Tropical Permaculture Online Course


A step-by-step guide to design a food forest, vegetable gardens, and create a sustainable homestead in the tropics. Whether you're just starting out or refining your land, this course offers the tools, strategies, and real-world experience to help you thrive.

 

Join the Course

Tropical Permaculture Online Course


A step-by-step guide to design a food forest, vegetable gardens, and create a sustainable homestead in the tropics. Whether you're just starting out or refining your land, this course offers the tools, strategies, and real-world experience to help you thrive.

 

Join the Course
 

What You Can Achieve

  • Design your living ecosystem - with food forests, roots, grains, beans, and vegetable gardens and create a green home powered by rainwater, energy, and waste recycling systems.

  • Grow your own supermarket at home - raise chickens for eggs, care for honey bees, and master 50+ recipes, from balanced farm-to-table meals to pantry staples like flour, chocolate, vinegar, oil, and ferments.

  • Grow over $10,000 worth of food yearly - or thousands from just 100m².
    That’s using local supermarket prices - the real value of homegrown organic is much higher.

  • Feed a family of two+ from just 2,000m² (½ acre) or adapt our plan to a smaller garden or community space.

  • Maintain your homestead with just 4 hours of work per week - using regenerative, low-effort methods.

  • Get the proven system that has trained over 1,000 students worldwide - now available online!

 

Who This Course Is For

  • Anyone interested in growing food in the tropics - from backyard beginners to serious growers.

  • Food forest enthusiasts & gardeners who want food systems that thrive in tropical climates.

  • Homesteaders and landowners - ready to turn their land into productive, low-maintenance abundance.

  • Permaculture designers — looking to sharpen their tropical design skills and tools.

  • Community leaders and organizers - bringing food security and resilience to their regions.

  • Sustainability consultants - adding tropical, real-world solutions to their practice.

  

Gain the skills and tools to transform your life from consumer to producer!

Join the Course

What Makes This Course Different

More than a Gardening Course - The Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency in the Tropics

  • Built to guide you at every stage - from your first garden bed to a thriving long-term homestead

  • Field-tested over 15+ years on real tropical land

  • Designed for the tropics - humid, wet/dry, and savanna zones

  • Filmed on Finca Tierra’s off-grid homestead - real soil, real systems, real results

  • Custom tools + bonus modules - nutrition charts, garden templates, planning tools, animal care, natural pool & solar dehydrator building, and more

  • Teaches to grow and cook a balanced diet - proteins, fats, carbs, greens, and fruits (not just vegetables), 50+ recipes

  • Builds real integration - food, water, energy, and waste cycles in harmony

  • Continuously evolving - with updates and new tools over time

  • Join a global tropical community - exchange tips, seeds, resources, and region-specific advice with others

Hear What Our Students Are Saying

All You Need to Live Sustainably in the Tropics

"I took the Permaculture Design Course with Ana and Ian in 2018, and it completely changed my life. I ended up moving to Costa Rica because of it!

Now, their online course is the most comprehensive guide out there. If you know Ana and Ian, you know they’re total nerds about this stuff—in the best way.

They’ve spent 15 years researching how to live sustainably in the tropics: from building your home and growing your food to natural energy systems and even a natural swimming pool. If you dream of living sustainably in the tropics, this course really has it all.”  

Elizabeth Couse

Designing and Building My Off-Grid Home and Food Forest

“I attended the on-site Permaculture Design Course and recently signed up for the Online Course. I'm so glad I did both!

The on-site course was life-changing and the online course has been invaluable as I design and build my off-grid home and food forest. It’s perfect for beginners, but also great for going deeper or revisiting details, as I start from scratch on my land.

The community forum has been incredibly helpful for niche questions. I highly recommend it for both novices and experienced growers!”

— Sky d’Almeida

From Planning the Garden to Cooking What You Harvest

“I absolutely love Finca Tierra’s Online Permaculture Course. It’s detailed and gives you everything you need to start your tropical garden and live a self-sustained life.

What stood out to me were the amazing garden templates and how the course goes from planning to planting each crop—even to cooking delicious meals.

The videos are excellent, showing everything in detail. You can feel Ana & Ian’s incredible knowledge throughout.”

— Lea Imboden 

A Practical Model for Growing Food and Strengthening Local Economies in the Tropics

“As an organic farmer and environmental economist, Finca Tierra’s course stands out as a practical, hands-on manual for growing food in the tropics.

But it’s not just about growing food, it’s about designing a resilient, self-sufficient system that supports you and your community.

This course offers a replicable model that can strengthen your economy, local food systems, and resilience, not only in Costa Rica, but across the tropics.”

 Irene Burgues

What's Inside the Course? 

