Apios Institute:

Regenerative Perennial Agriculture For Temperate Forest Ecosystems

The Apios Institute builds communities of amateur and professional practitioners to research and demonstrate agricultural ecosystems modeled on the structure, function, and dynamics of temperate climate forests. We work with and educate gardeners, farmers, students, professors, designers, policy-makers, and the general public to develop these humanatural ecosystems.

We envision an integrated system of diverse collaborators undertaking action research, cooperative plant breeding, and participatory education using a distributed network of research and demonstration sites in various regions within the world’s temperate forest biomes.  We focus initially on small-scale systems for local production of food, fuel, fiber, fodder, fertilizer, farmaceuticals, and fun for urban, suburban, and rural environments, but we also address small-farm systems and support work at larger scales.

This mostly self-supporting network functionally interconnects universities, NGOs, individuals, and businesses for resource-sharing and mutual benefit, with maximum cooperation and minimal competition.  We seek to embody in our organization’s social systems the same principles and practices that maximize the health and productivity of the humanatural agroecosystems we create.  We endow our organization and ecological systems with natural and human capital in patterns designed to increase in richness, abundance, diversity, and complexity over many centuries and generations.