PERMACULUTRE DESIGN & IMPLEMENTATION SERVICES
We offer a range of services in the field of permaculture design, regenerative farming, site assessment, both on site and virtual
Regenerative Site Assessment & Design Service
Our once-off site visit is a comprehensive site survey that uncovers a wide range of potentials and challenges on your property, including internal dynamics (soil, water, topography, microclimates) and surrounding influences (neighbours, access, resources) — all of which can be turned to your advantage. We provide tailored permaculture design suggestions and deliver a clear, concise basic report to guide you confidently toward greater self-reliance in key areas: water harvesting, soil health, food production, energy security, and the other essential elements needed for a high-quality, resilient life.
If you’re considering purchasing a property specifically for permaculture or self-reliance purposes, we offer expert pre-purchase advice. We’ll assess its true potentials and hidden challenges upfront, helping you avoid costly mistakes by identifying issues that may not be obvious during a standard viewing. Many properties cycle repeatedly through buyers and sellers because underlying problems (poor water access, erosion risks, soil degradation, zoning limitations, or microclimate extremes) only reveal themselves years later. Our survey helps you see them clearly from the start, so you can choose a site that truly supports your long-term vision and dream homestead.
Regenerative Water Harvesting Services
Healthy, regenerative landscapes need smart, diverse ways to catch, store, and use water, methods that last for generations and don’t rely on expensive tech or fragile external supplies. That’s why our approach centres on simple earthworks: swales, contours, keyline patterns, ponds, and infiltration systems that are inexpensive to create, straightforward to look after, and designed to become a permanent, living foundation for your land. These features quietly support thriving gardens, food forests, pastures, livestock, and biodiversity, all while steadily improving soil, hydrology, and resilience.
During an on-site visit, we’ll walk your property together and assess its real water-harvesting, storage, and use possibilities, plus ways to help restore the natural water cycle. From that clear picture, we share practical design ideas and management steps to help you step fully off the water grid and unlock your land’s maximum water potential. The result? Reliable, self-sustaining water security that grows stronger over time, giving you peace of mind, abundance, and true independence.
Food Forest Design Services
We are able to help establish food forests via mentorship or directly on-site, with advice, links to resources, plant materials and follow-up management.
DESIGNING FOR SELF-RELIANCE
Building from Self-Reliance
Permaculture often starts close to home, strengthening self-reliance at the household or small-community scale. This is not about doing everything alone, but about reducing dependence on fragile external supply chains so you can meet your basic needs with local resources and skills.
Securing the Foundations
At the heart of our designs are four essential “People Care” needs: food, water, energy, and shelter. We focus first on creating systems that reliably provide these basics — through rainwater harvesting, food forests, gardens, small animals, passive solar design, and renewable energy. Only once these foundations are secure do we look toward creating surplus.
From Security to Sharing the Surplus
When surplus does emerge, permaculture’s third ethic, “Share the Surplus”, guides how we approach it. This often means producing value-added products, selling at local markets, trading within the community, and maintaining fair pricing. Scaling into larger production should happen gradually and thoughtfully. Larger permaculture farms require careful planning based on real hands-on experience, understanding what the land can sustainably produce, what the market needs, and the true costs involved in time, skills, equipment, and regulations.
The wisest path is to start small, run pilot projects, learn from each season, build your knowledge and skill set, and let larger-scale operations grow naturally from a strong foundation of self-reliance.
Our Approach to Design Consulting
We specialise in helping people design practical self-reliance systems at the homestead level, whether you’re in an urban area, on a smallholding, or building a family homestead. We focus on smaller-scale systems rather than large commercial farming operations.
We do this because we’re passionate about supporting those who truly want to grow their own food, harvest their own water and energy, and live a high-quality, independent life regeneratively on the land. This is real living off the land, not just lifestyle farming. With more than 30 years of experience, we know what successful self-reliance looks like in practice: the right land sizes, the resources needed, and how to scale thoughtfully.
For Larger Farms
On bigger properties, we offer Mainframe Design, the backbone layout of water systems, roads, fencing, building placement, agroforestry, and functional livestock integration. We design the overall pattern and function, leaving specific commercial plant and animal choices to your own developing experience. We happily assist with retrofitting existing farms when the farmer already has the required skill set, good knowledge of their local market and what works in their environment.
