Permaculture Design Courses (PDC) in Thailand

What is a permaculture design course?

A Permaculture Design Course, nearly always shortened to PDC, is the foundation course of the worldwide permaculture movement. Across a minimum of 72 hours of teaching it covers the ethics, principles and design methods of permaculture, then asks you to prove what you have learned by producing a real design. Graduates receive the Permaculture Design Certificate, the shared qualification held by permaculture teachers, designers and farm projects around the world.

The name trips people up, so it is worth saying clearly: this is a design course. You will spend plenty of time in gardens and fields, but the purpose is to learn how to read a piece of land and the people who depend on it, and to bring the two together in a workable plan. Rosemary Morrow, an Australian educator who has taught PDCs for more than 26 years in Australia and many other countries, puts it plainly in her handbook for course teachers:

“The PDC is not a boot camp of techniques. It provides principles for approaching global and local problems.”

The hands-on skills courses, the natural building and composting and earthworks, come alongside or after. The PDC teaches the thinking that connects them.

And if you are new to the word itself: permaculture is the conscious design of landscapes and human settlements that work the way natural ecosystems work, providing food, water, energy and shelter while rebuilding the living systems underneath. That one idea, and how to apply it anywhere, is what the course exists to pass on.

Where the PDC comes from

Permaculture began in Tasmania in the mid-1970s as a collaboration between two people. Bill Mollison had spent his early life fishing and working in the bush before becoming a wildlife scientist and university lecturer, and had watched the ecosystems of his childhood collapse around him. David Holmgren was a young environmental design student who met Mollison in Hobart in 1974. Out of their conversations came the word permaculture and, in 1978, the book Permaculture One.

Mollison resigned his university position in 1979 to teach permaculture full time and founded the Permaculture Institute. In January 1981 the first 26 students graduated from an intensive lecture series, and the course was born. A shared curriculum was codified in 1984, and when Mollison published Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual in 1988, it became the textbook the course is still built on. He told the story himself in the preface to a later book:

“After designing numerous properties with good results and conducting courses, I realised the most intelligent way to achieve my goals, of exponential growth of education of these strategies, was to create a curriculum. This curriculum is the book PERMACULTURE: A Designers’ Manual, and is presented in the seventy two hour Permaculture Design Certificate Course (PDC).”

The plan worked better than anyone expected. By the time the Designers’ Manual appeared, thousands of people had already been through design courses, workshops and seminars, forming a loose global network with no central structure. Graduates taught courses of their own, their students taught more, and the PDC carried permaculture to every inhabited continent. Holmgren later described the course as acting as “a social glue bonding participants to such an extent that the worldwide network could be described as a social movement.”

The 72-hour PDC curriculum: what the course covers

A shared 72-hour foundation

The number you will meet everywhere is 72 hours. National curriculum documents agree on it. The Permaculture Association in Britain requires “a 72 hours minimum contact time between teacher and student to be awarded this certificate”, and the Permaculture Institute of North America publishes its outline for what it calls the standard 72-hour Permaculture Design Course. In practice that usually means around two weeks of full-time residential teaching, or a longer run of weekends, and some schools now teach the course online. The hours are a minimum, and honest teachers say openly that 72 hours can introduce each topic but never exhaust it.

What fills those hours is remarkably consistent from school to school, because most curricula descend from the Designers’ Manual. A full PDC can be expected to cover:

• The ethics: earth care, people care, fair share
• Design principles, including David Holmgren’s twelve
• Ecology and patterns: how living systems behave
• Reading land: maps, sector analysis and site analysis
• Water in the landscape, from harvesting rain to aquaculture
• Soils and how to rebuild them
• Trees, forests and food forests
• Climate and microclimate, designing for your climate zone
• Zoning: placing every element, from the kitchen door outwards
• The built environment and appropriate technology
• The “invisible structures”: community, economics and access to land
• A final design project, usually done as a group and presented at the end of the course

The final design project

That last item is the heart of the course. The certificate is not awarded for sitting through lectures. PINA’s curriculum, for instance, assesses students on “full attendance of the 72-hour program, including completion and presentation of the group-based design project”. In the closing days of most courses you and a small team take a real site, often for a real client, and carry a design all the way from survey to presentation.

