9-Day Permaculture Design Certificate Course — Daruma Eco-farm

The Permaculture Design Certificate Course at Daruma is the full, internationally recognised 72-hour PDC curriculum, delivered as a nine-day residential programme on a working permaculture campus near the Gulf of Thailand coast. It is taught in English and designed for international students, and it is deliberately kept small, with a maximum of twelve places on each intake so that every participant gets close attention on the land and through their own design work. Two runs are offered in 2026, from 21 to 31 August and from 18 to 28 September, and each follows the same residential shape of nine days and ten nights, with participants checking in on the Friday afternoon and checking out by noon on the closing Monday. Teaching days run from around nine in the morning to half past five in the late afternoon with regular breaks, so the standard curriculum has room to breathe rather than being rushed through.

The heart of the course is the complete 72-hour curriculum that PDC courses share worldwide, taught here against a real, working landscape so that theory in the morning is tested in the gardens the same afternoon. Alongside the taught sessions, each student carries out a design project of between ten and twenty hours, which includes a critique and a final presentation, so participants leave having applied the whole design process to a site of their own rather than only studying it. Completing the course earns the internationally recognised certificate, which is the recognised first step toward the Permaculture Diploma, and because the 72-hour curriculum is common to PDC courses everywhere it also connects graduates to an international network of designers who work from the same foundation and language. The work is moderate but genuinely hands-on, with outdoor sessions in the Thai heat kept to a sensible pace around shade, water and rest, so a reasonable level of fitness is all that is needed.

Daruma Eco-farm sits at Bang Phra, in Chonburi, about an hour from Bangkok’s airport, which makes it an easy arrival for students coming from abroad. It is a thriving permaculture campus rather than a classroom, home to food forests, rice paddies, chinampas, aquaculture ponds and natural buildings, and its facilities include a natural pool, a sauna, a FarmLab, a Learning Resource Centre and a library of more than eight hundred titles, so the ideas the course teaches are demonstrated everywhere you look. The course is led by Neil Willmann, the founder of Daruma and one of Thailand’s most experienced permaculture educators, who has taught permaculture design since 2007 and guided more than eight hundred graduates from over thirty-six countries. He holds a verified teaching profile on the Permaculture Global Network, and the campus he has built with his wife Su gives the course a living example of the systems it sets out to explain.

Accommodation and meals are included in the course, with three meals a day prepared by the farm’s own chef from fresh local produce and food grown on the site, and vegetarian and vegan diets are catered for with advance notice. The campus rate starts at 18,000 baht and covers the course, all meals and a place in a shared dorm room for up to four people or a space to pitch a tent. For those who would prefer more privacy, rooms in a Thai house near the Bang Phra reservoir are offered at 28,000 baht for a twin or double and 34,000 baht for a private room, subject to availability. To join one of the 2026 intakes, send an enquiry through the form on the Daruma course page.