Jackson Free Press

Akia Chabot fits in nowhere, yet everywhere. The Australian native, with his master's in Environmental Management, teaches the natural poetry of permaculture with his wife, Rebecca, a Mississippi native who sports a Ph.D. in Ecology. The two will be offering courses on permaculture, starting Aug. 4, at their home in Vicksburg.

The Chabots define permaculture as a method of farming that mimics the diversity, stability and resilience of natural ecosystems. Some ecosystems have been around for millions of years, so imitating them seems a logical next step for any aspiring farmer.

The Chabots' course, which will run until Sept. 2, will touch on a wide variety of design, growing and building techniques, all geared to producing the maximum amount of milk with the minimum of "moo." Topics include water and gray-water reuse, composting, plant species and placement, alternative building techniques and materials, harnessing alternative energies, beekeeping, bamboo cultivation, animal integration and aquaculture, among many other topics.

The Chabot home is testimony to the process. A tour of the property reveals a veritable explosion of an ecosystem gone wild—or at least as wild as it was designed to be. Akia Chabot is quick with his hands, and has revamped the most unbearably hot sheds into pristine living quarters that need no air conditioning in the middle of a Mississippi summer. His property also boasts a rainwater capturing system that he claims has not gone dry all year, despite the state's painful spring and early summer season drought.

How do you make a living off of permaculture living in Mississippi? What's the market for this kind of education?
Everyone is reading about the need for organic food. Every time you pick up a magazine, you're reading about the rising desire for cleaner, more healthy food. Just the idea of locally grown food is starting to catch on, and this is the logical next stage in that, having it in your backyard. Mississippi is probably one of the easiest places to grow food on earth. You can plant anything here, and if there's a little bit of water and sunshine it'll flourish.

What's the magic in growing organically?
The involvement of it, the gardening of it, is so important. It's more convenient than going to the market. It's just outside your back door. It's intellectually stimulating; it's physically engaging. The permaculture approach is a pretty low-energy approach. It's described as a thinking person's approach to gardening or a lazy person's approach to gardening. You spend just a bit of time working out your design ahead of time, so that the different elements you put in your ecological system look out for one another, so as the manager of the system you're not having to go in there and supply all of your plants' and animals' needs. You're trying to create a whole ecological system.

And the nature of permaculture impacts every aspect of the design, all the way down to the pesticides?
It's all organic, obviously. We find that through clever design, initially, we eliminate a lot of the need for pesticides, and we're growing our own fertilizers.

Does the organic nature of the gardening limit the kind of plant contained within it? Have you ever had to forgo a certain variety of garden vegetable because it could not be grown without the use of pesticides? We have some very savage pests in Mississippi, you know.
We've reduced the number of pesticides we've used on our property, and we've noticed that the number of predators have really come back into the system, the frogs, the lizards, and the birds were kept away, but we've stopped the local (city) council from spraying for mosquitoes around our property, and it's made a huge difference. The return of the natural predators has allowed us to reduce our use of chemicals considerably.

How'd you convince the council to do that?
Well, the pesticides are sprayed in the street, where they don't really have much of an effect, what with mosquitoes living in your backyard and all, but the chemicals accumulate and the mosquitoes develop a tolerance for it. It was pointless. So we spoke with a young professional woman at the local council, who was overseeing the spray. She came right down, gave us a form to sign, saying we'll take responsibility for our own West Nile risk and then she instructed the truck driver to turn the sprayer off here and there—and that was it.

Was there any problem raising farm animals in the city?
I had heard there would be a problem, but we pulled the big book out and it said, "no large farm animals." Come on, a chicken isn't a large farm animal. Turns out we're allowed to have small, quiet domestic animals, including chickens and rabbits, so long as we don't let them intrude on other people's property and go on the roads, and that's not a lot to ask.

For more information regarding the Permaculture Design Certificate Course call Akia or Rebecca Chabot at 601-636-4302.