Terre Verte Guié- Holistic Systems Overview

Greetings from the Land of Men of Integrity (pays des Hommes integres.) I'm here at a pilot farm called Terre Verte (green earth) in a beautiful village called Guié in Burkina Faso, West Africa. This place is pretty amazing. Over the past thirty years, the Sahel has seen systematically worsening conditions of drought and dryness. The the folks at Terre Verte cite bush fires, overgrazing, cutting too much wood, and “mining agriculture” as factors that encourage the encroaching desert and make the landscape increasingly vulnerable... which leads to drought, loss of biodiversity to extinction, and famine.

Trench to plant a  haie vive, living fence

Here at Terre Verte, the main focus is on ways to conserve water and sediment in the landscape, preventing the erosion that accelerates the processes of desertification. This is done largely through the installation of mad windbreak hedgerows, or Wégoubri in the local tongue here called Mooré, or Le Perimetre Bocage in French. Almost every building, pathway, and garden plot here is lined with a row of Cassia sieberiana. I was shocked by the volume of C. sieberiana starts in the nursery, it's really a large focus of Terre Verte's approach. The concept haie vivre- living hedge- comes from Europe and was brought by Henri Girard, who started the farm here, but it goes along with the practices that were in place here before the period of "mining agriculture" began.

So now you're picturing large fields, each surrounded by a living hedge. They also have large berms around the perimeter to protect against and control brush fires, which can be wildly destructive. At the lowest point in every field, theres a small pond to retain water and  berms built up around it a little wider with the extra earth.  During the rainy season, the hole fills up with water and floods up to the berms, forming a stock that's used for watering until it's all gone. 

Diagrams credited to AZN

Okay, so now picture a row of trees running down the midline of the field. This provides shade for families working in the fields, where children can play or rest while parents work, and also helps prevent erosion. These trees are also productive: including Karite (which we know as shea, a la shea butter) fig, mango, guava, Moringa (an excellent tree which I'll probably post about) and tons of others. 

So, that should leave two large open sunny area's in the picture in your mind's eye. These are the main productive areas and are cultivated using a method called Zai holes. About a foot in diameter and half a foot in depth, Zai holes concentrate fertility and aeration for planting. This is a traditional method here in Burkina and the word Zai is Mooré but the technique has been widely adapted throughout Africa because it works. Composted manure is added to the holes well in advance of the rainy season. Then after a good rain, you can plant- usually millet or sorghum and about 3 seeds per hole. 

100 hectares is about 247.1 acres. It's critical to be
able to implement these systems at this large scale.

That is essentially the system. Weeding is minimal because weeds only grow within the Zai holes…but it's important. When the millet is about calf-high, we bring in animals, who eat down the plants and then they come back more vigorous. The grains are the first year rotation, then the second year, it's des legumineuses: sesame, beans or peanuts to fix nitrogen. (I'd always wondered about sesame the plant, I only hear about the seed and the oil. Photo on the right is the dried seed pod from the plant. I thought it was beautiful.) After the nitrogen fixing round, the third year the field is left fallow to rest and regenerate. Fourth year, back to grains. It's important to leave behind the stalks once grains are harvested, these provide ground cover and organic material as they break down- which you can see in the photo below. With each year's rotation, you add composted manure -fumier- to the Zai holes- to replace the nutrients you took from the soil.  Then during the dry season, animals come through added more nutrients and eating what they can- which helps because food gets scarce during the time furthest from the rains.

Mady and I moving electric fence for cattle in a millet field during the dry season. 

Part two: Permaculture Principles

Hey there, thanks for joining us for the second part of our series laying out some principles of permaculture design. Check out the first post here if you missed it.

 5. Energy cycling and recycling A forest cycles nutrients from the soil into the plants, who then drop leaves, which serve first as much, then break down into food for worms and microorganisms, who convert it into plain soil nutrients, ready to be cycled back into the roots of a plant. No need to bring in straw or fertilizer or fish emulsion.

 6. Using and accelerating natural plant succession to establish favorable sites and soils Bare soil will naturally go through the phases of forest succession. An example: bare soil is overtaken by moss and lichen, which is overtaken by annual grasses, which is seceeds into perennial grasses and plants, then moves into sun-loving tall trees, and eventually into a diverse and varied ecosystem with annuals and perennials, sun- and shade-lovers, that cooperates and competes to partition resources. Each step builds soil, depositing different things. Eventually, another disturbance will create another patch of bare soil, and the process will begin again.
 7. Diversity of beneficial species for a productive, interactive system Biodiversity betters survival chances and encourages hearty traits like drought and disease resistance. Even grasslands, which can look pretty monotonous to us, are teeming with species of native grasses, critters, and microbes.

The tulip poplar is a great centerpiece of some biodiverse systems in our neck of the woods

 8. Use of the edge and natural patterns for best effect. At the edge of the forest and the grassland, there's huge opportunity for biodiversity, species that thrive in either setting can interact and flourish. Indeed, many humans thrive in communities built at the edge of the city and the country, looking for the best of both worlds. Using the edge is my favorite permaculture principle, it applies to my life all the time and in many ways. Patterns in nature are simply based on the laws of physics, and they do things like distribute resources and energy in a way that's often astonishingly simple and effective. These patterns -for example, a river's meander, the spiral of a conch shell, or the branching pattern of a leaf's veins- can be valuable design tools for building systems that work.

