

Holistic Management is another tool valuable to any site. Too often associated exclusively with grazed animal planning, HM is a decision making framework and a great way to test your actions up against the quality of life you desire.

Abundance of Feedback

Back at Rancho Mastatal many of the essential systems were in place when I arrived, and the site was entering the next phase of site establishment: Abundance of Feedback. This is the point where the great diversity of systems either begin thriving or falling apart. After a few years of observing and intervening in a system one becomes aware of its strengths and weaknesses. Does it cause you stress or make your day easier, does it become more resilient as it grows/ages or less, has it become forgotten/ignored or is it used all day long?

The Feedback phase requires:

a keen sense of observation
being realistic about your capacity
good record keeping systems to capture feedback
understanding what scaling a system up entails
avoiding emotional attachment to poorly functioning systems, plant genetics and projects; a form of “ruthless culling”
the ability to make hard decisions (i.e. to shut something down even after much initial investment)
having the experience to know what drives your quality of life
being open to feedback in the first place
revisiting initial goal setting and invisible structures, formalize policies
avoiding “founder syndrome” and allowing new people to drive the project forward

This is when it is time to take out the fruit trees that don’t produce well, and propagate the ones that do. This is the time to say that the biochar system an intern started years ago and has puttered along, really doesn’t yield much and should be dismantled. This is the moment to notice that guests love fermented beverages and perhaps there exists a micro-enterprise opportunity. I would argue that this is the stage in site development that puts good permaculture designers and sites on the map. Good design is accepting feedback and adjusting accordingly.

With your experience in place now, update and formalize your policies, come to cleaner agreements than when you first began. This is your best chance to put the policies in place that will protect your community and relationships, both personal and professional.

Resources for the Feedback Phase

Sociocracy: A system of governance that provides unique ways to organize, make decisions, create accountability, and so forth. Increasingly being used in permaculture designed organizations and communities.

Creating a Life Together: Diana Leaf Christian exploration of why communities fail and succeed is a must read for any projects that seek to have many stakeholders.

Abundance of Maintenance

No site will ever follow the linear nature of these three phases. Every year, as you learn and grow as a designer, you will keep experimenting, planting new orchards, adding an addition to your home, etc. Different zones on your land will move through this process fluidly, but eventually some aspect of a well designed site will arrive at the third phase of establishment: Abundance of Maintenance.

This is the point where you have experimented and observed; and now you know with certainty what works best. At Finca Luna Nueva, established in 1994 as an organic ginger farm, they have fully gone through various cycles of abundance. It is a site with an established pattern language in many ways, it has weathered deep set backs and evolved greatly from its initial purpose of growing ginger.

Today though, it is very much a place that takes the time to consider new systems, projects, and infrastructure and when it makes a decision to implement, it does so with a startling efficiency. Its managers know what they want and how to make these things happen. They recognize the systems that best meet their goals and they dedicate the maintenance work to those systems.

The key requirements of the Maintenance phase of site establishment are:

consistency and routine
understanding cycles and repetition
a commitment to the concept of chore, a celebration of daily maintenance tasks
learning how to take a yield and spread it over time
knowing how to finish projects
leveraging maintenance and harvest into one activity
revisiting past projects and ideas to see if you are ready for them now
understanding what you do best, what defines you as a project/site
a commitment to long term documentation
a commitment to using all of the abundance that the site is now producing
a thorough accounting and elimination of waste (physical, time, resource)
the ability to retain intellectual capital through long standing community members, employees, and such.

The word maintenance might turn some folks off. Many in the permaculture community love to start projects, but never arrive at this phase. But isn’t this the permaculture ideal promised in so many texts? The ability to know just what you need to do, how to do it efficiently, and when to do it on any given day of the year. There is never an “end” to this process, it is rather a cycle, with maintenance again leading to experimentation, but in much smaller ways. This is not stagnancy, it is maturity. This is dynamic stability.

Installing a new agroforestry system at Finca Luna Nueva

What becomes most interesting is how this cycle occurs in smaller ways throughout all these projects. Luna Nueva is starting the farm over after a few years of focusing on other infrastructure developments. The farm is back in the experimentation phase, even though the larger site runs mostly in the maintenance phase. This is a pattern that imitates forest disturbance, “clearing to clearing” succession. New projects always take us back to the first phase of establishment.

Resources for the Maintenance Phase

The Lean Farm: A unique effort to apply the concepts of Lean manufacturing to organic farming. Excellent ideas to improve efficiencies and minimize waste. A good resource for getting you to look at a space/system with a new lens.

What Happens Next…?

Do sites ever really move out of being established? I doubt there are many great designers, farmers, or homesteaders out there who feel they have nothing more to add to the land, and simply go through the days harvesting yields. But it should be expected that a site will reach a point where many of the key systems, infrastructure, earthworks, tree plantings, human knowledge, and such, are in place, functioning well, and life is good.

As the Brave Earth team ponders where to site their compost bins, it can be difficult to visualize this whole process. Working on the cutting edge of experimentation, combining systems in climates and cultures that have very little modern history creates a great amount of unknown. But, if they step back to look at the patterns, it is helpful to realize they are smack dab in the middle of the Phase of Experimentation. We know goal setting and prioritizing will make the work easier.

As Finca Luna Nueva seeks to leverage the yield of a decade plus of tree planting, it can look at the patterns above and consider how to combine harvest and maintenance, how to spread a yield over time, and in the end get closer to accomplishing their goals.

Remember these patterns are reminders of what makes a site work well, they often apply across contexts and climates. A pattern language such as this is another tool in our designer kit as we seek to help project’s achieve their goals.

What other skills and characteristics have you found are key during the various phases of establishment? Do you see these patterns applying to other aspects of your life?