Birdwood Downs Station (BDS) is owned by a group of philanthropic Americans and is run as a not-for-profit social enterprise. The history of the place is quite interesting. Birdwood is the grass that was used to regenerate the soil and turn useless bushland into pasture for cattle. At its peak, the pastures were able to support 250 cows and a business producing hay and seeds for export. The government then sold the company 2,500 hectares of land on which the station is situated for a small price. This has inspired us to work on Project Scenario B (Details below for reference) and Benoit is already doing research on grants and subsidies available in Europe for land regeneration. BDS is run in the form of a quasi-community. Workers are not paid but receive food, lodging and a share of returns from projects they launch. Business includes cattle rearing, horse breeding, horsemanship training, tourist accommodation and last season, when they had a volunteer chef, they ran a restaurant and also sold fruits & vegetables. Volunteers stay in huts and take communal meals in the homestead. Hans, the manager, was a Dutch Management Consultant who came to BDS 8 years ago, volunteered and loved the place so much, he never left. He is now director of the company and is looking at building a house on the station. We had wonderful discussions on ideology, philosophy and our various wacky projects. Currently, there is a need for the station to have an additional member to help run the tourist operations and manage the vegetable gardens. The kids want us to have horses at our new place. Apparently, a horse can produce 22kg of poo a day. Can you imagine how much compost we can make with that! Well, we would probably have to produce 22kg of grass to feed it, so maybe it isn't such a good idea... Some Observations & lessons learnt from BDS
Mark Nelson, the wastewater gardener, is one of the founding members of BDS. Black & grey water from the homestead is filtered through gravel then goes directly into a garden. (We had planned to do a simplified version by running the grey water from our washing machine at our house in Oceanic Drive into a gravel pit in the front gardens.) He was also 1 of 8 scientists who lived in a sealed, closed-loop Biosphere dome for 2 years. Project Scenario B (Peri-urban Farm)
Identify a need for redevelopment & regeneration of land in the vicinity of a large city (eg : abandoned industrial zones) and obtain subsidies / grants to start up a project consisting of
Our Needs : To create something that contributes socially (regenerating the environment / rehabilitating people in need / supporting healthy food production / small business creation / providing community space) Local Government Needs:
Market Needs :
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