About Us

The Apios Institute builds communities of amateur and professional practitioners to research and demonstrate agricultural ecosystems modeled on the structure, function, and dynamics of temperate climate forests. We work with and educate gardeners, farmers, students, professors, designers, policy-makers, and the general public to develop these humanatural ecosystems. (more)

Board of Directors

	Jonathan Bates - President With a Masters Degree from the Institute for Social Ecology, Jonathan has been thinking and teaching ecologically since 1999. He’s been creating farms and gardens in the CT River Valley for the last ten years, and is a co-designer and inhabitant of an edible forest garden in Holyoke, MA, were he started Food Forest Farm.
	Ethan C. Roland - Treasurer Ethan is a permaculture designer, teacher, and researcher practicing regenerative design from New York to Azerbaijan and beyond. He holds a M.Sc. in Collaborative Eco-social Design from Gaia University, and builds resilience for local and global communities through the ecological design firm AppleSeed Permaculture
	Eric Toensmeier - Secretary Socially engaged plant geek Eric Toensmeier is the farm manager at Nuestras Raice's Tierra de Opportunidades, the coauthor of Edible Forest Gardens and author of Perennial Vegetables. Eric brings his encyclopedic plant knowledge and a deep enthusiasm for extensive explorations of all things edible.

We envision an integrated system of diverse collaborators undertaking action research, cooperative plant breeding, and participatory education using a distributed network of research and demonstration sites in various regions within the world’s temperate forest biomes. We focus initially on small-scale systems for local production of food, fuel, fiber, fodder, fertilizer, farmaceuticals, and fun for urban, suburban, and rural environments, but we also address small-farm systems and support work at larger scales.

This mostly self-supporting network functionally interconnects universities, NGOs, individuals, and businesses for resource-sharing and mutual benefit, with maximum cooperation and minimal competition. We seek to embody in our organization’s social systems the same principles and practices that maximize the health and productivity of the humanatural agroecosystems we create. We endow our organization and ecological systems with natural and human capital in patterns designed to increase in richness, abundance, diversity, and complexity over many centuries and generations.