permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lflondon@mindspring.com>]

On 8 Feb 2000 17:56:01 GMT, in alt.permaculture hemenway@jeffnet.org
(Toby Hemenway) wrote:

In article <__On4.20851$3b6.88289@ozemail.com.au>, "Wesley Trotman"
<trotmanw@<nospam>camtech.net.au> wrote:

> 
> Ancient farmers made clearing in the forrests, burnt the felled trees and
> planted a crop for one or so years and then moved on. On return many years
> later regeneration had occurred.
> 
I've been studying about slash-and-burn agriculture (technically
called
swidden and fallow) because I'd heard hints that it was actually a
good
deal more complicated, and permacultural than that. Here's how it
works,
at least in South America: To pick an arbitrary beginning point in the
cycle, people would cut down a small chunk of forest, 1-5 hectares,
often
saving the nitrogen-fixing trees and certain good construction timber.
They'd let the slash dry,then burn it and plant. The planting was
polycultural, based at first on annual staple like cassava or yam or
maize, with an N-fixer like peanuts as well. They'd also plant seeds
and
seedlings of perennial shrubs, vines, and trees: pineapple, banana,
peach
palm, guava, coca, avocado, about 20-30 species. They'd work the
annuals
for a few years, and by then the pineapples or other small perennials
were
coming on. They'd coppice the young trees for fuel and baskets (Inga
was a
common one in the Amazon, a N-fixer that coppices well and yields "ice
cream beans" for fruit). As the big trees began to bear, they'd give
up on
the annuals, which were shaded out by then, and they'd harvest fruit
and
other tree crops. In 20 years or so the whole patch would lose
productivity from shade, and get too tall to harvest, and the people
would
move on, letting it go fallow for 10-20 years. They'd usually have 2-4
of
these swiddens at different stages going at once.

Very permacultural; not at all what they teach in school as that
backward,
slash-and-burn technique that's destroying the Amazon. These guys knew
what they were doing. We just didn't understand how sophisticated and
sustainable (at least with small populations) it was until recently.
Anthropologists only saw people "farming" in the new swiddens; they
mistook the older swiddens for forest, since they were clueless about
tree
crops. In a sense, permaculture is modeled on these systems. I'd love
to
see us create our own using temperate plants.

Perhaps this is a way to do market farming: start with an annual cash
crop
that keeps you going until the trees come on.

Toby

-- 
Toby Hemenway
hemenway@jeffnet.org

Lawrence F. London, Jr. Venaura Farm
metalab.unc.edu/intergarden InterGarden       
metalab.unc.edu/permaculture PermaSphere       
metalab.unc.edu/intergarden/orgfarm AGINFO
metalab.unc.edu/market-farming Market Farming
lflondon@mindspring.com  london@metalab.unc.edu