Beforest
We build sustainable, permaculture based food forests and collectively owned living spaces (or collectives) that are food, water and power secure.
What is Permaculture
Permaculture or Permanent Agriculture is based on the guiding ethics of ‘People Care, Earth Care and Fair Share’. It is a natural design system which creates sustainable, productive and harmonious ways of living by making optimal use of available resources
What is a Collective
A collective is a group of individuals who come together with a single objective. At a beforest collective, that objective is to live sustainably.
What is a Food Forest
Forests are ecosystems in which diverse elements like plants, animals and fungi thrive with the least effort. Now imagine if the same ecosystem could be replicated to produce multiple layers of food right from tall trees to bushes, herbs and underground foods in the same space in a sustainable manner with minimum inputs and intervention for maximum outputs. When such an ecosystem is replicated over large tracts of land, we call it a food forest.
Collective
A collective is a group of individuals who come together with a single objective.
At Beforest, that objective is to run a sustainable farm. Each member owns a part of the farm along with the infrastructure on it. However, the entire farm is managed as a single property when it comes to infrastructure, plantation and produce planning. All decisions are taken collectively with Beforest moderating and enabling the process. All costs are split and all profits are shared. The rules that govern the collective will all be framed by the families who form the collective.
Beforest plays a guiding role and helps this group navigate through the regulatory, operational and legal pitfalls. In addition, once strategic decisions are taken, Beforest plays the role of the man on the ground and keeps the needle moving on a day to day basis.
Why a Collective
In recent times, most people in the urban societies have expressed a lack of connection with nature and society. In order to address this, many have even bought pieces of farmland, and over weekends tried to take time out to try their hand at it. Some folks have succeeded and made it work, but for most, life and work start to eat up most available time, and the farm does not sustain after a couple of initial years of enthusiasm. It’s also a little expensive to have a caretaker stay on and manage a 2-3 acre farm – both the manpower and the basic inputs and infrastructure easily need a few lakhs a year at the very least. In addition, with every small farmer trying to find his share of resources like borewells, equipment etc, it becomes very inefficient.
We saw this problem repeat again and again, and decided to solve it.Farming Collectives are our way to try and solve this problem.