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  • From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Large scale farming - sustainable? Profitable?
  • Date: Tue, 22 Dec 2009 02:22:15 -0500


From the permies.com farm income forum:
Quote from: Kerrick
(1)Looked at from another direction, however, there's the question of whether or not a farm that doesn't turn a profit can be called sustainable from a practical standpoint. <...> After all if you don't obtain a yield of some kind, it's not sustainable, because you're sinking all your resources into a project that you get nothing back from. And a farm that relies on only one income stream is as vulnerable to changing market forces as a monoculture is to pests and blight.
(2)I'm not yet a permaculturalist or a farmer, but I'm making shifts in my life to put this vision of sustainable economy into practice in my own life. I'm cutting my costs of living drastically and learning to make do with what I can produce myself in as many ways as possible. And while I'm learning and working, I'm saving, so that one day, I hope, I can have land of my own.
(3)What would a permacultural economy look like to you?
LFLondon:
(1) Any farm can turn a profit with work and luck, and persistence, one way or another, whether it be through cropping, forestry,
plant nursery, aquaculture or other enterprise including all the other cottage industry categories, including telecommuting (after all you are stewarding a piece of land - a good thing, you're a caretaker though you derive your income offsite). A farm can be considered sustainable regardless of how it pays for itself; your living there is one payback, your serving as conservationist of it as a natural resource is a payback in the greater sense, certainly contributing to it being part of a permacultural economy.
Weather, cropping conditions, timing of farming operations, access and availability of marketing opportunities, customer base, personal health all have to do with success at making a living off cropping. By dramatically diversifying your operation and site resources you broaden your income base. That is the essence of sustainability, and permaculture. You are making a living on your farm allowing you to steward your land as a permaculture site, developing, improving and maintaining the systems you have in place so that it becomes ecologically richer, able to withstand weather extremes and more self sustaining each year.
(2) I wish you luck in your pursuit of land.
(3) A permacultural economy is one where you have people living on sites as described in (1) who cooperate and are economically linked to all others doing the same. Consider the concept of individual farms in communities of farms adjoining towns and cities forming local nodes, which overlap with adjoining similar nodes, which together form regional nodes or networks, which overlap with adjoining regional networked nodes to form a single national production & services marketing and distribution network. That's a permacultural economy, an alternative one but robust and fully diversified, eliminating those middlemen from outside the network from making a profit off any product or service within that network. Provision probably should be made for that to happen in a sensible, practical and fair way.
LFLondon
Advocate for a National Permacultural Production and Services Marketing and Distribution Network




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