再生 · Regenerative by design
Abundance from abundance
Kopi-Us is a play on “copious.” The name is the thesis: where a system is overflowing with something, a good design turns that overflow into a yield. We run on regenerative agriculture and permaculture design principles.
The framework
Twelve permaculture principles
These twelve principles shape how permaculture designers read landscapes, make decisions, and build systems that become more alive over time.
Observe & Interact
Before acting, watch the land, water, sunlight, and life already present. Good design begins with patient attention.
Catch & Store Energy
Capture resources when they are abundant and make them available when they are needed. Biomass, water, and nutrients all count.
Obtain a Yield
A system that gives nothing back cannot be sustained. A useful yield makes regeneration practical.
Self-Regulate & Accept Feedback
Every action sends information back. Listen, adjust, and avoid pushing a system past its healthy limits.
Use & Value Renewables
Prefer resources that renew themselves naturally — sunlight, water cycles, biological processes, and living systems.
Produce No Waste
The output of one process becomes the input of another. Waste is simply a resource out of place.
Design from Pattern to Detail
Understand the larger patterns first — landscape, climate, seasons — then shape the specifics to fit.
Integrate
Elements work best when they support one another. Place things so that every part serves more than one purpose.
Use Small & Slow Solutions
Small interventions are easier to manage, adapt, and repair. Speed can override the very systems we are trying to serve.
Use & Value Diversity
A diverse system has many responses to stress. Diversity in biology, ideas, and practice builds resilience.
Use Edges & Value the Marginal
Edges are often the most productive and creative places. Where two systems meet, new possibilities appear.
Creatively Use & Respond to Change
Change is certain. Design for it, and a disruption can become an opportunity rather than a setback.
From principle to practice
How Kopi-Us applies them
Catch and store energy
Asian carp are a surging, unmanaged flow of biomass in the Illinois watershed. Capturing that flow before it does more damage is the first act of the whole design.
Obtain a yield
A solution nobody can afford is not a solution. Kopi-Us gives the removal effort an economic engine — soil amendment that growers actually want to buy.
Stack functions
One action, many outcomes: waterways protected, native fish given room, waste diverted, soil biology fed, and chemical inputs reduced downstream.
Produce no waste
We use the entire fish. What would be landfill or discard becomes protein, oil, calcium, and trace minerals cycling back into living ground.
Observe and interact
Every property is its own system. Sun, slope, compaction, and history all change the prescription. We read the land before we spray it.
Mend the relationship
Our mission is not only healthier soil. It is repairing how people relate to the earth systems that feed, water, and shelter every one of us. We are creatively using and responding to change within our local ecosystem in the greater Chicagoland area.
The founders
Tyadg & Brianna McGauley
Tyadg and Brianna earned their Permaculture Design Certificates together through Midwest Permaculture. Their backgrounds are very different, but deeply complementary: Tyadg brings experience in professional athletics, coaching, and youth development, while Brianna brings a background in pharmaceutical formulation, microbiological sampling, and gardening. Their work comes together through a shared belief in permaculture—the idea that healthy systems are built through relationship, balance, and thoughtful stewardship. Together, they have brought these principles to First Nations communities in Canada, Barrington School District 220 in Illinois, and private clients throughout Canada and the United States. Tyadg was born in Japan and raised in the Kootenays of British Columbia—a landscape of glacier-fed water, cedar forests, mountains, and living systems that make the interconnectedness of nature impossible to ignore. Today, he and Brianna live and work in the Chicagoland area, where two challenges meet: waterways under pressure from invasive carp, and soils increasingly in need of biological renewal. Their work is an attempt to connect the two—taking a problem from one ecosystem and transforming it into nourishment for another.
Our mission
- Protect the waterways.
- Mend the soil.
- Mend the relationship.