1. Urban Permaculture Center

Metro Manila, where we are located, has a population of approximately 12 million. Food comes from the outlying provinces and travels up to 1500 km by air, sea, and land to get to the wet markets, supermarkets, and groceries. Some foodstuffs come from as far away as China, Australia, New Zealand, South/Southeast Asia, North/South America, Africa, and Europe, but these generally cater to the upscale portion of the population, except for rice which is imported from Vietnam, Thailand, and India.

We are currently looking at a one-hectare site nearby where we can establish a Center for Urban Permaculture. We intend to test different methods of gardening, small-scale agroforestry, animal husbandry, and food processing to see what works best in our situation. This will include indigenous methods, animals, and crops used by our farmers. We will also conduct seminars and workshops on Sustainable Agriculture, Peak Oil/Natural Resources, and Climate Change to the communities around. We will disseminate any lessons learned from our projects.

A portion of the site will be allocated for an Organic Farmers Market to enable the surrounding communities to buy and sell organically produced food.

2. Rural Permaculture Center

We have two properties available to us. One is a 10 hectare coconut farm (with approximately 2000 coconut trees) located in Quezon Province, about 140 km. from Metro Manila. It is at an altitude of 400-450 MASL, 3000 mm of rainfall, with a small rainforest, two springs, and a creek that do not dry up during the dry season. The terrain is rolling, with areas for gardening, fruit trees, ponds, and rice. It hasn't been touched for the last five years, and to our knowledge, has never been chemically farmed.

Another property is in the Province of Bukdnon, on the Island of Mindanao, at an altitude of 1000 MASL, with 2500 mm of rainfall, springs, and 3 creeks. Its ravines are some of the most biodiverse areas that can be found in the locality. This is larger; 50 hectares of rolling land in the Moleta-Manupali Watershed, a portion of which used to be a Robusta coffee farm with 13,500 trees, supplying Nestle Philippines. Another portion was used to grow Certified Seeds for the Philippine Department of Agriculture in the 1980's. In the late 1990's, we started planting rare and endangered indigenous Philippine trees in collaboration with the Environmental Research and Development Bureau of the Philippine Department of the Environment and Natural Resources on 5 hectare of the property. It has a 6000 sq. m. irrigation catchment pond that is leased by a banana plantation nearby. The land has been fallow since the early 90's.

3. Plans

We intend to start development of the Urban Permaculture Center first and scale up slowly to the larger projects in Quezon and Bukdnon with the lessons we learn.

We have associates in the fields of forestry, microbiology, geology, and soil sciences who can be tapped to provide expertise for these projects in their respective fields.

We intend to start the Urban Permaculture Center after our rainy season, which should be sometime in February or March 2007. We have a small budget available for this.