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  • From: "John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>
  • To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] The Trouble with Permaculture
  • Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2014 18:22:01 -0000

Reply below.

JDh> <<What you say strikes right to the heart of the mattter Jason.
JDh> But we have complications here in Europe. To be recognised as a farm we need
JDh> to maintain 14 livestock units on our land consisting of cattle and sheep (6
JDh> sheep for one livestock unit). We have also been working towards
JDh> permaculture for almost 30 years and because of this we now loose our only
JDh> subsidy in the government's drive towards more industrial farming. More than
JDh> 40 % of our acerage is under trees and shrubs and that made we just lost our
JDh> only subsidy or about 1/3 rd of our gross income.
JDh> This means that we will be haemoraging losses for every livestock unit we
JDh> produce from now on. And because of our weather conditions (climate is gone)
JDh> there is no way we can grow high value plant-food-crops enough to survive
JDh> financially.
JDh> We find ourselves on a sinking permaculture ship.

JDh> John in Ireland

At risk of going off-topic, but I am slightly puzzled by your post. The 14 LU
requirement, isn't that for the organic scheme?

<No Ute. We own some 70 acres of land that is classified as mostly suitable for grazing. Therefore we have to keep 14 livestock units on our land to qualify as a farm at all. In former years we got paid a per head subsidy so there developed a thing that we call "farming of the grants". You did not need to have those livestock units all year but say from the 12 of March till the 12 th of August. Many farmers had their land empty outside this time. They would buy animals in large quantities in the beginning of March, really as close as possible to the starting date of the grand and they would sell everything on the 13th of August. And they did not care much for these animals as long as they did not drop dead before an inspector had come to count.
We love animals and so we keep them all year round, let them have babies and try and protect these from the elements and the foxes, meaning that we did not have the grass to maximise the numbers. We never made much money from the grants.

We were in REPS (rural environmental protection scheme) for some 8 years until this scheme started really damaging the environment with the "Nitrate Directive" and then we opted out. Even from the start REPS had little to do with protecting the environment. It was largely cosmetic. One example : "There are three environmental suitable colours : red, green and grey." So all of your farm building would have to be painted in one of these colours. And of course it had all to be the same colour. If you painted one corrugated roof red then everything else had to be red everywhere. Another thing that was even more important was that farmers needed wire fences around every field. On occasion I saw beautiful trees being cut down to make room for regular timber or concrete fence stakes. It was not allowed to nail sheep wire to a tree. Also some farmers were penalised because they did not spray roundup at the bottom of this wire fence and vegetation started to grow over the bottom wire. These regulations also made an end to commonage in Ireland for every partisipant on this commonage now needed to put a fence around "his" part. This not only made many mountains impossible to walk any longer but it made for very bad relations amongst many neighbours that had been friendly up to then. Put your fence so that you got a little bit of extra ground and you could make a few thousand.
Anyway, REPS was money but to make it worth our while we had to become officially organic as well. This paid extra and we really were fully organic already anyway.
Only the fee for certification went up year after year until by year 8 for us this fee would have cost more than it brought in. We also spend a full month per year on the paperwork all this brought along since we had a very diverse farm and every species of animal or plant had to be constantly monitored on paper separately. So much food for the chickens and so much food of this and that sort for the ducks, of course with all the invoices of the food suppliers. Made not much sense since we always fed ducks and chickens together.
Also, supposedly organic produce makes a higher price but we found that to be untrue. On one occasion we took 20 finished lambs to a special organic mart in Kenmare (long,steep and windy road) and the prices were so bad we brought them back home. We of course had to pay the mart fees to get them back out of there. Three days later these same lambs made 20 euro a head more in the non organic local mart. And that is often still what happens.


Are you loosing your Single Farm
Payment because of the tree/scrub cover?

< Well yes. You quote Georges Monbiot yourself down below and that is what happens here too.

Or are you loosing your organic scheme payment for some reason?

<Haven't had an organic scheme payment for ten years or so.This was only paid out in combination with REPS but in REPS 3 it became impossible to have a manure heap and to bed down your animals over the winter on woodshavings and straw. Slurry tanks (stinking, anaerobic and toxic) were needed from the moment you had half a dozen chickens or even one ruminant on the farm.
It was also forbidden to spraid any compost whitin 20 meters of even the smallest water course or farm track or hedge. Only artificial bag manure was allowed to be spraid to the very hedge.
My impression of the whole scheme was that farmers were used as milk cows. Europe paid most of the REPS money and then the Irish government got that money back from farmers through fines and by forcing them to spend most of their grand on wire and chemicals and of course the REPS planner who often charged a thousand for something I could knock together in haf an hour.

