permaculture

["Charles Knoles" <charles@growfood.org>]

I think it's important to make a distinction between "big agri-businesses"
and
 large scale farms/farmers.  The former are amoral, market driven
organisations.
 They are just as happy selling organic produce as they are selling
landmines as
long as it makes them a profit.  The latter are people who grow crops on
large
tracts of land.  Large scale farmers have a vested interest in taking care
of the land
they use and generally aren't as rapacious as some people on this list make
them out to be.
They are however, extremely conservative by necessity and will not try new
methods unless they can be shown that they work (usually this job falls to
the
extension agents in the U.S.A).

   Since it is the large scale farmers who own the land where the
overwhelming
 majority of the worlds food is produced the only way to get a sustainable
food
supply is to get these people to start farming sustainably.   In Cuba they
are fortunate
enough to have a dictatorship and so when Castro says "go organic" everyone
jumps.
Burdened as we are with the hassles of democracy, the only option open to us
is
continued research, education and demonstration.  I think that we need to be
much
more effective in the way we go about these tasks however.  Here are a few
ideas
about how to go about this:

1) Start a research organisation similar to ATTRA but it would be devoted to
Permaculture.
It would give farmers of all scales, information on well proven techniques
for their bio-region.  We
would also start a library of research that has been done on techniques such
as alley-cropping
silviculture, mechanical harvesting of perrenial polycultures, agroforestry
etc.  These studies
would be made available to farmers in a simplified practical format.

2)  The development of a software program that can bring together the
enormous amount of
information that a farmer needs to consider.  From this info, the program
could reccomend
how the farmer can minimize their inputs, reccomend remediation strategies
etc. We could napsterize
Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Monsanto, etc........  ;)

  Whattaya reckon??

  Love

Charles

>>On Friday 30 August 2002 10:47 am, you wrote:
>> You assume these are mutually exclusive.  IMO they are not.  The fastest
>>way to increase PC acreage is by moving "industrial ag" in our
>> direction.  This will take time and no doubt will not satisfy PC purists.

>What is a Pc purist?

>Isn't this just a question of how we define Pc.
>I've always viewed it as a design system based upon
>ecology and sustainability.  You can't design without
>an objective and for Pc the objective seems clear.  If
>we believe in this definition then i would think most of
>us would be uncomfortable with industrial ag.  Does this
>make us purists?

>jeff