A Few Keyline Resources

I have been lax in my posts. My intention has been to post each week on a Tuesday but I have been working very long days on the farm and getting little time for writing.

So, excuses aside, I have decided to make a less-than-substantial post which points to some resources I have recently created on the back of other people’s generosity.

Next week, I am going to be attending to course on regenerative agriculture with Darren Doherty. As far as I can tell, the course follows essentially the Keyline Scale of Permanance. Some of the key texts in the ‘recommended reading’ list are three which Steve Soloman of the fantastic Soil and Health Library has made available with the permission of Alan Yeomans — one of the sons of the indomitable Percival Alfred Yeomans, the author of these three works.

I wanted to be able to read these books on my e-reader, so using ‘wget’, a GNU / Linux command line tool, I downloaded the full illustrated HTML and, using Calibre, an open source e-book manager, I converted the texts to .epub format, a free and open standard for e-books.

Just in case anyone else finds illustrated HTML as frustrating as I do, I am making the .epub versions of the books available here:

• The City Forest
• The Keyline Plan
• The Challenge of Landscape

Thanks again to Alan Yeomans for giving permission for the Soil and Health Library to host these important works. If you appreciate them, why not buy a hardcopy of Yeomans’ classic work “Water for Every Farm” to show your gratitude.

If you’re interested in the idea that free e-books could improve sales of hardcopy books, check out Cory Doctorow’s book ‘Content’, available as a free e-book or audio book on his site craphound.com.