I don't live on a mountainside, but my town isn't called one of the "Hilltowns" for nothing, and Sepp Holzer's permaculture designs, set in a cold, steep place with stripped soil (my soil was literally stripped when the farm was a sod farm in the 1980s) comes closer to what my farm requires than almost anything else. I'm particularly taken by his methods of making large scale raised beds from brush.
He has a recent book on his techniques, and it is extremely valuable, even for a woman who doesn't have his same passion for earth moving equipment ;-). Neat stuff - a way of making land that is harder to use farmable for a more diverse range of crops.
Sharon
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I once wrote an essay about my son Isaiah's wish for a farm. He has a farm, of course, but he also dreams of a different one, the one in his imagination.
The most devastating impact on biodiversity is caused by agriculture. Farming is already the greatest extinction threat to birds, and its adverse impacts look set to increase, especially in developing countries (Green et al.
I didn't grow up on a farm, but my dad did. He was the youngest of 13 kids, several of them who grew up to own farms of their own. As a kid, my family had almost an acre in the country, but the only animals we kept on it were stray cats and the occasional opossum (the latter, not on purpose).
Very informative video, thanks for sharing that, so which hilltown do you live in?
Very interesting video, shared on twitter and facebook, lets spread the word!
Very interesting video, but not much there on what I think of as raised beds. My situation is pretty much the opposite of his... deep, flat, low-elevation, Delta farmland. But still the idea of raised beds on a commercial scale has a certain appeal, mainly for weed control and drainage. Do you know if he has more to say about raised beds somewhere else?