Photos & text by Owen Savage
November 9th, 2023
As he walked me around his farm in Denmark’s Central Zealand, I interviewed Adam to find out about what he does at Planteskolen Evigt Liv. He told me how he believes in doing things differently in order to contribute to a world where farming follows the cycles of nature, and mitigates the release of greenhouse gases, all the while enhancing the beauty of the landscape and the diversity of our diet.
So, how did you get into permaculture in the first place?
I have a background as a trained historian, but when I graduated, I couldn’t get a job and the only thing I actually earned a little money from was selling edible plants. It was like a small side job. Then I thought to myself, I’m not working as a historian anyway because I can’t get into that field.
When I was living in Copenhagen, I became interested in permaculture and in how to grow plants in a cold, temperate climate. I began to be nerdy about what was possible to grow. I asked myself: what’s the most sustainable way of growing? What’s the most tasty?
I ended up taking a Permaculture Design Certificate in Friland, and have been working actively to spread permacultural perspectives ever since. That’s also why I have this plant nursery, which specialises in edible plants for our climate, specifically perennials, berry bushes, and fruit trees.
How would you explain permaculture to the layperson?
Permaculture is very well-known for being hard to explain! However the short way of explaining it is a system design, and system designs are based on the organic principles of holistic sustainability. The permacultural way of growing food imitates natural systems and aims to restore natural resources, making these systems become more and more productive each year. It does this through mutually positive interactions between the land, plants, animals and people.
That means that in a permaculture design, you should strive towards ending up with no waste and circulating all of the nutrients. When growing food, you work towards self-sustainability and self-reliance, you work with plants that benefit your microclimate, and you try to work more actively in accordance with natural processes.
In nature, you have succession, which is the circle of nature – how a landscape evolves over time. And it’s not like going from A to B, it’s a cycle that starts with the forest. The woods we see around us are not real nature. They’re “Danish nature”. But they’re still symbols of nature, you could say, and the way they work is that instead of people fertilising them, they fertilise themselves. If mankind left, they would still be woods. That is, until a wildfire or something. Most of them would be proper forests if it weren’t for humans.
If you have a mature forest, then, at some point, a wildfire, or big land animals, push over the trees. Or humans destroy an area. At that point, it goes down to zero, which is an open field with open soil. That’s what you could call the catastrophe stage, but it’s just a natural part of the process. It has its time and place.
Nowadays, it is usually humans that cause it, but if you just let it be without intervention, it would undergo a process where first the annual plants come, then the perennial plants would take over and dominate for all of the rest of the cycle.
The annuals, especially, are the pioneer plants. They fly themselves in by air, or via birds, and they land and quickly cover the ground – they are like the bandage on a wound, creating a lot of biomass and casting seeds quickly, bringing life to the soil. In that way, they fulfil a need.
The problem is that the way we now farm is dependent on reproducing this ‘catastrophic stage’, and we are overreliant on farming the annuals. It is deemed to be the most efficient way of doing things, and it’s done to grow food, cereals, and the annual plants that we eat as vegetables.
Every time you plough the field, you are trying to keep at point zero, because you want the annuals to thrive.
And why is it particularly bad to farm in this way?
When we dig in our garden, that’s like small-scale ploughing. Every time we do that we emit a little bit. And I’m not saying that to point fingers at anyone. I am the son of a farmer’s son, and my grandfather was a part of the conventional farming revolution. Like many others, he thought that he was saving the world by making food more accessible and making production more effective.
However, the methods of farming used to achieve this goal – including the heavy use of pesticides – are a problem. There is a lot of carbon in the form of half-composted plant material in the soil, and when that soil is oxygenated via ploughing, carbon and oxygen combine to make CO2, which is then released into the atmosphere. This is a major source of farming emissions on a global scale.
In this type of farming, the amount of sun exposure is not good for the microorganisms in the topsoil – the microorganisms most important for making nutrients available for our plants and eventually our bodies.
Once you start growing pioneer plants, you don’t want to grow berries, you don’t want to grow trees. Instead, you want to grow carrots, you want to grow cabbage. And therefore you keep on hurting the soil. If, instead, you set up your production for growing perennials, you are doing what is best for the soil and the climate.
And how do you do things differently at Evigt Liv?
I grow my plants in a different way. I grow all my plants without peat moss, which is very commonly used by private individuals and a lot by the industry. It is terrible for the environment and the harvesting of peat moss emits a lot of CO2.
The other, even more radical element of my way of growing plants is that I grow them ‘veganically’. Veganic means vegan organic. I grow all of my plants without any manure from farm animals, or any animal parts. In the industry at large, a lot of producers grow with a large amount of manure from cows, horses or chickens, but also even blood and bone meal, fishmeal and feather meal, all coming from the meat industry.
Why do I choose to grow without elements from domesticated animals? Because I don’t want to support the meat industry for the sake of the animals, and because it is an extraordinarily high emitter. So for me, the reason for growing my plants with plant-based fertilisers is ethical but also climate-oriented. And yes, it also works very well!
