About us
Kasamatsu Farms is a family-run farm by Byron and Kaori, practicing permaculture, regenerative agriculture, traditional and natural building, and a free range poultry.
We both originally worked in Tokyo in corporate jobs, but after the Tohoku earthquake in March 2011, decided to try to start a more resilient and environmentally conscious and sustainable lifestyle by starting an organic farm based on permaculture principles and regenerative agriculture, after both of us obtained Permaculture Design certificates from the Permaculture Center in Japan. It has not always been an easy journey, shifting from our previously programmed high consumption consumer lifestyles to learning to become a producer of all sorts that get affected by weather and nature. Through trial and error, and after 11 years of being out here, we do now truly feel that being in tune with nature it has helped us discover that mankind already had SO many practices that were environmentally respectful and sound, and some of these things can be implemented today if we can learn to let go of some level of modern-day convenience, and re-learn for the sake of attaining the long-term goal of a healthy planet.
From 2015- 2016, we also self-renovated an 150 year old old silk worm production farmhouse on the border of Kanagawa and Yamanashi by upcycling old tatami mats for insulation, crafting our own lampshades from locally grown vines, recycling old boards that were used in the renovation process into a beautiful dining room table, and old sliding doors have been installed with colorful traditional washi paper.
We named it Yokomura Eco-lodge , incorporating the old "yago" (trade/store name) out of respect to Japanese tradition, which was commonly used in these regions to distinguish one house from another.
We have also built multiple movable chicken coops, permanent earthen wall chicken coop, a custom-scale greenhouse with a ventilation and irrigation system, a super insulated off-grid tiny office collecting gray water, off-grid volunteer facility with a kitchen /compost toilet/ wood fired showers, running on solar energy with multiple solar panels.
We have also been building an environmentally low-impact and passive solar house from scratch for the past couple of years, cutting down trees from the forest and charring the walls with yakisugi techniques, doing earthen plastering, chipping much of the beams by hand, etc.
There are also VICE Asia video from 2020 and Echo tools videos that can give you a glimpse of the process that we went through.
VICE Asia: https://youtu.be/csBr5pO_Gfk
ECHO Homestead, parts 1~3: https://youtu.be/4rB1iAkcLn0
Official FB + Instagram pages
- Byron and Kaori Nagy
