I’ve just spent half an hour perusing the Annual Monitoring Report for Tir y Gafel Ecovillage (aka Lammas).

I don’t imagine this would float a lot of boats, but as I expected it’s striking just how low their outgoings are. Here’s the annual figures for what I’m assuming must be the two single person households on site (given that they’re a lot lower than the other households).

	Plot C			Plot F
	Cost of need	Met from land		Cost of need	Met from land
domestic wood use	£650.00	£650.00		£300.00	£245.00
domstic gas use	£108.00	£0.00		£90.00	£0.00
domestic electricity use	£1,291.00	£1,291.00		£1,168.00	£1,110.00
Water	£506.00	£506.00		£385.00	£385.00
Food	£3,466.00	£700.00		£1,800.00	£642.00
Phone	£156.00	£0.00		£350.00	£0.00
clothes	£0.00	£0.00		£40.00	£0.00
maintenance	£0.00	£0.00		£35.00	£0.00
council tax	£0.00	£0.00		£0.00	£0.00
transport	£1,000.00	£0.00		£1,000.00	£0.00
Expenditure met from land*		£3,147.00			£2,382.00
£ from land based enterprises		£1,700.00			£1,740.00
Totals	£7,177.00	£4,847.00		£5,168.00	£4,122.00
Further monies required to break even	£2,330.00			£1,406.00

*before income from land based enterprises is taken into account 

After housing costs (which are not included above) we have two annual expenditure figures of £7K and £5K, with THE single largest expenditure item being on food, which here includes alcohol and munchies (which is odd given that food growing is one of the key things Lammas seems to do.)

Expenditure is clearly kept incredibly low by virtue of electricity being generated on site through burning wood and use of other renewable sources and transport being minimal due to mainly working on site, as well as the fact that above two people must live in caravans given the zero figure for council tax.

There are items which are not included in the above table, but no matter, what this data strongly suggests is that once you’ve got your mortgage paid off you can get by on £5-7K in a year as a base income, and this comes down to £2-3 K a year if you can get your own electricity generated on site.

A final advantage shown by this example is that it is clearly possible to generate some (albeit limited) money from rural enterprise.

I’m actually staggered by the above figures. I mean, I always knew low-impact living significantly reduced dependence on money, but this has surprised me… £2-3K a year is really a startling figure, actually £5-7K a year is pretty good.

At some point I’ll add in how this compares to my own expenditure and insane (consumerism as usual expenditure).

The question in the meantime is simply one of how can I get a piece of this action and how soon, just without the community bit, in which case apparently it’s not really Permaculture, but then again I’m sure the definition’s open for debate (at least as long as you don’t want to formally use it to engage in the Permaculture Pyramid selling scheme.)