Rob, Michelle and Takota's combined work brings a fresh, integrative and holistic perspective on how to orientate oneself to the process of establishing your dreams and visions on the land. Designing and managing a farm that can build soil, create amazing food products and sustain the farmer financially is possible anywhere; and yet it is the clarity of our context and decision-making and our attitudinal responses to design and management that largely underlie success. If you are dreaming of starting out on the land, this book will be a useful companion that will help you clarify your own approach to success, and help you navigate complexity with confidence.

I couldn’t be more pleased to count the authors of Building Your Permaculture Property as past students, friends and colleagues, and I’m very excited about this significant and unique contribution to the existing rich collection of literature on the subject of permaculture design. I’m confident that it will become a go-to resource for a significant number of permaculture designers and consultants.

Building Your Permaculture Property is exactly what is needed in the regenerative agriculture, homesteading and permaculture community right now. It is loaded with practical, non-ideological and actionable material on how to approach building your permaculture homestead. The information here is completely guided by experience and facts, unlike a lot of content out there these days that is rooted in hopes and dreams and built on a lack of practical application. This book will certainly be my manual as I develop my off-grid permaculture homestead.

A self-help book to take the reader from thinking into action, BYPP offers an excellent addition to permaculture theory, and provides a key resource for all designers. By confronting and working through real, thorny, and often invisible human and landscape problems—a terrain in which they have earned their share of cuts and bruises—the authors slice through the Gordian Knot that stops most people from realizing their home and nature visions through this powerful design system. Their vibrant and positive attitude yoked to psychological insight harnesses clean language and a keen focus on process to cut a neat furrow of systematic thinking through the complexity of living systems assessment, design, and management. Offering a window on digital design tools, clever illustrations, and ample examples from the demanding world of cold prairie farming, the Avises and co-author Coen have created a well-marked pathway for the advanced learner to reach professional outcomes.

As a well-being economist I would encourage government policy makers, First Nations, businesses and farmers, to contemplate the pragmatic processes and guidelines offered in this wonderful book, Building Your Permaculture Property. What would a permacultural approach look like adopted to the complex challenges of our economy? A permaculturist approach to the economy might consider maximizing well-being and minimizing suffering as the ultimate goal of a better life for all. This book provides a practical choreography of how to optimize the well-being of our front yard gardens, our farm land and across this vast expanse of Canada, which in the Cree language (Kanata) means 'clean or sacred place.' Takota, Rob and Michelle remind us there is wisdom in the indigenous stories and knowledge of good and right relationships with the land.

As well as being a valuable tool for individuals in their permaculture journeys, Building Your Permaculture Property represents another step towards permaculture being recognised beyond its widespread misconception of being simply a fashionable form of organic gardening. It highlights the need for permaculture design thinking in creating resilient, regenerative landscapes and communities. Through this work, Rob, Michelle and Takota make a valuable contribution to the ongoing evolution of permaculture thinking and action.

Those just embarking on a project, and those in the thick of creation, will find value from Building Your Permaculture Property’s systems approach to regen-erative design. Anchored in permaculture’s basic tenets — earth care, people care, and future care — the book’s five-step process is organized with templates to collect and manage information, helping the reader to identify design ideas that consider her values, resources, and personal vision. These mental tasks are enhanced by playful illustrations by Jarett Sitter and lessons learned on the ground from the Coen family farm. Highly recommended!

A life well-lived includes leaving the land better than we found it. This five-step design manual jumpstarts that journey to a foregone conclusion, laying out a thoughtful process for making permaculture principles your own. Every farm, every ranch, and every homestead benefit from thinking deeper about how human intent engages with the places we’re blessed to call home. Restoring integrity to degraded ground is our primal mission now as a species. Restoring diversity means planting many more trees. Restoring ecological posterity begins with listening to the heart of the mother. . . and then reading this book.

This book is doing a world of good by reorienting readers to the holistic nature of permaculture. More than just a gardening method, permaculture is rooted in systematic observation, design, practice, and feedback for re-design to create regenerative, biodiverse, and profitable landscapes. I enjoyed reading this book!