At Planteskolen Evigt Liv, we instead try to mimic the early stage of a forest. We focus more on the smaller perennials, bushes, and small trees. We mimic this stage in the overall succession because that’s where you can easily work with nature. Most of what we see around us would be forests if it wasn’t for humans. That’s why if we want to grow in the most sustainable way, we have to go in that direction.
Because at the early stage of the forest, there is still a lot of sun coming in, there’s a lot of photosynthesis. We get a lot of energy from the sun for the plants. And that’s what we mimic, actually with the food forest systems which we have out here – it is like we are in an early stage of a food forest, before the forest gets to the mature stage, with a closed growth.
And these plants are very good in the next stages of succession because they’re perennials. Most of these plants you see around you are perennials. Some of the plants take one of the most important fertilisers, nitrogen, from the air, and bind them in the soil. That’s the magic of those. The plants I sell here do that, and do that with carbon too. They sequester carbon.
All of this also has the effect of making the countryside look beautiful and more biodiverse. All of the flowers you see around you are edibles, they have different colours at different times of the season, and I typically use them for salads.
Also, what we grow here also needs to be good for the insects and general biodiversity. These plants are some of the best for bees and butterflies. Like I said, it’s not just about eating food. It’s about making a beautiful garden that produces more of your own food, which as a holistic system is good for both the soil and the animals. This also applies to the treatment of people who work and volunteer here at Planteskolen. If they are not happy and treated well, then this goes against the honour mentality too.
How easy is it to translate these techniques onto a wider scale?
You might say that it isn’t possible to take this approach to the whole of human production, that’s fair enough. People will want to live off mainly annuals for a good while before everyone gets to know the thousands of delicious and healthy perennial plants out there waiting for us to put them in the ground. Several reports are stating that we have to plant so and so many billions of trees, and the UN is also taking that stance.
In light of that, we can begin designing production in a way that is more in line with these natural cycles. Right now, such businesses might be rare, but these practices are becoming more accessible to normal people who are starting to grow in more sustainable ways and become more self-reliant. Instead of working against their gardens and nature’s rhythm, they can start mimicking the ways of nature.
If people start to do this on a larger scale, then that is effectively mitigating climate change.
because right now we have emissions that are just galloping away. And it doesn’t feel like there is a serious effort to stop that at the moment. So whenever we plant forests, it would be for production. If we want to eat something healthy, and at the same time, work against climate change, then trees, bushes, and perennials are the way to go.
Adam hosts courses on permaculture, self-reliance, and related topics.
or go to visit his farm at Høedvej 38, 4174 Jystrup.
GRØNT MARKED
Producer Portrait:
Planteskolen Evigt Liv
Photos and text by Owen Savage
November 9th, 2023
As he walked me around his farm in Denmark’s Central Zealand, I interviewed Adam to find out about what he does at Planteskolen Evigt Liv. He told me how he believes in doing things differently in order to contribute to a world where farming follows the cycles of nature, and mitigates the release of greenhouse gases, all the while enhancing the beauty of the landscape and the diversity of our diet.
So, how did you get into permaculture in the first place?
I have a background as a trained historian, but when I graduated, I couldn’t get a job and the only thing I actually earned a little money from was selling edible plants. It was like a small side job. Then I thought to myself, I’m not working as a historian anyway because I can’t get into that field.
When I was living in Copenhagen, I became interested in permaculture and in how to grow plants in a cold, temperate climate. I began to be nerdy about what was possible to grow. I asked myself: what’s the most sustainable way of growing? What’s the most tasty?
I ended up taking a Permaculture Design Certificate in Friland, and have been working actively to spread permacultural perspectives ever since. That’s also why I have this plant nursery, which specialises in edible plants for our climate, specifically perennials, berry bushes, and fruit trees.
How would you explain permaculture to the layperson?
Permaculture is very well-known for being hard to explain! However the short way of explaining it is a system design, and system designs are based on the organic principles of holistic sustainability. The permacultural way of growing food imitates natural systems and aims to restore natural resources, making these systems become more and more productive each year. It does this through mutually positive interactions between the land, plants, animals and people.
That means that in a permaculture design, you should strive towards ending up with no waste and circulating all of the nutrients. When growing food, you work towards self-sustainability and self-reliance, you work with plants that benefit your microclimate, and you try to work more actively in accordance with natural processes.
In nature, you have succession, which is the circle of nature – how a landscape evolves over time. And it’s not like going from A to B, it’s a cycle that starts with the forest. The woods we see around us are not real nature. They’re “Danish nature”. But they’re still symbols of nature, you could say, and the way they work is that instead of people fertilising them, they fertilise themselves. If mankind left, they would still be woods. That is, until a wildfire or something. Most of them would be proper forests if it weren’t for humans.
If you have a mature forest, then, at some point, a wildfire, or big land animals, push over the trees. Or humans destroy an area. At that point, it goes down to zero, which is an open field with open soil. That’s what you could call the catastrophe stage, but it’s just a natural part of the process. It has its time and place.
