I’d like to introduce you to Sepp Holzer, a man who not only produces food in a very unlikely location, at a high and frigid altitude in Austria, but is also growing very unlikely crops there as well — and all without the use of chemicals, and with minimal input of human labour.

I guess you could call him a European counterpart of people like Bill Mollison and Masanobu Fukuoka — as all three independently discovered ways of working with nature that save money and labour and that don’t degrade the environment, but actually improve it. In Holzer’s case, he was effectively running a permaculture farm for more than two decades before he even realised his unconventional approach could be termed ‘permaculture’.

In the coldest part of Austria, a farmer is turning conventional wisdom on its head by growing a veritable Garden of Eden full of tropical plants in the open on his steep Alpine pastures.

Amid average annual temperatures of a mere 4.2 degrees Celsius (39.5 Fahrenheit), Sepp Holzer grows everything from apricots to eucalyptus, figs to kiwi fruit, peaches to wheat at an altitude of between 1,000 and 1,500 metres (3,300 and 4,900 feet).

… “Once planted, I do absolutely nothing,” Holzer told Reuters. “It really is just nature working for itself - no weeding, no pruning, no watering, no fertiliser, no pesticides.” — permaculture.org.uk

See Link Below for Full Article, Links and Video:
http://www.celsias.com/2008/03/22/permaculture-miracles-in-the-austrian-...