Thanks for checking out our overview of these design principles. Remember, these are principles that people have put together from their observations of nature, and they're often tweaked or reinterpreted depending on who you speak with. There is no offical permaculture anything, it's just a word that people use for a collective of attitudes and ethos, design tools and outcomes.

Part one: Permaculture Principles

This is part one of a series introducing permaculture to our readers who may not be already familiar. Permaculture is a term you'll hear kicked around here a lot... and in my experience it tends to raise eyebrows when I take it somewhere new. The term was born in the seventies to two Australians (shout out to Australia) and it's a portmanteau (some of you may be familiar with my love for the portmantau) made from “permanent agriculture” and “permanent culture.” Essentially, at its modern iteration, permaculture refers to a sort of loose association of philosophical approaches to gardening, agriculture, and human settlement in general that uses natural ecosystems as a model for effective design of human settlements. Not to get too deep or philosophical here, but much of the history of western agriculture, by contrasts, strives to sort of wrangle nature into order and keep everything in line by isolating variables, etc. Instead of dominating, permaculture puts humans working alongside nature, or, to take the line of thought further...

“We are nature, working.” -Penny Livingston Stark 


The pivotal example often given is the forest- no one has to plow the forest or fertilize the forest or weed the forest. It's a integrated, self-sustaining system. So the idea is to great productive human landscapes that integrate our activities with the natural world.

At it's core, the ethics of permaculture are care to for the earth, care for people, and a commitment to sharing the surplus. Through careful and long observation of natural systems, folks have outlined some of the guiding principles that we can perceive in nature's design process, and we list them and call them permaculture principles.

 1. Relative Location Each site or landscape presents its own unique opportunities, needs, and challenges. We have to design for the site, not for ourselves. Start with the site.

 2. Stacking functions Each element of a natural system performs many functions... for example, a small pond may provide water storage, fish habitat, animal habitat, niche plant community habitat, and create microclimates and edges.
 3. Each important function is supported by many elements Building redundancy into the system provides backup plans for each function- minimizing maintenance and input. For example, the important task of water preservation and storage may be served by water stored in the ground table, a pond, a rain barrel or cistern, and the well.

 4. Conservation of energy I won't call nature lazy, but you definitely won't catch her carrying water uphill. With this principle, we're taking into account zones: which reflect human usage (not putting herbs you want to cut for each meal at the far end of the property) and sectors-factors in the landscape, like sun exposure, slope, the behavior of water, and using these factors to your advantage rather than trying to change them.



We'll cover four more principles in the next post.

Note: These photos were taken at Bear's Den in January. I'm now in Burkina Faso in a very different landscape...so this is a sweet little taste of home.

About Our Namesake

A three sisters garden is a traditional Native American storage garden strategy. It’s corn, beans, and squash: a food alliance which when combined, makes a complete protein. A bean plant grows on either side of the corn, creating the basic pattern (spaced about four feet apart in a honeycomb pattern, usually done radially, you start with the center planting and then spiral out) and then the squash- you build mounds in all the spaces between corn and beans and plant the squash in the mound. They say you do this when the oak leaf is the size of the mouse’s ear. You weed once- at a certain time based on another seasonal indicator (any of you guys know what it is?) Our modern conception of this garden often features sweet corn, pole beans, summer squash, but traditionally this style of garden was for winter storage: drying corn for making cornmeal, shelling and drying beans, and winter squash. That’s why it was so low maintanence- in the summer, you can spend your time in the summer garden, and only spend a couple of days on the fall and winter bounty. What’s most remarkable about this garden is the relationships that all the plants have with each other. The beans fix nitrogen back into the soil, and they need the corn to trellis up. The squash provides ground cover, keeping the soil from eroding, keeping moisture in, suppressing the growth of weeds, a living mulch. And these three have a really neat way of partitioning the most key resource: sunlight.

Corn and beans both like full sun, and while the beans use the corn’s structure to sun themselves, their numerous tiny leaves don’t shade out the corns long narrow leaves. the narrowness of the corn leaves also don’t shade the beans. However, the combined mass of all of the corn and beans together provide a dynamic and dappled light for the winter squash, which changes throughout the day, never oversunning or overshadowing the broad flat leaves of the squash plant. Dave Jacke lectures about this really well, diving into how there are two kinds of shadows, umbra and penumbra, and draws diagrams of the sun and moon, it's really lovely. Highly recommend it.

image credit: Slow Food USA

image credit: Kurt Kulac

image credit: Sam Fentress

So there you have it. We named this blog after this garden model because it's so basic and no-fuss, yet highly interconnected and beautifully abundant. It's built to flourish on North American soils, just like us. The sum equals a whole lot more than the parts. This relates right in to what we're all working to foster in our communities.