Speakers at the 2024 National Hui
Trish Allen
Village Permaculture - Creating Community Resilience
Trish has been a permaculture practitioner for more than 35 years, establishing Rainbow Valley Farm with her late husband Joe Polaischer, moving to Matakana Village and setting up a community garden, a greenswap and a community recycling centre. Trish will talk about the strategies and initiatives she undertook to establish these projects.
Rob Small
Hua Parakore & Pourewa Māra Kai, Māori Kaupapa Supporting Community
Rob is the architect behind the 33-hectare organic Māori rongoā garden, food garden, nursery and proposed weavers' and carving gardens. He will talk about working with the land and soil for sustainable agriculture, using centuries-old traditional knowledge to carve a path towards the future.
Yotam Kay
A Thriving Business For All Life
Yotam shares the variety of strategies and techniques used at Pākaraka Permaculture in the past decade, to grow an abundance of produce while improving ecosystem health. This talk is for gardeners on every scale and will include time for questions.
Ellen Eskildsen
2 Presentations: Design Your Own Food Forest & Herbal Tea Blending
Ellen presents ideas about soil prep, plant selection, guild design, the seven layers, succession planting, incorporating chickens/guinea pigs/rabbits, polyculture, hugels, herbs, water-wise ways, fertigation, all topics based on her current fortnightly workshops in her Auckland food forest.
In her second topic, Herbal Tea Blending, she describes the attributes of different herbs and allows participants to blend a variety of supplied dried herbs, flowers and some spices to create a sample of their own tea blend.
Finn Mackesy
Permaculture Whakapapa In Aotearoa
Finn runs Aotearoa Permaculture Workshop and has been developing a timeline for the history of permaculture in New Zealand. For the Hui, he will facilitate a storytelling session with various permaculture elders and pioneers to share some of the history of the permaculture movement in Aotearoa.
Zeb Horrell
The Future Is Rural
A third-gen sheep farmer from Southland, Zeb leads Future Whenua, aiming for rural rejuvenation through ecological and sociological solutions. Blending hands-on farming with high-level strategy, he's dedicated to pioneering regenerative agriculture by exploring the drivers, pathways and possible destination of an agricultural future.
Roz Rolls
Permaculture Design In The Christchurch City Rebuild
This will be a presentation about Ōtākaro Orchard which is a project of Edible Canterbury, aka The Food Resilience Network. Ōtākaro Orchard is the only community-led project of the central city rebuild, situated between Colombo and Manchester St, opposite the town hall. We have a food forest, community garden, education hub, cafe and urban farm - all designed and run with permaculture principles.
Sophia Leon de la Barra
A Permaculture Path To Establishing An Ecovillage
As the co-founder of Taiao Ora Farm, a permaculture ecovillage established in 2022 just south of Ōamaru, Sophia will share their journey. Four years ago, four families began the ground work of establishing a legal framework, governance and policies to establish an ecovillage. Two years ago, they bought a small farm and began to transform a neglected lifestyle block into a permaculture ecovillage. This is a presentation about their journey and an opportunity for others to learn from their experience.
Dennis Frank
Recycling Ancient Wisdom, Catalysing Social Evolution, Co-Design Groups
Dennis identifies design principles relevant to group process and networking, and shows how to use these in operational contexts.
Robina McCurdy
2 presentations: Bioregional Food Sovereignty In Aotearoa & Participatory Permaculture Design for Common Land
Robina will share how she empowers households, communities and entire bioregions to take responsibility for their own food, seeds and associated economies. She will show inspiring examples of communities quietly and powerfully moving towards food resilience, discovered during her 10 years of localising food facilitation within Aotearoa.
Robina's second topic is an introduction to her multi-faceted step-by-step approach to the integration of social and physical collective design for community land. Her system is applicable to intentional rural communities, co-housing, ecovillages, papakāinga, community gardens, schools, kindergartens, marae and all land-based social service projects.
