Sepp Holzer

Who is Sepp Holzer?

Sepp Holzer is a farmer who taught a mountain to hold water. On the Krameterhof, his family's farm in the Lungau region of Salzburg, he spent more than four decades turning a steep slope between about 1,100 and 1,500 metres into a landscape of ponds, terraces, fruit trees and mixed plantings. In a harsh mountain climate he grew fruit, vegetables and grain and raised fish, in a system that fitted the slope rather than fighting it.

He did not arrive at this through theory. He learned by watching, trying and correcting, season after season, and only later found that others had a name for what he was doing: permaculture.

His path

Josef "Sepp" Holzer was born on 24 July 1942 in Ramingstein, the youngest of three brothers in a mountain farming family. Besides farm school he trained in fruit tree care, and later also in blasting and in fish farming, skills that would all find their place on the Krameterhof. In 1962, at the age of nineteen, he took over his parents' farm. In his own words he then began to build ponds, terraces and seedling nurseries, step by step and often against the advice of his time.

For decades he followed his own path. The farm grew to about 45 hectares. In 1995 students and professors from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna visited the Krameterhof and called it an example of permaculture. Holzer then read the works of Bill Mollison and David Holmgren and decided to develop the farm consciously along those lines. In 2009 he handed the Krameterhof to his son Josef Andreas Holzer, who carries the work forward.

The idea

At the heart of Holzer's work is water. He sees ponds and wet areas not as wasted farmland but as the engine of a landscape: they hold rain and meltwater on the land, store warmth, create sheltered microclimates and give life to fish, amphibians, insects and plants. Around them he shapes terraces with planted embankments that slow down water and soil on the slope and create level, usable ground.

On these terraces grow mixed plantings in which fruit trees, shrubs, vegetables and herbs support one another. Raised beds built over wood and plant material, known today as hugelkultur, store moisture and nutrients. The aim is a farm that largely looks after itself because every element has its place and its task.

Out of this practice grew the approach now known as the water retention landscape: a landscape shaped so that the rain stays where it falls, with retention ponds, terraces and permanent plant cover working together.

The work

The Krameterhof itself is his main work, a living example that has been visited by people from many countries. Holzer passed on what he learned in books: Der Agrar-Rebell (2002), Sepp Holzers Permakultur (2004), his best-known book and later also published in English, and Wüste oder Paradies, which appeared in English in 2012 as Desert or Paradise and is devoted to restoring damaged landscapes with water. The filmmaker Bertram Verhaag portrayed him in the documentary Der Agrar-Rebell.

Over the years he advised projects far beyond Austria; according to his publisher he has worked on nearly 200 of them worldwide. The best known in southern Europe is Tamera in the Portuguese Alentejo, where a water retention landscape of lakes and retention spaces has grown since the mid-2000s. According to Tamera, the first lake there, built in 2007, goes back to his proposal.

What became of it

Holzer's work showed many people that even harsh, steep land can be made fertile if water is given time and space. The water retention landscape, which he shaped like no one else, is today discussed and tried out from the Alps to the dry regions of southern Europe, and Tamera's case study on the European Environment Agency's Climate-ADAPT platform has made the approach known in the debate on adapting to drought. On the Krameterhof, a new generation continues what he began.

What we learn from Sepp Holzer

From Sepp Holzer we learn that water comes first. Sa Medada is a steep slope in Sardinia with long dry summers, the opposite of an Alpine farm in climate, and yet the question is the same: how can the rain that falls in winter be kept in the land? Holzer's answer, to slow water down, store it and spread it, is the direction in which we think.

We also learn from his way of working: observe closely, try things on a small scale, accept mistakes and correct them. Holzer trusted what the land showed him more than what was written about it. That is an attitude we want to keep alive in Project Eden.