Our Strong Recommendation
If you’re just starting out, begin small and let your system grow naturally. Take time to gain real experience and understanding of your land before committing to larger-scale operations.
As the saying goes: “The bigger they are, the harder they fall.” Our job is to help you succeed and avoid major Type One Errors, the kind of costly mistakes that are hard to recover from.
We’ll support you with proven starting strategies and stay with you as you gain hands-on knowledge and confidence along the way.
How We Can Help You Begin
If you dream of living more off the grid and creating real self-reliance on your land, no matter its size, we invite you to get in touch.
We start with a free, friendly call or video call to understand your site, your vision, your time, skills, and resources. From that conversation, we can suggest a practical way forward and give you a transparent quote.
We strongly recommend a site visit so we can see the land firsthand, get to know you, and design something that truly matches your needs and budget. Please note that we currently only offer on-site visits in the Western Cape.
Once we agree on the scope, we create a clear design map and a detailed explanatory document so you fully understand the permaculture principles and reasoning behind every element.
For most small-scale designs, the process involves a site visit of a few hours plus roughly 8 to 10 hours of design work. Farm-scale projects may require additional visits or more information as we go.
Virtual Assistance
We also offer virtual assistance for urban and smallholding properties when an in-person visit isn’t possible. We’re happy to give general online advice on any scale, but we don’t do designs for larger, more complex sites without first visiting them.
Get in touch today for a chat. Let’s work together to kick-start your journey into regenerative living and greater independence on the land.
Kent Tahir Cooper: Permaculture Design Consultant
Meet Tahir (Kent Tahir Cooper)
Tahir’s permaculture journey began in the early 1990s in the lush sub-tropics of KwaZulu-Natal. There he co-established Gardens for Africa, an intensive one-hectare urban permaculture project that provided training and support to many local organisations.
In 2003 he moved to the Klein Karoo and co-founded the Berg en Dal Farm Permaculture Training Centre. Since 2014, together with his wife Larissa Green, he has been developing Oudeberg Permaculture Farm, turning the land into a thriving, productive regenerative system.
For nearly three decades, Tahir has been teaching and consulting in permaculture. He has facilitated 27 Permaculture Design Certificates and a broad range of courses covering eco-village design and permaculture work in disadvantaged communities.
As a professional permaculture designer, Tahir has created systems ranging from small urban off-grid systems to full farms and community-scale projects. His particular passion and expertise lie in self-reliance scale designs and regenerative water harvesting systems that help properties become drought-proof and water-resilient.
Tahir holds a Diploma in Permaculture Design and Education from The Permaculture Institute (USA), along with specialised training from Geoff Lawton in Permaculture Design, Max Lindegger in Intentional Community Design, and Ali Sharif in Village Scale Technologies. He also brings academic grounding with a degree in Geography and postgraduate studies in Ethnobotany.
Above all, Tahir draws on the deep, ongoing experience of managing his own permaculture farm. He combines this practical wisdom with clear design skills and thoughtful mentoring to help you successfully transition into a regenerative, self-reliant way of life.
THE KEYLINE SCALE OF PERMANENCE
The eight factors on the Scale are arranged according to how much time and energy it takes to influence or change them.Yeomans spoke of relative permanence — the longer something has been in place and the harder it is to change, the higher it sits on the scale. The higher the factor, the more energy and effort any modification requires.Although everything is interconnected, the scale is hierarchical. Changes at the top levels cascade down and affect all the layers below.In practice, we always begin design at the top of the scale and work our way down:
- Climate is at the very top. It is the most powerful influence on any site and the hardest to change. Everything we design must respect and respond to the local climate.
- Landshape (the physical form of the land) comes next. It is shaped by climate over long periods and takes massive effort and machinery to modify — with changes that are hard to undo.
- Water sits a little lower. It is shaped by both climate and landform, but we can influence it more readily through earthworks like swales, dams, and keyline systems.
Over the years we have created our own practical adaptation of the Scale of Permanence. This version is shaped by real-world experience on the land and insights from fellow regenerative practitioners, including the Regenarians Platform. It serves as a clear, actionable guide for permaculture design and implementation.
