"A Permaculturist is someone with a fierce determination to create the conditions for beauty everyday"   - James Reed, co-owner Onsen Farm

Visitors and students at Onsen Farm will experience the healing properties of the magical natural environment and pristine spring waters. Onsen Farm's mission is simple - to create a permaculture-based way of living using sustainable practices to raise healthy food for vibrant people. By example and active educational opportunities, the farm will increase visitors' awareness of sustainability and their connection to the natural world. The facilities and grounds aspire to set the highest standards for healthy and sustainable living. Onsen Farm seeks to support appropriate ecological farming and sustainable local food systems.

A VISION

If we will have the wisdom to survive, to stand like slow growing trees on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it, If we will make our seasons welcome here, asking not too much of earth or heaven, Then a long time after we are dead the lives our lives prepare will live here, their houses strongly placed upon the valley sides, fields and gardens rich in the windows.  The river will run clear as we will never know it, and over it, birdsong like a canopy.

On the levels of the hills will be green meadows, stock bells to noon shade.  On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down the old forest, an old forest will stand, its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.

The veins of forgotten springs will have opened. Families will be singing in the fields.  In their voices they will hear a music risen out of the ground. They will take nothing from the ground they will not return, whatever the grief at parting.

Memory, native to this valley, will spread over it like a grove, and memory will grow into legend, legend into song, song into sacrament.

The abundance of this place, the songs of its people and its birds, will be health and wisdom and indwelling light.

This is not paradisal dream.

Its hardship is its possibility

Wendell Berry