It is a sad reality that the Irish
govt. has not even begun to embrace agro-forestry despite the many advantages it
offers in this climate. Under the agri-environmental schemes they pay farmers to
maintain, even develop new farm habitats and under the Single Farm Payment they
encourage farmers to rip them out. Just last week I sat with a farmer who was
docked SFP for a patch of gorse he had not excluded from his forage area. He is
in his last year in REPS (the Irish EU-financed agri-environmental scheme)
and in 2015 he is going to get out the bulldozer to get
rid of the gorse, one of the few native woody N-fixers we have in Ireland and a
good habitat plant for birds, early forage for bees and so on. The right hand
does not know what the left is doing. It's insane and frustrating.

Have you seen the recent article by George Monbiot on flooding, the CAP and the
Welsh farmers in Pontbren? http://www.monbiot.com/2014/01/13/drowning-in-money/
Incidentally the Pontbren initiative seems well-researched at this point both in
terms of economics and downstream (literally!) environmental benefits.

I hear your frustration, John. The climate/weather in this country, especially
in the wild and wet West is not one for locavore vegetarians or for perennial
cropping (unless you include perennial grasses in that definition). It is meat
and potato land with a few berries and annual vegetables thrown in. If we hadn't
f***** up the salmon streams and gotten rid of the ancient woodlands, it would
probably as "easy" to live off salmon and hunted deer and wild boar than it is
nowadays to make a living off sheep or cattle in an ever wetter environment.
We've seen a 10% increase in rainfall in the 1980-2010 period compared to the
previous reference period 1970-2000, coming from an already high base in the
west, and that's with a warming of only 0.5C. I am truly scared to think of a
2C warming scenario. Better build a boat and focus on duck production...
At 1200-1400 mm rainfall in a cool temperate environment at 53N (i.e. not a lot
of evaporation)

< Count yourself lucky Ute. We live on the SW slope of a mountain in the SW and this is where all that Atlantic air has to start rising to get to the rest of the country. In 2012 we had over 4000 mm of rain come down on us. If we only got 1400mm we would count ourselves very lucky. County Clare is often bad but this is the pits.


I find myself constantly trying to work out how to get rid of
water, very much in contrast to the "slow, sink, and spread" messages coming
from other climes (and rightly so of course). We are headed here for twice the
average rainfall this January, on already completely saturated ground. I dare
not think of your own situation, John, with the hills behind you and the
forestry (anti-biodiversity matchstick grant-farming) drains dumping water on your land.

< We had one extra spectacular flood before Xmas were there was a foot deep of water racing down the road (steep road, 400 foot drop on our farm) carrying bucket sized rocks along. Lost our water turbine on that occasion since the turbine house filled up completely. Good thing no one here was swept away for it was far from safe in the dark and impossble to raise our voices over the noice of that thundering water. Can't be worse standing behind a jet engine.

Searching for evapotranspiration figures for woodland v. grassland I came across
this publication recently: "Water Use by Trees" from the British Forestry
Commission: http://www.forestry.gov.uk/pdf/FCIN065.pdf/$FILE/FCIN065.pdf
They look at the issue from the view of groundwater yield (how much
groundwater discharge do we loose under different types of woodland) so we have
to read it and kind of reverse the message in our head (how much of the annual
rainfall can the trees remove from our super-saturated soils by way of
interception and transpiration - quite a lot as it turns out).
If we can double up evapotranspiration from grassland plus woodland in
agro-forestry systems we might stand a chance. Better still, we can fix nitrogen
(alder) and feed livestock (willow, alder and other species) with these trees and yield
fuelwood too.
Unfortunately neither the Common Agricultural Policy nor the Irish govt.
realize this, reinforcing the segregation into grassland on one side of the
fence and non-native conifers on the other with the latter dumping acidified
drainage water onto the former and killing what fish are left in the waterways.
As George Monbiot writes:
"If other farmers want to copy the Pontbren model, not only must they pay for
the trees themselves; but they must sacrifice the money they would otherwise
have been paid for farming that land. For – and here we start to approach the
nub of the problem – there is an unbreakable rule laid down by the Common
Agricultural Policy. If you want to receive your single farm payment – by the
far biggest component of farm subsidies – that land has to be free from what it
calls “unwanted vegetation”(10). Land covered by trees is not eligible. The
subsidy rules have enforced the mass clearance of vegetation from the hills."

<Well I would rather starve than clear our trees. Another stupid aspect is that when we came here now 27 years ago there were almost no trees. At times the wind was so strong that a big adult could not keep his footing and had to go on all fours. We saw lambs flying through the air.
Trees bring nutrients that have washed down back to the surface with their leave fall and they give shelter and make the grass grow at least twice as well.
What it is all about I think is that there is an enormous push towards industrial, large scale farming. Small farmers are being pushed out to make room for very large farms. That is probably also the reason for these compulsory, concrete slurry tanks. You can't handle that stuff with a fork and a wheelbarrow as we use with our straw manure. You need big machines. A big machine on a steep 70 acres makes no sense. Expand or get out is the message.

Mise le meás,

John in SW Cork

Best regards from County Clare,
Ute

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