The Community-Scale Permaculture Farm: The D Acres Model for Creating and Managing an Ecologically Designed Educational Center

This book is ahead of its time. If this model were adopted globally or even just in the USA this world would be a much different place. Many key takeaways and insight into how to keep a community going and thriving for 20 years.Beautifully put together and pictures galore.

great book!

Great book, written by a great Author!!! It has been very useful at the homestead.I highly recommended it without reservation!

gift....seems to fit the bill

This is the piece of permaculture information that we've been missing.

Excellent book and invaluable reference. Highly recommend.

My husband and I are currently working on setting up a similar project in our area and have found the content very helpful.It is written in a easy yet informational way.The photos are great.I would recommend it to anyone!

Being fairly new to gardening and to learning about sustainable living I found "The Community-Scale Permaculture Farm" a great resource for learning more about how to use my land in a way that helps me and my family to be more sustainable, and make less trips to a grocery store. My yard is gradually becoming a place where I can go outside to gather food for dinner without making a trip to a store and spending money. I know nothing has been sprayed with any chemicals and is healthy for us to eat straight out of the greenhouse or ground. This book is not just for "farms" or large scale operations - this is a great resource for anyone with a bit of yard that they want to use productively. This book isn't just a guide to small scale sustainability it is also the history of D Acres and how it came to be, the mission, purpose and long term goals of the farm and the people on it. It is very interesting and quite a journey that will inspire you to make changes in your own way of life. This book embraces community and how we can all work together to be successful. Something that at times seems to have fallen by the wayside - people no longer know their neighbors and instead of helping or visiting with neighbors it is just a competition between neighbors to see who can have the best house or more expensive car - when the reality is that none of that really matters in the big picture.The photo's in this book are outstanding and beautiful and really help you to see how much work is really involved if you want to apply any of these practices to your own life. Living in the society we live in, this book can be a life saver not just for you but for your children and anyone who will be here long after we are gone. There is so much information in this book, it is really your new permaculture and sustainable living bible, keep it nearby as you begin your journey and you will refer back to it often.

The need for a book like this is increasing and hopefully there will be some better ones in the future. The format is reminiscent of some Chelsea Publishing gems like Ben Falk's Resilient Farm and Homestead but the quality is not quite there. Trought shares his knowledge as best he can but a lot of it is garden variety basic knowledge. While trying to share expertise on both running a non profit educational organisation and an integrated permaculture farm, he ends up wasting whole sections of the book on useless summaries of different kinds of farm animals, or the importance of nourishing your soul, topics that are covered in much better, more pragmatic detail in other books.While there are illuminating sections like how to deal with long term residents, organisational dynamics etc., I would have appreciated more detail and forthcoming sharing regarding the struggles of managing a non profit, keeping it running, integrating a business with the educational aspect, dealing with zoning etc. Trought seems to have shied away from a transparent financial picture of how this place runs which is often the biggest challenge facing environmental education organisations. A $200,000 facility is built and barely a mention of how it was financed or generates revenue.I welcome the idea of this book, I'm glad he wrote it but I think it could be a lot better.