Courses

Bookings for this course are still available due to some cancellations because of flooding throughout western NSW. Please contact us to book in.

Please also note that, due to the weather, this course has moved from Milkwood farm into Mudgee town.

This unique two day course offers both producers and consumers (or co-producers) the opportunity to learn how to build resilient, effective and profitable Local Food Systems from the ground up.

Joel Salatin of PolyFace Farms is a world-leading example of how a small family farm can become an extremely diverse and profitable Local Food producer, and how the benefits of Local Food Systems can create resilence, stability and abundance for both local farmers and the wider community.

Featured in Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and in the films FRESH and FOOD, Inc., Joel and his family at Polyface Farms exemplify successful small-scale farming and the growing relocalization movement.

In this comprehensive course, Joel will challenge participants to design pathways to relocalisation based on techniques and directions from the emerging relocalisation movement and his own very successful and innovative model at Polyface Farms in Virginia, USA.

Today Polyface arguably represents America’s premier non-industrial food production oasis.  Regarding Nature's design as the best pattern for the biological world, the Salatins learned to arrange the facets of farm life so they don’t operate as independent operations, but rather a system of intertwined cycles.  

Disregarding conventional wisdom, the Salatins planted trees, built huge compost piles, dug ponds, move cows daily with portable electric fencing, and utilize portable sheltering systems to produce all their animals on perennial prairie polycultures.

"A course with Joel Salatin is like snorting a large load of logic.  He is an inferno of intelligence and brilliance on every subject whether it be the economics of the timber industry, the most ideal ratio of carbon to nitrogen for composting, or the needed blending of the “holistic, spiritual, ethical eastern modalities with the compartmentalized, individualized, and democratized western methodologies” in order to bring morals, ethics, health, wellness, and spirit back into the way we grow, distribute, consume, cook, and eat food." - Katie Liljedahl, after a Joel Salatin Relocalisation workshop in 2009.

Joel brings a lifetime of natural and profitable farming experience to his first Australian education series. An electrifying presenter, he is also the author of six books including "Family Friendly Farming", "Salad Bar Beef", and his latest, "Everything I Want To Do is Illegal - war stories from the local food front". He is a fulltime farmer of the highly successful Polyface Farms, and recipient of the Heinz International Award for Environmental Leadership.

This course is FarmReady approved. The FarmReady course number for this course is: FRTC783. Please note that FarmReady is now fully subscribed until the 2011/2012 financial year.

About the course:

This essential two-day course includes the nuts-and-bolts of the following topics:

• Family Friendly Farming - creating a farm your children will treasure
• Polyface's innovative 'Salad Bar Beef' pasture system
• Polyface's innovative 'Egg Mobile' pasture system
• Creating stable local food systems
• Infrastructure
• Nutrient Cycling
• On-farm processing
• Dealing with regulations
• Marketing

Articles and videos:

• Family Friendly Farming, Creating a Farm Life Your Children will Treasure - article by Joel Salatin for Acres USA
  
• Everything I Want to Do is Illegal- article by Joel Salatin for Acres USA
  
• Polyface Farms: Joel Salatin - excerpt from Fresh, the Movie
  

Other Milkwood Permaculture events with Joel Salatin during his Australian tour:

• Joel Salatin Public talks: Sydney NSW on 23rd November, Canberra ACT on 24th November and Mudgee NSW on 9th December
• Joel Salatin two day course: Mulloon Creek 25-26 November

During your course:

Your course fee includes curriculum notes and amazing lunches made with the best local food the Mudgee region has to offer, as well as morning and afternoon tea on each day.

Course cost: $750

Bookings for this course are still available due to some cancellations because of flooding throughout western NSW. Please contact us to book in.

Please also note that, due to the weather, this course has moved from Milkwood farm into Mudgee town.

Milkwood Permaculture are the proud NSW providers of the 2010 Regenerative Agriculture Series, of which this course is a part.