Introduction To My PDC Journey

My decisive journey into natural farming began in June of this year. Since my mother and father have been doing work related to food and farming for almost a decade now, I’ve had the chance to visit and stay at several farms around the country (more on that soon). Our experiences also led to a host of conversations and questions about food, farming, forestry, and how they all link back to the environment. For instance, how can we make farming, commonly practiced as an activity that leads to deforestation because of soil degradation and loss of fertility, not only sustainable but regenerative?

That leads to several other questions: How efficiently can regenerative farming produce food? What are its long-term impacts on soil health and biodiversity? Does better soil improve the nutritional value of food? Though most of these questions require research and experimentation, I knew the most important piece of the puzzle was still exploring these practices on-ground.

So, drawn in by the taste of the sweetest papayas and sapotas I had ever eaten (both at established permaculture farms) and to start my journey of discovering the right questions, I decided to do a 13-day Permaculture Design Course (PDC) at Aranya Permaculture Academy.

It was both intense and extremely fulfilling, which is the best kind of learning there is. It is impossible to cover everything that happened within those thirteen long (6 am – 10 pm) days. So, I’m going to cover the three aspects that have stayed with me: new ideas, farm design, and a nurturing ecological community.

PS. The credit for many pictures in this series goes to all the participants in my PDC batch. They have very kindly let me add them to my collection and use them to tell our story!