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  • From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Peak Oil -
  • Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2007 18:18:23 -0700

Marjory wrote:
in your experience growing food is easy. . . but by no means is it as easy
as it was presented in the pc course.
Growing some food is easy; that's why it's the most popular hobby in the developed world. But there's a huge difference between "growing food," which is what PDCs talk about, and "growing all your food," which I've never heard recommended in any of the 60 or so PDCs I've been involved in, or by any of the teachers I know.
I've visited almost all of the precious few local
farmers who actually produce food for a living.
Anyone who says or believes farming is easy is certifiably insane; with all the cultural lore about the miserable lives of farmers, how could anyone think otherwise? Mollison does have some old stories about how many people could make a living from one piece of land, and I do think those are Bill's fantasies rather than anything he's seen people actually do. Bill is magnificent tale-spinner and a great salesman. That's typical for a visionary. There are a few teachers repeating Bill's stories, and it's a disreputable thing to do. At least make up your own. But are there really people coming out of PDCs and straightaway buying farms, thinking it's going to be one big party?

So it sounds like you've heard Pc teachers say that creating an ecovillage was easy, growing all your own food is easy, and farming for a living is easy. That's truly bizarre. Why would any intelligent person listen to such rubbish?

It's very strange that permaculture is perceived as recommending each household grow all their own food. Any basic design assessment would show that that's a dreadful strategy for almost everyone. In the first pages of the Designer's Manual, Mollison says if you're better at something other than food growing, trading your time or income for healthy food is an intelligent thing to do. By the same token, it only makes sense for an ecovillage to grow the crops that they are well-suited to grow, and to trade for or buy the remainder of their food. Only if they are end-of-the-world types would they want to grow all their own food. But at this point, with so much food so readily available from comparatively healthy sources, and with farming such difficult work, I don't see why an ecovillage would insist upon growing all its food. My observation is that the 80/20 rule applies to food self-sufficiency: that last 20% of your food needs takes about 80% of the work. I was about 50% food independent with only a few hours of work per week at one point, but to get to 100% would have required a many-fold increase in labor time. To do so seemed a poor use of my time.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com







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