Patrick Whitefield is a British permaculture

Permaculture

Permaculture is an approach to designing human settlements and agricultural systems that is modeled on the relationships found in nature. It is based on the ecology of how things interrelate rather than on the strictly biological concerns that form the foundation of modern agriculture...

 teacher, designer, and consulting editor for Permaculture Magazine. He is the author of Permaculture in a Nutshell (1993), How to Make a Forest Garden (2002), The Earth Care Manual (2004), and The Living Landscape, How to Read it and Understand it (2010). He has been an influential British exponent of the permaculture system since 1990, and has been interviewed in several television programmes advocating it, including the BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

's It's Not Easy Being Green

It's Not Easy Being Green

It's Not Easy Being Green is a television series on BBC Two starring Dick Strawbridge and focusing on how to live an environmentally friendly, low impact life...

(2006) and A Farm for the Future (2008).

Whitefield grew up on a smallholding in Somerset

Somerset

The ceremonial and non-metropolitan county of Somerset in South West England borders Bristol and Gloucestershire to the north, Wiltshire to the east, Dorset to the south-east, and Devon to the south-west. It is partly bounded to the north and west by the Bristol Channel and the estuary of the...

 and qualified in agriculture at Shuttleworth College in Bedfordshire. He has experience of farming in Britain, the Middle East and Africa, and has been involved in organic gardening, nature conservation, country crafts and green politics. He offers various permaculture courses at Ragmans Lane Farm, Gloucestershire.