[permaculture] Perma-Data needed!

Andrew Millison amillison at gmail.com
Sun Sep 5 17:19:54 EDT 2010


Thanks Norris and everyone else.

Even small scale data from one yard is valuable as a sound bite in a
proposal to show the potentiality of the pattern repeated many times. For
example:

 "One 1/4 acre (?) city lot planted in intensive perennial and annual food
systems in Portland has been measured as yielding up to 600 calories per day
for one hour of work per day. For a city block of 50 homes planted
similarly, that's up to 30,000 calories per day for one hour of work from
each household. That could supply 15 needy children 2000 calories per day
for relatively little work besides the initial system development."

That's good stuff in my opinion!

Andrew

On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 10:04 PM, Norris Thomlinson <norristh at gmail.com>wrote:

> > From: Andrew Millison <amillison at gmail.com
> >
> > Hello,
> > I'm putting together a funding proposal for a State agency who are
> > requesting Permaculture training for their staff.
> >
> > I need to include data in the proposal with *verifiable sources*. Some
> > examples of the types of statements I'd like to clarify and back up are:
> >
> > * Intensive garden agriculture is X% more productive per unit of area
> than
> > conventional mechanized field cropping and require X% less
> > energy/water/dollars to maintain.
> >
> > Does anyone out there have sources for useful data to make
> > Permaculture-supporting statements? I'd really appreciate any input.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Andrew Millison
> > www.beaverstatepermaculture.com
>
> Hey Andrew,
>
> This doesn't exactly address the "Intensive garden agriculture" X%
> elements you listed above, but it might help you as a data point...
> As I might have told you on a tour earlier this year, we've started
> recording the weights of all the food we harvest from our yard (about
> 7000 square feet of growing space), and putting into a database with
> caloric information.  We've only been keeping records since April
> 15th, so don't have a full year-long picture yet.  Much of our yard is
> in immature fruit & nut trees, or less-than-optimally-designed
> chicken-ravaged playground, or
> perennial-vegetable-experiments-turning-out-not-to-yield-us-anything-much,
> so I wouldn't use our data for calculating yield or calories per
> square foot.
>
> BUT I think we have a very good assessment of home-scale garden time
> input:food output with our data.  We've harvested an average of nearly
> 600 calories a day, and estimate we spend at most an average of one
> hour per day between the two of us to maintain and harvest everything.
>
> Our harvest log, periodically updated when I feel like doing data
> entry: http://discountpermaculture.com/cgi-bin/harvest.py
>
> My first blog post introducing our harvest log:
> http://farmerscrub.blogspot.com/2010/05/harvest-log.html
> A new blog post I just wrote with comments on where we're at now:
> http://farmerscrub.blogspot.com/2010/09/harvest-log-update.html
>
> I hope that helps you, Andrew, and anyone else who's interested!
>
> Norris Thomlinson
> Portland, OR
> http://farmerscrub.blogspot.com
> http://discountpermaculture.com
>
> --
> "The absolute bottom line is: what methods of food production build
> topsoil while using only ambient sun and rain?  *Because nothing else
> is sustainable.*"
>
> Lierre Keith, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability
>



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