Eric Toensmeier
Cataloguing the perennial crops of the world, and then costing out honestly what they can and cannot do for the carbon budget.
The record
- Standing
- active practice
- Based
- Holyoke, Massachusetts
- Home ground
- A tenth of an acre in Holyoke, Massachusetts — barren ground, bad soil and broken concrete when he and Jonathan Bates started — now carrying more than two hundred low-maintenance edible species.
- Teaches
- Appointed lecturer at Yale University; trains in English and Spanish across the United States, Canada, Mexico, Guatemala and the Caribbean.
- Also
- Contributor to Drawdown; ran a seed company, managed an urban farm project for five years, and co-developed a farm business training curriculum now used in eight US states and three Canadian provinces.
Standing is this studio’s placement of the work, not a ranking of the person, and it is the one line here that is a judgement rather than a cited fact.
The work
Toensmeier’s usefulness is that he counts. Perennial Vegetables and the global inventory work behind it are catalogues — what exists, where it grows, what it yields — rather than advocacy, and Edible Forest Gardens, written with Dave Jacke, is the technical reference for temperate design.
The Carbon Farming Solution is the harder book and the more honest one. It works through the practices that are claimed to sequester carbon, orders them by what the evidence actually supports, and is explicit about which are marginal. That willingness to say a favoured practice does not pay is rare in this literature.
Paradise Lot is the ground truth for all of it: a tenth of an acre in a run-down part of a Massachusetts mill town, planted from a standing start.
Where to read them
Sources for this record
Corrections
This record was assembled from the sources above, and nothing in it was inferred to fill a gap. If it is about you and it is wrong, or you would rather not be listed, write and it changes.