Austrian · b. 1942
Sepp Holzer (born Josef Holzer in 1942) is an Austrian farmer, author and consultant on natural agriculture, born on the Krameterhof, his family's mountain farm near Ramingstein in the Lungau district of Salzburg. He took over the farm in 1962 and over the following decades turned its steep slopes, between roughly 1,100 and 1,500 metres, into a patchwork of terraces, ponds, orchards and mixed plantings that produce fruit and vegetables rarely grown at that altitude. His refusal to follow conventional practice, including declining to prune his fruit trees, brought fines and clashes with the authorities, and the biologist Bernd Lötsch dubbed him 'the agricultural rebel'. Holzer's methods, including raised beds built over buried wood, water-retention landscapes and the use of animals to work the land, became influential in the international permaculture movement through his books, among them Sepp Holzer's Permaculture and Desert or Paradise, his seminars and documentary films. He has advised land-restoration projects in many countries.