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.
Buy Course - $297
What You Can Achieve
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Anyone interested in growing food in the tropics — from backyard beginners to serious growers.
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Food forest enthusiasts & gardeners — who want food systems that thrive in tropical climates.
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Homesteaders and landowners — ready to turn their land into productive, low-maintenance abundance.
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Permaculture designers — looking to sharpen their tropical design skills and tools.
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Community leaders and organizers — bringing food security and resilience to their regions.
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Sustainability consultants — adding tropical, real-world solutions to their practice.
Gain the skills and tools to transform your life from consumer to producer!
What Makes This Course Different
More than a Gardening Course — The Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency in the Tropics
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Built to guide you at every stage — from your first garden bed to a thriving long-term homestead
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Field-tested over 15+ years on real tropical land
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Designed for the tropics — humid, wet/dry, and savanna zones
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Filmed on Finca Tierra’s off-grid homestead — real soil, real systems, real results
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Custom tools + bonus modules — nutrition charts, garden templates, planning tools, animal care, natural pool & solar dehydrator building, and more
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Teaches to grow and cook a balanced diet — proteins, fats, carbs, greens, and fruits (not just vegetables), 50+ recipes
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Builds real integration — food, water, energy, and waste cycles in harmony
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Continuously evolving — with updates and new tools over time
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Join a global tropical community — exchange tips, seeds, resources, and region-specific advice with others
Hear What Our Students Are Saying
Harvesting My Own Food Faster Than I Ever Dreamed
"Thanks to this online course, I'm already harvesting baskets of food every week. It happened way faster than I ever dreamed!
The nutrition charts, the clear templates and step-by-step videos made building my tropical homestead not just possible, but simple and exciting! "
— Isabella R.
The Garden Plan That Let Me Grow My Own Diet
"I finally found a tropical permaculture course that shows exactly what to plant to live off the land—nutrients and all. The garden templates, crop guides, and step-by-step videos made building my tropical homestead feel totally doable. Now I’m growing real food for a real diet—and the recipes even show how to cook it all! You can feel Ana & Ian’s deep knowledge in every part of the course."
— Sky D.
This Course Paid for Itself and Then Some
"The Tropical Permaculture Course saved me from thousands of dollars in mistakes, and probably years of trial and error.
Their real-world system made growing abundant food easy, efficient, and fun.
Every step felt clear and achievable. I finally feel confident."
— Mateo V.
What's Inside the Course?
Diet Design — Create a complete, nutrient-rich diet using easy-to-grow tropical staples.
Example Garden with Crop Area & Nutrient Charts — Plan your self-sufficient mini-farm on 2,000m² - or adapt it to any space.
Permaculture Design — Design a thriving, low-maintenance tropical homestead from the ground up.
Food Forest — Mimic natural ecosystems to produce abundant food with minimal effort
Mini Farm — Grow grains, tubers, vegetables, beans, honey, and eggs — naturally and sustainably.
Homestead Infrastructure — Solar energy, rainwater systems, nutrient cycling, cooking, and more.
Crop Profiles — Master 60+ essential tropical crops — how to grow, harvest, and use them with confidence.
Wellness Kitchen — Turn your harvest into powerful meals, flours, oils, preserves, and more.
Meet Your Instructors
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 M. 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.
Learn to Grow Food, Design a Food Forest, and Live Sustainably
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.
Our Journey to Self-Sufficiency
Like so many others, we dreamed of something more...
To help our planet, to grow our own food, live free from bills, and build a truly sustainable life rooted in freedom and simplicity. To be truly independent — living off our land in comfort and abundance, without fear of money troubles or dependence on collapsing outside systems. And most of all, we wanted time! To spend with our loved ones, for personal growth, and to truly enjoy life and nature!
In 2008, we began living that dream—and eventually founded the Finca Tierra Permaculture Education Center, where we still teach our immersive, hands-on two-week Permaculture Design Certificate Course (PDC) on our working tropical farm. 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.
During the pandemic, our local community urgently needed support, and we realized this knowledge could serve not just our neighbors, but anyone across the tropics. That’s when we decided to create the Tropical Permaculture Online Course — a complete, step-by-step tropical permaculture course for living an abundant and self-sufficient life.
Today, we can live sustainably, surrounded by food forests and gardens, with the time to enjoy life on our terms.
We created this course to make that lifestyle easier, more accessible, and truly abundant for anyone in the tropics.
It’s everything we wish we had when we started and couldn’t find— and now, it’s yours.
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