Permaculture Soils

This project started with video from a three day workshop. The workshop covered the earthworks for building a pond without a liner, a swale, and a hugelkultur bed on a terrace. Then we added more footage by doing the same workshop over again in a colder climate. A year later, we returned to the first workshop site and added even more footage! We even had an evaluation by the Crown Prince of Permaculture, Geoff Lawton.

This documentary film asks whether a citizens' experiment, the CSA (Community-supported Agriculture), developing new partnership models between consumers and farmers, has the power to change society.

Farm families in Lestock, Saskatchewan, have pooled their resources so that rising operating costs will not drive them off their land. By pooling their land, their equipment, their livestock, and farming as a cooperative, they are able to live as they choose, to maintain their standard of living, and even to have some spare time left over to enjoy. An engaging look at a novel approach to big-scale farming.

Permaculture expert Geoff Lawton describes how he and a team of volunteers grew an oasis in arid, salty lowland, despite extremely high temperatures and minimal irrigation. The site is the lowest dryland expanse on Earth: a plain in Jordan, two kilometres northeast of the Dead Sea, and 400 metres below sea level.

A look at the destruction that follows the breaking of long-neglected dikes and the measures being taken to prevent future problems.

Devastation of a Welsh-speaking community: Capel Celyn village and farms of the Tryweryn Valley disappear beneath the waters of a reservoir so Liverpool’s thirst may be slaked.

King Corn is a fun and crusading journey into the digestive tract of our fast food nation where one ultra-industrial, pesticide-laden, heavily-subsidized commodity dominates the food pyramid from top to bottom – corn. Fueled by curiosity and a dash of naiveté, two college buddies return to their ancestral home of Greene, Iowa to figure out how a modest kernel conquered America. With the help of some real farmers, oodles of fertilizer and government aide, and some genetically modified seeds, the friends manage to grow one acre of corn. Along the way, they unlock the hilarious absurdities and scary but hidden truths about America’s modern food system in this engrossing and eye-opening documentary.