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  • From: <soilfirst@dojo.tao.ca>
  • To: <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: RE: [permaculture] Re: The meagre harvest of yield
  • Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 22:29:26 -0000

Hummm......Agreed to that written below. but here's jst a quick note: The
work of many Agroecologists (Steve Gleisman of the University of California,
Santa Cruz, Miguiel Altieri of UC Berkeley, etc) have written some good
things on measurng systems in full ecological terms rather than simply
harvest yield.

It's not "permaculture" per se, but there's things to be learned from it.
Even the Land Institute (Jackson)has an experemental farm measuring all
input/outputs in terms of caloric value if the research is still ongoing).

I have little time but if I come across any of these studies we could model
PC system studies on, I will post them. Any other examples?

Perhaps we shoulkd look a bit outside PC as it really is such a large, fluid
topic it encompasses many other design and agro systems.
Tim


souscayrous <souscayrous@wanadoo.fr> said:

> 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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