Bena Denton & Daniel Woolley
Professional Permaculture
Founder and co-directors of award-winning Greenbridge on what it takes to be a professional permaculture practitioner. Operating for over 15 years in the space of regenerative and ecological projects from landscapes to homes, domestic to community projects, we will share what we have found works and what doesn’t. A practical look at the day to day running of a permaculture business. Exploring processes and project case studies across the motu.
Robert Guyton
Is It A Forest? Is It A Garden? It's A Managed Woodland-jungle!
Robert will share his observations of and dialogues with his "mature" southern forest garden. "Now that I am familiar with my forest garden and the forest garden with me, I have much to share about the vegetal community and the healthy relationship that forms over time," he says.
Dennis Scott
Recloaking Papatūānuku
Dennis has been focused on large scale restoration and revegetation projects in Aotearoa for 50 years, including a part in the primary NZ Government Initiatives with the Aokautere Plant Science Research Centre developing the practical strategies and techniques to "recloak" Papatūānuku. He will bring practical implemented examples going back over 40 years demonstrating the benefits of their long-term outcomes.
Leo Murray
Weaving Permaculture People (Whakawhanaungatanga)
Leo uses this active, embodied, non-verbal process to build intimacy, vulnerability, and ground a group into presence at the start of a workshop. Instead of relying on the power of words to create connection, this exercise moves people through a series of exchanges inviting images and reflections to shift a person's perspective about each other and their role in our shared future.
Amanda Warren
Gift-The-Garden: Bringing Permaculture Into Mainstream Urban Households
Amanda describes how Gift-The-Garden activates people and their places to help to resolve the challenges of increasing population density and decreasing outdoor space in our urban environments. Alone, each garden provides some benefit to some people and nature, but in the wider context, as each garden embraces permaculture principles, significant gains are made.
Leo Gedye
Introducing The Learning Environment: Our Permaculture Journey
The Learning Environment is an educational charity based on a forest-farm on the banks of the Whanganui River, running interactive land-based education for youth that is immersed in te taiao and the local place. The programme demonstrates regenerative practice through native restoration, thriving kai systems and resilient infrastructure.
"At the last National Hui, we were introduced to the owners of the land we now steward in Whanganui," says Leo. "This session is to give an update on our growth since then and the positive impact we are now making, inspired and supported by the permaculture community."
David Kettle
The City to Farm Project
Over the past six years, 250+ tonnes of food scraps have been composted with biochar in swales as an experiment to create Terra Preta -- an ideal agricultural soil that is also a carbon sink. This presentation discusses the benefits of swale composting, the magic of using biochar in composting and also the large scale use of bokashi composted food scraps along with biochar to alter soil structure, enabling rapid topsoil development. The project has transformed low productivity, pasture with heavy clay soil into a highly fertile, productive banana farm.
Kama Burwell
Integrating Trees & Forests Into Farms: A Win For Farmers, Livestock & the Environment
It's counter-intuitive to most people, but it turns out that integrating trees and forests into farmscapes (as well as providing benefits to livestock and the environment in many ways) also increases farm profit.... Win win win! Kama will share case studies and the theory behind it, and show how it's being applied on their farm in Taranaki. A focus of the workshop will be the restoration of healthy watershed processes.
Nandor Tanczos
Permaculture in the Hood
Nandor admits he's a "terrible gardener", but is a dab hand at applying permaculture design principles to a community development initiative. "I got my PDC in 1992 with Jim and Miriam Tyler at Taheke Tree Farm," he says. "I am very interested in how we can use permaculture design principles to create resilient and regenerative social systems."
Betsy Kettle
Gardening with Biochar
This hands-on workshop explains what biochar is, its properties, ways to "charge and inoculate" it and how to safely apply it so it can work its magic. For the more technically-minded, Betsy can explain their theory on how biochar and bokashi composted food scraps can be used in the extremely rapid transformation of clay soil into Terra Preta, both a carbon sinks and a highly fertile agricultural soil.
Lynda Hannah
Living Legacies
Lynda founded Living Legacies, Aotearoa's first natural funeral company, in 2001. She explains what natural funerals mean, how they belong within a permaculture framework, and why and how to plan them in advance of need. This sustainable, holistic and celebratory approach to life, death and funerals embody the permaculture ethics and principles, she explains.