Example tropical garden with crop and nutrient chart for self-sufficiency
Tropical permaculture layout being explained on a map for homestead planning.
Woman harvesting fruit in a thriving tropical food forest.
Woman standing in a lush tropical mini farm surrounded by vegetables and staple crops.
Sustainable bamboo kitchen designed for off-grid tropical living with solar and rainwater systems.
Adlay grain as an example of easy-to-grow tropical crops featured in the course.
Assortment of nutrient-rich tropical foods made from garden harvests in a permaculture kitchen.

Meet Your Instructors

Ana Gaspar in the tropical garden, co-founder of Finca Tierra and leader in bioregional sustainability.

Ana Gaspar A.

Costa Rican human rights lawyer specializing in Indigenous rights, environmental advocate, community organizer, co-founder of Finca Tierra, and founder of the BioRegional Plan for Talamanca. She is passionate about integrating sustainability and food sovereignty into law, politics, economics, and education, transforming bioregional and national systems to serve people and the planet while empowering local cultural identities. At Finca Tierra, she’s the heart behind the Wellness Kitchen — leading nutrition and diet design research, transforming harvests into farm-to-table recipes for vibrant health.

Ian Macaulay at Finca Tierra, focused on hands-on composting and sustainable systems design.

Ian Macaulay

American artist, permaculture designer, and consultant with over 15 years of experience in tropical homesteading. He is the co-founder of Finca Tierra, where he teaches practical systems for food forests, mini-farms, and off-grid living, and also co-founder of SEED Ecovillage. At Finca Tierra, he leads hands-on research and design, constantly experimenting to develop low-cost, efficient, and modern systems for sustainable living. Ian is especially focused on creating regenerative food systems that support the family nucleus — yet are fully scalable to serve communities and bioregions.

Tropical Permaculture Online Course

$599

$999

  • 170+ expert-led lessons, videos, and downloadable resources
  • Step-by-step system to design your food forest, garden, and complete diet
  • Proven tools for land design, soil regeneration, diet planning, and off-grid living
  • Lifetime access + private community with expert feedback
Bonus Modules:
  • The Wellness Kitchen — stock your pantry and 50+ farm-to-table recipes 
  • Bees & Chickens – conscious management for homesteads
  • Natural Pool – off-grid swimming + water storage design
  • Solar Dehydrator – build your own, and more!

Offer valid for next 50 students.  Join Risk-Free Money-Back Guarantee.

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7-Day Money-Back Guarantee — Join Risk-Free

We’ve poured years of tropical permaculture experience into this course, and we’re confident it will transform how you grow food and design your life. If you don’t feel 100% excited and empowered within the first 7 days, just email us — we’ll refund your full purchase.

Turn Your Land into a Living System- Fast Track Productivity

Join the Tropical Permaculture Online Course to build your food forest, regenerative systems, and grow food, resilience, and abundance in the tropics.

Join the Course

Our Journey to Self-Sufficiency 

In 2008, we began our journey into permaculture, initially inspired by the idea of building an energy-efficient home and growing our food. We wanted to eliminate rent, electricity, and water bills and produce a food forest to replace our grocery expenses. Ultimately, we envisioned creating something beautiful, low-maintenance, and cost-effective that would give us the freedom to share time with our loved ones and enjoy life—a system that would transform us from consumers to producers to heal our lives while helping to regenerate the planet.

Eventually, we founded the Finca Tierra Permaculture Education Center, where we still teach our immersive, hands-on two-week Permaculture Design Certificate Course (PDC).  More than 1,000 students from around the world have since joined us to gain real-world experience in sustainability. Along the way, we’ve also launched and supported community projects that help others reconnect with land, health, and self-reliance.

For 15 years, we’ve dedicated our lives to experimenting, documenting, and refining this system, always focused on sustainability and economics. We aimed to be as self-sufficient as possible, minimizing off-site inputs and maximizing the dollar-per-hour value of our work.

After many years of living off-grid, we achieved a super efficient, productive ecosystem with a green homestead, food forest, and gardens that produce a complete diet. And we want to share it with everyone interested in becoming self-sufficient in the tropics!

In this course, we’ve documented everything you need to make it easy to replicate. It’s the transformative step-by-step guide we wish we had when we started!

If you live in the tropics and want to build resilience, reduce your grocery costs, or create an economically and environmentally sustainable lifestyle, this course is for you. Whether you're seeking to create a garden that produces literal tons of food in a few hours a week, hoping to build resilience against economic issues or job loss, or enjoy the satisfaction of gardening and connecting with nature, this course offers a blueprint for success.

Transform your relationship with nature and the land—join us and fast-track your journey toward a more efficient, resilient, and sustainable life!

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