COURSE DESCRIPTION
Learn how to grow affordable organic food with less effort. We take the mystery out of composting, soil microbiology and plant nutrition to understand the need for living soil to produce low-cost vital foods for human health with environmental responsibility.
This is a 5-day dynamic learning experience where you will learn how to maintain and restore soil vitality, how to make our organic fertilisers, how to grow more food for less cost and less effort.
This course redefines ‘sustainable agriculture’ as “our ability to build soil fertility as we improve production and reduce cost and labour”.
This course is for anyone that is interested in growing fresh organic food almost anywhere, from centre city to the most remote forests. You will leave with the tools to grow your food in your backyard, in a greenhouse, on a farm, or in the city. No matter if it’s for your backyard, for people in need, or to advance your abilities as a consultant, this course will give you a firm foundation for food security and food sovereignty with the ability to grow food almost anywhere.
Paul Taylor has owned and operated more than a dozen organic properties and is a 3rd generation organic food farmer and horticulturist, he is the managing director of Trust Nature Pty Ltd and the Co-founder of Hidden Garden Sustainable Farms. Paul is an energetic and engaging teacher with a gift to give you the practical skill and knowledge for growing organic food almost anywhere. His teaching and consulting have taken him from India to Outer Mongolia, from the USA to Australia, from greenhouses in Saudi Arabia to the wilderness of New Zealand. His courses are dynamic, fun, hands on and full of knowledge.
In this 5-day course, we take the mystery out of soil microbiology, plant nutrition and ‘organics’ and learn how to combine methods to improve soil fertility, reduce input costs and improve production. These management principles apply to the backyard garden as well as the broad acre farm.
Sustainable Soil Management means that we depend on natural processes to improve production while we build soil fertility and reduce cost. We believe that the principles of sustainable soil management is the path forward for giving agriculture the tools needed to rebuild degraded soils.
What is soil? Soil is that living stuff that gives us our daily bread; soil is alive and productive and has a remarkable complexity. As humanity expands the need for vital soils becomes an ever-important focus of sustainability and food sovereignty, vital soils grow vital foods that grow vital communities.
We have the science, knowledge and experience to change how we manage the land, how we responsibly manage waste as a resource and how we build soil fertility while we improve production; this course redefines how we look at soil management.
In this workshop, we redefine ‘sustainable agriculture’ and learn the tools we need for soil regeneration so that we can be responsible for our vital food and achieve on-farm profitability. The science of soil, soil organisms and plant nutrition is a complex one; here Paul demystifies these sciences and offers real, practical soil-utions to our growing issues.
Specialist composting made easy: The Bio-vital approach
We learn how to turn common waste products into high-value compost with ‘specialist composting made easy’. We teach how to best use specialist compost to improve soil fertility as ‘easy to understand, realistic to apply’ systems. Here we learn how to make and manage high-quality compost for fun and profit.
One of the primary benefits of quality compost that it is rich in microorganisms. We need soil microorganisms in high diversity to restore the soil food web where natural processes reduce input costs and nutrient support cycling.
Specialist compost (Bio-Vital) has all the benefits of good compost, rich in organic matter, rich in plant nutrients but has the additional benefit of having soil microorganisms in high diversity, to act as a powerful as a soil inoculant. It is the organisms in high diversity that give us the range of benefits needed to achieve sustainable agriculture and sequester soil carbon.
Soil Pro-biotic: a simple to manage, easy to under system for building soil fertility.
During this workshop, we have the hands-on experience of growing soil microorganisms as soil pro-biotic and look at the dynamic results under a microscope.
‘Compost tea’ is commonly misunderstood and mismanaged, Trust Nature’s Bio-Vital system has chosen to rename specialist ‘compost tea’ as ‘soil pro-biotic’ as this makes the point of difference between the understanding and misunderstanding of the value and management of soil organisms. Just as we might use a spoonful of yogurt to inoculate a litre of milk, we use specialist compost as the source of soil microbes and as the inoculant for making soil pro-biotic.
When we don’t have enough high-quality compost, we can still grow the organisms we need to support our productive systems and build our soil fertility. We learn how to grow soil microorganisms as soil pro-biotic, as an easy to understand the system. Paul teaches simple processes for growing ‘hundreds of thousands’ of microorganisms into ‘thousands of millions’ to spray out on our productive crops.
Soil microorganisms play an essential role in building soil fertility and protecting productive plants, learn how to manage soil microorganisms, build the soil food web and establish nutrient cycling as a management cornerstone for sustainable agriculture. We take the mystery out of soil microbiology and take advantage of natural processes; soil organisms work 24 hours a day seven days a week to improve your soils and support production. Learn the how, when and why of soil microbiology made simple.
Bio-Fertilisers: Making your fertilisers for pennies a litre.
We all need to be able to amend our productive systems with good fertilisers, the cost of good organic fertilisers is increasing annually, here we learn how to make powerful organic fertiliser for pennies a litre so that we can reduce input costs while we improve production and profitability.
During this workshop we have the hands on experience of making powerful bio-fertilisers from commonly available materials, we learn how to make our organic fertilisers for a fraction of the cost of what we pay at the shop. Bio-fertilisers help to maintain production while we reduce costs, an all-important feature of sustainable management; we consider this essential knowledge for the backyard, for the broad acre and food sovereignty.
ABOUT THE TEACHER
Paul Taylor has Australian Federal Government FarmReady approval as an educator, is a recognized permaculture teacher and organic soil management specialist and has completed his Certificate IV in Education, Training and Assessment, qualifying him as an educator under the Australian Federal Government VET (Vocational Education and Training) guidelines. Paul has worked extensively as a consultant and educator in Australia, India, the Middle East and the U.S.A.
