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  • From: Gasper Family Farm <farmer1@gasperfarm.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Perma-Data needed!
  • Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2010 08:23:34 -0500

corn is 56 #/bu and depending on your state 200 bu/acre is unreachable, but the record is over 300 bu. Typical MO corn ground will yield 75 - 144 bu in any given year. Not sure on IL or IA. And that is at most 2 out of 3 years as they have to rotate soybeans in every other or every third year, so average that in.

You might consider the economics as well. Virtually all the profit from corn farming leaves the community. The same is not true for diversified polycultures producing food for local eaters. Same analysis could be done on all the other aspects of the designs you mentioned.

Pete

On 09/28/2010 12:15 AM, Andrew Millison wrote:
Hello,
For those of you who sent me messages wanting to find out how the search for
Permaculture data went, I've pasted the section of my proposal where I cited
the data and information.

Thanks for the suggestions folks,
Andrew

Some examples of measurable data for design strategies incorporated in
Permaculture systems are:

*Passive Solar Design: *In Davis, CA, apartment units in a building with
proper passive solar orientation (elongated East-West with long walls facing
South and North with roof overhangs) were measured 17 degrees F warmer in
winter and 24 degrees F cooler in summer than buildings with poor passive
solar orientation (elongated North-South with long walls facing East and
West). (Hammond, Jonathan, Marshall Hunt, Richard Cramer, and Loren
Neubauer, *A Strategy for Energy Conservation: Proposed Energy Conservation
and Solar Utilization Ordinance for the City of Davis, California,* City of
Davis, August 1974.)

*Intensive Food Production*: A typical industrially farmed corn field may
yield up to 200 bushels per acre @ 70 lbs per bushel = 14,000 lbs per acre.
(Logsdon, Gene, *Small Scale Grain Raising*, Chelsea Greene Publishing,
2009). The record soy yield is 155 bushels per acre @ 60 lbs per bushel =
9,300 lbs per acre (
http://deltafarmpress.com/cullers-soybean-record-155-bushels-acre). An
“Urban Homestead” in Pasadena, CA, utilizing many Permaculture strategies
produces up to 6,000 lbs harvest annually on 1/10 acre and grows 99% of
their produce. That’s 60,000 lbs per acre of diverse organic foods. (
http://urbanhomestead.org/urban-homestead)

*Rainwater Harvesting:* A 1000 square foot house in Salem, OR, can collect
over 24,000 gallons of water per year from the roof. In Bend, that same
house can collect nearly 7,300 gallons per year, water that can be stored or
used beneficially in the landscape, reducing municipal storm drain load and
improving stream water quality, which is one of the overall goals of the
City of Salem’s Stormwater Master Plan.


*Community Safety:* In Portland Oregon, where a neighborhood center was
created by painting a mural in the intersection, building benches, building
gardens, posting a community bulletin board, and creating other features in
the public space, 87% of respondents to a survey said that they feel safer
and there is less crime now in the neighborhood, and 86% said communication
between neighbors increased. (PDOT Survey of Intersection Repair)

There are countless potential yields and benefits from Permaculture systems,
including craft and cottage industry based employment among others. Low
income housing and assistance using Permaculture design can provide people
the opportunity to lift themselves out of desperation and poverty, and help
them to develop meaningful skills that can feed and provide for their
communities. Some potential transferable skills from a Permaculture course
to other fields are Landscape Design and Construction, Ecological
Restoration, Mycoremediation, Food Production, Urban Planning, Architectural
Design, Stormwater Management, Ecological Building Construction, Community
Organizing, Surveying, Earthwork and Pond Construction, Farming, Forestry,
Land Development, Solar Electric and Solar Hot Water System Design and
Installation, and Trail Maintenance and Erosion Control to name a few.


On Sun, Sep 5, 2010 at 2:52 PM, loren luyendyk<loren@sborganics.com> wrote:

An established system (20 yrs) like Path to Freedom has harvested 6000 lbs
of produce on 1/10th an acre= 60,000 lbs per acre.

A typical mono-crop corn field may yield up to 200 bushels per acre = 70
lbs per bushel = 14,000 lbs per acre.
The record soy yield is 155 bushels per acre = 60 lbs per bushel = 9,300
lbs per acre.

Those are some BIG differences. Granted you will harvest many types of
produce with different caloric values from a diverse cropping system.
Perhaps this could be calculated as a caloric difference per acre.

Loren Luyendyk
(805) 452-8249
www.sborganics.com
www.surferswithoutborders.org




Date: Sun, 5 Sep 2010 14:19:54 -0700
From:amillison@gmail.com
To:norristh@gmail.com
CC:permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [permaculture] Perma-Data needed!

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@gmail.com
wrote:

From: Andrew Millison<amillison@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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