Mark Shepard Combo

Restoration Agriculture

Around the globe most people get their calories from “annual” agriculture — plants that grow fast for one season, produce lots of seeds, then die. Every single human society that has relied on annual crops for staple foods has collapsed. Restoration Agriculture explains how we can have all of the benefits of natural, perennial ecosystems and create agricultural systems that imitate nature in form and function while still providing for our food, building, fuel and many other needs — in your own backyard, farm or ranch. This book, based on real-world practices, presents an alternative to the agriculture system of eradication and offers exciting hope for our future.

Praise for Restoration Agriculture

“This book, written from real experience of working with the land and referencing real results of experience over time, will be invaluable and is destined to be a permaculture classic. This will be a reference book of great value for anyone interested in using permaculture design in a farming operation and valued by future generations.”

Geoff Lawton, managing director, Permaculture Research Institute of Australia

“In Restoration Agriculture, Mark Shepard convincingly makes the case for notillage, perennial agriculture. He draws inspiration from J. Russell Smith, Bill Mollison, Masanobu Fukuoka, his father, his grandfather, his neighbors and others who showed him that trees are the key to productive and sustainable agricultural systems. Shepard shares his practical knowledge and hard-won wisdom gleaned from years of experience growing up on a farm in central Massachusetts and later transforming a barren overgrazed landscape in western Wisconsin into a richly productive polyculture. The discussions include rotational livestock management, beekeeping, soil and water management, plant breeding, turning a profit on a small farm, and many others. This book is well organized with lots of delightful and informative personal anecdotes.”

Larry Korn, translator of The One Straw Revolution and Sowing Seeds in the Desert and student of Masanobu Fukuoka

“What a great story and a fun read … a wonderful history of man’s intervention. It’s not just the ‘reasons’ we need to change land management, it’s the ‘model’ to follow … a call to action.”

Gary Zimmer, president, Midwestern Bio-Ag

Copyright 2013, softcover, 339 pages. 28 per case.

Water For Any Farm

Written as a companion to the bestseller, Restoration Agriculture, this book will help farmers capture water in areas they want to, and avoid having water flow immediately to the low point. The result? Less water expense, healthier crops and livestock, and less erosion ... just to name a few. 

What you will read in this book is a distillation of over 25 years of on-the-ground experience working with and modifying the Yeomans’ Keyline Plan. From the back yard suburbs to 10,000-acre ranches and everywhere in between, from permafrost mountainsides just shy of the Arctic Circle, to equatorial boulder fields of East Africa, areas with 300 inches of rain per year to those with less than 3 inches, I have personally installed systems based on the Keyline design methodology and its modified forms.

What you will read in this book is tried and true. It is intended to give a sufficient background to any landowner so that they can optimize their water resource for higher site productivity, have greater drought resistance and just as importantly, to know deep in their heart that they have made even one little piece of earth a little more life-filled, livable and green.

#7573 • Copyright 2020 • Softcover • 240 pages 

Water For Any Farm: Engineering Field Manual

 A book with so much detail, it took three years to create. Including dozens of detailed illustration to help you solve real-live problems on your farm, bestselling author Mark Shepard offers landowners a guide to implementing a Master Line System of farm water management.

He clearly explains this whole-farm approach to understanding water flow and retention, which works on farms of various scales and in diverse climates, and which enables the landowner to cope with a wide range of real-world problems, such as property lines which don’t align with topographical lines, complex landforms, utilities and pre-existing infrastructure.

In times of drought, this system enables producers to catch, direct and hold water high where it can be put to work, and in times of severe rain or melt, these strategies help prevent erosion by directing water on a meandering journey using a series of retention and distribution features.

The book offers detailed diagrams and clear instructions, problem-solving and system maintenance guidance, and up-to-date reference data and information about relevant software products to ensure the accuracy of runoff calculations and construction parameters. The ROI potential on this book for any farmer and rancher is exponential.

#7762 • Copyright 2023 • Softcover • 152 pages 

About the Author

Mark Shepard is a Wisconsin-based permaculture designer, agroforester and ecological farming consultant. He and his family have transformed a typical 140-acre row-crop dairy farm into a permaculture-based perennial-agricultural ecosystem using oak savannah, successional brushland and Eastern woodlands as ecological models. In all, they have planted 100,000 trees on this property. The result is one of the first and finest farm-scale models of permaculture in the United States. New Forest Farm features chestnut, hazelnut and fruit trees, a variety of other fruits and vegetables, chickens, ducks, pigs and other animals.