What the permaculture design certificate means (and what it does not)

A recognised foundation

Complete the course and the design work and you hold a Permaculture Design Certificate. When people talk about permaculture certification, this is the credential they mean, and inside the movement it carries real weight. By long tradition it is the qualification that lets you call your work permaculture, take on design projects, and eventually teach, and it is the entry requirement for nearly everything that comes after: the diploma, teacher training and advanced design courses.

Not a professional licence

It is just as important to understand what the certificate is not. There is no single central accreditor of PDCs anywhere in the world. Certificates are issued by the school or teacher who runs each course, following a shared international curriculum, and the different national networks each add their own expectations on top. The PDC is a foundation, the movement’s common starting line, not a professional licence in the legal sense. Morrow frames the course as exactly that kind of beginning, writing that with the PDC, graduates “can become good permaculturists and more effective designers.”

After the PDC: diploma, teacher training and further study

Diploma and applied work

For designers, the traditional next step is the Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design. The pattern was set early: at the first international permaculture conference in 1984, around fifty diplomas were awarded to graduates who had completed two years of applied work after their design course. The shape is much the same today. You take the PDC, spend roughly two years designing, building, teaching or organising, document the work, and present it. Requirements differ between countries and institutes, so check with the body you would register with.

Teacher training

For future teachers there is permaculture teacher training. Morrow’s book Permaculture: Teaching Matters is the handbook of a six-day training for PDC graduates who want to teach the course themselves, built around practice teaching and co-teaching with experienced mentors. Many teachers begin exactly that way, delivering sessions on someone else’s PDC before leading their own.

University and online study

The course has also reached the universities. Andrew Millison, who has taught permaculture at Oregon State University since 2009, runs the PDC there as a for-credit course, on campus and in a ten-week online format, a long way from the original farm intensive. His advice on picking between all these paths is worth keeping: “Remember you don’t DO permaculture, you USE permaculture in what you do.” Choose the course that fits what you intend to do with it.

Why take your PDC in Thailand?

Thailand has quietly become one of the tropics’ established homes for permaculture teaching. Thai farms and institutes appear by name in Millison’s worldwide directory of permaculture centres, from Sahainan in Nan province to the Permaculture Institute Thailand, the Panya Project and the Phayao Permaculture Center. Courses here are usually residential, taught on working farms where the food forest is not a diagram but the shade you study under, at full tropical height. You learn zoning while living inside a zoned farm, and in the wet season you watch the water design of the site actually working.

The residential format is part of the point. Holmgren observed that the design course, “especially in its two-week residential format”, has been “particularly effective in galvanising fundamental change and new focus in the lives of participants”. Two weeks of living, eating and designing alongside your course mates does something a lecture hall cannot. Whether you are searching for a permaculture course near Chiang Mai or anywhere else in the kingdom, the listing at the top of this page shows every upcoming PDC we know about, with teachers working in English, Thai or both.

How to choose a PDC (and where we stand)

Our policy on this page is simple. We list every permaculture design course in Thailand that we know about, and we leave the comparing to you. The shared curriculum gives every course the same backbone, but the international curriculum documents deliberately leave teachers free to adapt. The British association’s core curriculum, for example, notes that courses “will almost certainly include other subjects” and may be shaped to a place, a group of people or the teachers’ own expertise. That freedom is one of the reasons the PDC has thrived on every continent. It also means no two courses are identical, and we do not inspect, accredit or vouch for what any individual venue teaches.

Questions to ask before you book

• Ask for the course outline and set it against the core topics listed above, and against the 72-hour benchmark
• Ask who is teaching, and how many courses they have taught
• Check the language of instruction: English, Thai or bilingual
• Ask whether there is a final design project and how it is assessed
• Read what past students say, and talk to one if you can

A good organiser will be glad you asked.