PermacultureGlobal

A thirty-something Scot who worked for just under ten years in Paris, France, and now resides in Japan, I originally studied Japanese art history and culture at university and as a post-graduate, but changed direction and have spent the past fifteen years working in the wine and spirits industry - selling bottles, teaching classes, as well as writing about and taking photographs of all kinds of small-scale "artisanal" producers, from absinthe to wine. Having originally chosen this job because of a conviction that wine and spirits are inseparable from agriculture, I have become more and more depressed by rampant commercialism and the non-existent awareness that drink is as important to humans as food and that it should be produced with the same degree of respect for nature.

Through friends active in the world of natural wine, I discovered the writings of Nicolas Joly and then (in French only) of Claude and Lydia Bourguignon; through reading about western spirituality I discovered E. F. Schumacher and through him Robert Hart; through my wife's rice-growing Japanese family I discovered Masanobu Fukuoka and Takao Furuno. This brought me to permaculture and, for the past few years now, I have been reading all the books (Ben Falk, David Holmgren, Ben Law, Bill Mollison, Patrick Whitefield and P. A. Yeoman) and watching all the videos (Sepp Holzer, Geoff Lawton, Bill Mollison and Paul Wheaton) I can find.

Totally convinced by the vision for the future that this system offers, I signed up to do Geoff Lawton's online PDC in 2015, and did a few courses - of the more hands-on variety - the same year: at La Ferme du Bec Hellouin in Normandy and La Ferme de Sainte Marthe in Sologne.

I moved to Japan with my wife in late 2016 and, while still officially residing in Tokyo, have been travelling around the country trying to learn as much as I can about organic, natural and otherwise alternative agriculture as practised by the Japanese, visiting farms, attending conferences and helping my father-in-law with his rice fields. Since April 2017 I have been working as a farming apprentice - kenshūsei - on a small farm 1000m up in the mountains south of Saku City, Nagano Prefecture. I am now the proud owner of a k-tora and hopefully soon of a fine piece of land - 5 hectares of former rice-fields at the same altitude as where I currently work, and not far away - where I hope to be farming by next spring.

2017 Spring Farming Apprentice in Nagano, Japan

2016 Autumn: Move to Japan

2016 Summer: La Ferme de Sainte Marthe

2015 Summer: La Ferme du Bec Hellouin

2015 Spring: Geoff Lawton's Online PDC