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  • From: "souscayrous" <souscayrous@wanadoo.fr>
  • To: <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: RE: [permaculture] Re: The meagre harvest of yield
  • Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 22:21:04 +0100

Sorry for the tardy reply, your email below deserved a more timely response.
You capture just the problem I attempted to sketch;

>So to say "we applied 80 kg of nitrogen per hectare and it yielded 35
tonnes
>of apples and 3 tonnes of wheat per hectare" gives you some deceptive
>numbers. It leads you to believe you know something important about the
>system, and might stop you from asking other, more meaningful questions
>about all the other things that are happening.

I do believe such linear equations are the subterranean pathways of our
thinking and it is for this reason we might have over-reacted to Greg
Williams attack: he hit us where it hurts, not as permaculturalists, but as
members of a culture that have grown up to respond to simple input/output
formulae. And the psychological satisfaction of justifying pc as a high
yielding competitor ready to take on and defeat 'agriculture allcomers' does
veil the deeper 'more meaningful questions about all the other things that
are happening'.

Before continuing, I think I should make it clear that yield is useful,
often important; the discussion of aid donors and NGOs has illustrated this.
Andreas Keller put it well when he said; 'If we measure or model anything in
a pc system, we do so to achieve a well defined purpose, otherwise it does
not make much sense'. I would only add that the reductive sum of
input/output can never capture the productivity of a pc system and I can
think of many land cultivation techniques that would beat pc easily over the
short hall.

How do we capture the particular benefits that flow from a well-designed pc
system? It seems to me that that is the correct beginning of any response
to those in conventional or organic farming. And unless we are clear about
what ultimately counts as 'yield' then, I believe, the further progress of
pc that I know Toby and others are committed to will come to nought.

Toby again;

>I suppose you could continue to ask more of the same kind of question: how
>many pollinators, how much mulch, how many species, etc.,and you might even
>get clever and begin asking how much work is performed by elements internal
>to the system

These questions are essential, they are prerequisite to the calibration of
any sustainable system. Yet, have you noticed that when you begin to follow
the spore of a single element within an holistic system how it impacts on a
wider and wider scale, until it seems almost as if but for that bee or that
spidermite, that duck or that thyme, the whole system would collapse. We
create a design and then implement it and watch it develop along the lines
we have thought out, but then, at some point and always, it gets beyond us.

>Then you'd get a whole bunch of little numbers, and maybe a
>clever statistician could do some sort of multifactorial analysis and
>combine them in a useful way. (Computers and advances in math have made the
>old "only change one variable at a time" methods out of date; I used to run
>experiments where we'd change tons of variables, and do matrix analyses,
and
>get answers that helped us.)

>Or you could step back and just ask broad questions like, how much energy
>does the system capture, how much is drained to sinks, how much remains
>incorporated in the system, what are the incremental accumulations

We cannot control the productivity of a system with 'a whole bunch of little
numbers' or by taking a 'step back and just ask broad questions'. Perhaps
pc could best be judged by how closely it approximates nature and the best
pc design by how quickly a stable system can become established? But
permaculture attempts to move beyond the confines of the garden and the farm
and inhabit a broader society. This bold move, essential perhaps, only
further complicates the question of
yield/productivity/sustainability/success.

I'll admit that I have no breathtaking reformulation, just more questions.
Yet the importance of clarity on this issue remains. Here in France it is
palpable, monstrously present in the deformed stumps that protrude from the
dead earth. Viticulture destroyed everything but the vine. Its reward?
Endless passes up and down the straight rows with plough, copper sulphate,
roundup and a growing concoction of pesticides for roughly the same harvest
as a century ago in the halcyon pre-phyloxera era. Modern agriculture
spirals downward on a vicious cycle to destruction, for, one day, to be
sure, a new virus or bacteria will destroy the vines. Permaculture is an
alternative that counters this destructive force and we must find a
meaningful way of communicating this alternative without losing its essence.



Souscayrous
Toby Hemenway
Sent: Monday, January 21, 2002 2:38 AM
To: permaculture
Subject: [permaculture] Re: The meagre harvest of yield

on 1/19/02 12:46 PM, souscayrous at souscayrous@wanadoo.fr wrote:

> Honestly Toby I do not think we are so very far apart.

I don't think so either; I too, generally agree with, and am impressed by,
your posts. I was responding mostly to what sounded to me like urging us to
refuse to quantify yield, ever. I think I misunderstood, and as happens in
this medium, my quickly written words distill and simplify my feelings to
seem more harsh than they are.

One of the things I've learned from this thread is that it is of very
limited use to try to measure the yield of a permaculture design (excuse the
sloppy language) in conventional terms. In a good design, many needs and
yields are being met internal to the system--fertility is augmented by
nitrogen fixers and mulch plants, pigs clean up the dropped fruit, etc. etc.
So to say "we applied 80 kg of nitrogen per hectare and it yielded 35 tonnes
of apples and 3 tonnes of wheat per hectare" gives you some deceptive
numbers. It leads you to believe you know something important about the
system, and might stop you from asking other, more meaningful questions
about all the other things that are happening.

I suppose you could continue to ask more of the same kind of question: how
many pollinators, how much mulch, how many species, etc.,and you might even
get clever and begin asking how much work is performed by elements internal
to the system. Then you'd get a whole bunch of little numbers, and maybe a
clever statistician could do some sort of multifactorial analysis and
combine them in a useful way. (Computers and advances in math have made the
old "only change one variable at a time" methods out of date; I used to run
experiments where we'd change tons of variables, and do matrix analyses, and
get answers that helped us.)

Or you could step back and just ask broad questions like, how much energy
does the system capture, how much is drained to sinks, how much remains
incorporated in the system, what are the incremental accumulations.

But after all that, do you really know anything? That might be what
Souscayrous is asking. In a couple of senses, you know some things. You may
know where some inefficiencies are in your design, what you could tweak to
reduce losses--though a good designer spots these things intuitively. But
I've often gone over wads of data and spotted patterns I haven't seen using
other methods. So the numbers could be useful in that sense. Plus, you
would have a nice pile of data to show to . . . people with money and power
that you want to recruit.

But one danger of getting all these numbers is that this sort of work is
really exhausting and can consume you. Would you still appreciate your place
as a place? (When I'm using my chainsaw, I tend to see every tree as board
feet and cords; it feels awful.) And most numbers measure things and not
processes, and almost never give you a good feel for relationships and
connections. You can measure some of that, though it looks to me like most
measures of "connectance" and "feedback" are very crude and simplistic. Yet
those are the quantities (or are they qualities?) that define permaculture
systems.

What kind of measurements could truly capture the essential qualities of
permaculture design? That's a big question. That would have been a good tack
to take to answer Greg Williams.

So to wrap up this mass of verbiage, I think we're safe measuring things
like yield if we keep in mind that we're using a very limited tool for very
limited purposes (like persuading the skeptical academic) and are missing
much of what's important. Trying to talk about what is important in a
permaculture design seems like a way to develop an interesting new language.

> every time
> I think I understand and reach out to grasp the solidity of the world, the
> more it flows through my hand like water.

Very well put.

Toby

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