From Monoculture to Permaculture.
When Warren Brush bought a run down orchard near Ventura, California, he knew he was in for the ride of his life transforming it into a Permaculture farm. From an original monoculture persimmon, apple and avocado orchard, it’s a risky challenge to turn all this around and announce you are now also running a creamery and a heritage pig system and a farm stall and then there are the walnuts and the orchards and… well, you get the idea. There are a lot of things happening here and you are not to sure what you are looking at when you walk around Casitas Valley Farm.
Warren’s farm is all about diversity and multiple functions that lead to security. Imagine many connecting wheels within wheels that drive the system. The end result is a farm that gets better soil fertility with age and remains economically viable even if one harvest is bad and one wheel happens to fall off that year. This train keeps rolling along. It’s like this simplistic chart below. This is one wheel that drives the system. There are many more interconnecting wheels that help keep everything on track.
