Vegan Permaculture at Wild Earth Farm and Sanctuary, Kentucky, USA

This time next month we will be beginning our next Vegan Permaculture Design Course at Wild Earth Farm and Sanctuary in the USA. Lots of other exciting workshops and events are also in store following on from this, and we are greatly looking forward to working with the team again, as well as meeting Restoration Agriculture author Mark Shepard and finding out more about his vision of polycultural and perennial based food production. In this guest post Joe Kilcoyne tells us more about the project…

Wild Earth Farm and Sanctuary began in autumn of 2014 when co-founders Heather Patrick and Joe Kilcoyne, purchased a 200 acre farm nestled in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains near Irvine, Kentucky. Starting as a homestead to grow their own food, the project gradually came to include a non profit farmed animal sanctuary along with a farm business to host courses and plant nut and fruit trees, berries, and other crops for the future. They have met many people along this path that have both inspired and taught them lessons that are very valuable for the development of this very fun and exciting project. The goal to improve food knowledge and choices within their vegan communities, offer education programs on how to grow food in our own spaces, while offering homes to rescued farm animals has been very worthwhile.

During the summer of 2015 Wild Earth hosted the first ever Vegan Permaculture Design Course in the United States, led by Graham Burnett of Spiralseed from the UK and William Faith of Chicago-based Genius Loci Design. Much of the course was filmed, parts of which you can see in the accompanying videos made by Lynn Van Eaton, and this year we are pleased to welcome the team back, as we host our second Vegan PDC, kicking off on October 1, 2016. Once again this 13 day course will take place on our 200 acre combination farm and animal sanctuary project – book your place here.

This summer we are also expanding our course offerings. On October 13-14, we will have our first Alumni Harvest Gathering which will feature harvests that participants bring from their own project to cook together over a fire. We will also be presenting short format workshops for each other to share skills and passions.  Then, Fungi Ally will be presenting a 2-day Mushroom Cultivation Workshop on October 15-16. To finish everything off, leading permaculture author and practitioner Mark Shepard of New Forest Farm will be instructing his 3-day Restoration Agriculture Workshop specifically tailored for the unique project that is Wild Earth Farm and Sanctuary on October 17-19.