permaculture.studio dover, pennsylvania
the people database62 records

None of this was invented here. Someone spent a life on each piece of it.

A practice is a debt to the people who worked it out first.

This is the open half of that ledger: the researchers, breeders, teachers, and working practitioners whose results this studio builds on — some of whom put the ground under the whole field decades ago, some of whom are doing the work right now. Each record says what the person is known for, where they work, and where to read them, and cites its sources. A field nobody has sourced reads not recorded rather than a guess, and no record carries a portrait, because a portrait needs rights this database cannot claim.

Design & whole systems field practice

01 Natural farming & syntropy Two traditions that begin by taking things away — the plough, the fertiliser, the spray — and let succession do the work a machine would otherwise be sent to do. writing 2 people

Design & whole systems teaching

02 Permaculture design The design tradition that named itself in Tasmania in the 1970s, and the writers who turned it into a curriculum taught on every continent. writing 3 people

Soil & fertility research

03 Soil carbon & organic matter Where stable soil carbon actually comes from, how long it stays, and why two decades of textbook chemistry on the subject is being rewritten. 4 people 04 Soil microbiome science The laboratories working out which organisms are actually in a soil, what each of them does, and which of those functions a farmer can move. 13 people 05 Soil science The researchers who moved soil from a substrate to be corrected into a living system to be managed — and the coaches who translate that onto working farms. teaching 7 people

Soil & fertility field practice

06 Fermentation & microbial inputs Cultures grown on a farm’s own waste streams — for the soil, and for the table. The two traditions turn out to be the same craft pointed in different directions. writing 3 people 07 Regenerative practice The people taking soil biology out of the laboratory and onto commercial acres, a compost heap, and occasionally a medical clinic. 3 people

Water & watershed engineering

08 Water & earthworks The people who worked out where water wants to go on a piece of ground, and then moved enough earth to make it go somewhere useful. field practice 3 people

Plants & perennial crops research

09 Plant & microbe partnerships What a plant recruits from the soil around its roots, what breeding took away from that ability, and whether it can be bred back. 4 people

Plants & perennial crops breeding

10 Perennial crop breeding The people spending careers on the slowest question in agriculture: whether a staple grain or nut crop can be a perennial and still yield. research 3 people

Plants & perennial crops writing

11 Agroforestry & tree crops The century-long argument that on sloping ground the crop should be a tree, and the working farms and forest gardens that have been testing it. field practice 4 people

Fungi & decomposition research

12 Mycology The researchers and writers who moved fungi from the decomposition footnote to the thing the rest of the system is built on. writing 3 people 13 Mycorrhizal science The fungi attached to almost every root on the planet — what they trade, what they build, and what a grower can do to keep them. 5 people

Livestock & grazing field practice

14 Grazing The argument that a herd is a soil-building tool if you get the timing right, and the long fight over how much of that claim the evidence supports. research 2 people

Food, seed & community organizing

15 Seed & food sovereignty The organisers who treat who owns the seed, and who owns the ground, as the first agronomic question rather than the last. policy 3 people

A note on the records

These describe real people, most of them living and working today. Every fact here is cited to a source that states it, and nothing is inferred to fill a gap. If one of these records is about you and it is wrong, or you would rather not be listed, write and it changes.