Nowadays, it is usually humans that cause it, but if you just let it be without intervention, it would undergo a process where first the annual plants come, then the perennial plants would take over and dominate for all of the rest of the cycle.
The annuals, especially, are the pioneer plants. They fly themselves in by air, or via birds, and they land and quickly cover the ground – they are like the bandage on a wound, creating a lot of biomass and casting seeds quickly, bringing life to the soil. In that way, they fulfil a need.
The problem is that the way we now farm is dependent on reproducing this ‘catastrophic stage’, and we are overreliant on farming the annuals. It is deemed to be the most efficient way of doing things, and it’s done to grow food, cereals, and the annual plants that we eat as vegetables.
Every time you plough the field, you are trying to keep at point zero, because you want the annuals to thrive.
And why is it particularly bad to farm in this way?
When we dig in our garden, that’s like small-scale ploughing. Every time we do that we emit a little bit. And I’m not saying that to point fingers at anyone. I am the son of a farmer’s son, and my grandfather was a part of the conventional farming revolution. Like many others, he thought that he was saving the world by making food more accessible and making production more effective.
However, the methods of farming used to achieve this goal – including the heavy use of pesticides – are a problem. There is a lot of carbon in the form of half-composted plant material in the soil, and when that soil is oxygenated via ploughing, carbon and oxygen combine to make CO2, which is then released into the atmosphere. This is a major source of farming emissions on a global scale.
In this type of farming, the amount of sun exposure is not good for the microorganisms in the topsoil – the microorganisms most important for making nutrients available for our plants and eventually our bodies.
Once you start growing pioneer plants, you don’t want to grow berries, you don’t want to grow trees. Instead, you want to grow carrots, you want to grow cabbage. And therefore you keep on hurting the soil. If, instead, you set up your production for growing perennials, you are doing what is best for the soil and the climate.
And how do you do things differently at Evigt Liv?
I grow my plants in a different way. I grow all my plants without peat moss, which is very commonly used by private individuals and a lot by the industry. It is terrible for the environment and the harvesting of peat moss emits a lot of CO2.
The other, even more radical element of my way of growing plants is that I grow them ‘veganically’. Veganic means vegan organic. I grow all of my plants without any manure from farm animals, or any animal parts. In the industry at large, a lot of producers grow with a large amount of manure from cows, horses or chickens, but also even blood and bone meal, fishmeal and feather meal, all coming from the meat industry.
Why do I choose to grow without elements from domesticated animals? Because I don’t want to support the meat industry for the sake of the animals, and because it is an extraordinarily high emitter. So for me, the reason for growing my plants with plant-based fertilisers is ethical but also climate-oriented. And yes, it also works very well!
At Planteskolen Evigt Liv, we instead try to mimic the early stage of a forest. We focus more on the smaller perennials, bushes, and small trees. We mimic this stage in the overall succession because that’s where you can easily work with nature. Most of what we see around us would be forests if it wasn’t for humans. That’s why if we want to grow in the most sustainable way, we have to go in that direction.
Because at the early stage of the forest, there is still a lot of sun coming in, there’s a lot of photosynthesis. We get a lot of energy from the sun for the plants. And that’s what we mimic, actually with the food forest systems which we have out here – it is like we are in an early stage of a food forest, before the forest gets to the mature stage, with a closed growth.
And these plants are very good in the next stages of succession because they’re perennials. Most of these plants you see around you are perennials. Some of the plants take one of the most important fertilisers, nitrogen, from the air, and bind them in the soil. That’s the magic of those. The plants I sell here do that, and do that with carbon too. They sequester carbon.
All of this also has the effect of making the countryside look beautiful and more biodiverse. All of the flowers you see around you are edibles, they have different colours at different times of the season, and I typically use them for salads.
How easy is it to translate these techniques onto a wider scale?
You might say that it isn’t possible to take this approach to the whole of human production, that’s fair enough. People will want to live off mainly annuals for a good while before everyone gets to know the thousands of delicious and healthy perennial plants out there waiting for us to put them in the ground. Several reports are stating that we have to plant so and so many billions of trees, and the UN is also taking that stance.
In light of that, we can begin designing production in a way that is more in line with these natural cycles. Right now, such businesses might be rare, but these practices are becoming more accessible to normal people who are starting to grow in more sustainable ways and become more self-reliant. Instead of working against their gardens and nature’s rhythm, they can start mimicking the ways of nature.
If people start to do this on a larger scale, then that is effectively mitigating climate change.
because right now we have emissions that are just galloping away. And it doesn’t feel like there is a serious effort to stop that at the moment. So whenever we plant forests, it would be for production. If we want to eat something healthy, and at the same time, work against climate change, then trees, bushes, and perennials are the way to go.
Adam hosts courses on permaculture, self-reliance, and related topics.
Follow his work with Planteskolen Evigt Liv
on Instagram @planteskolenevigtliv,
his website evigt-liv.dk
or go to visit his farm at Høedvej 38, 4174 Jystrup.
Follow his work with Planteskolen Evigt Liv
on Instagram @planteskolenevigtliv,