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  • From: LBSALTZMAN@aol.com
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] more on growing food
  • Date: Sun, 16 May 2010 11:38:11 EDT

Let me describe something that is working in Santa Barbara, California at
a community level. We have a neighborhood exchange movement started by one
or two people, the website is _www.sbfoodnotlaws.org_
(http://www.sbfoodnotlaws.org) that has is doing incredibly well. It works
in existing
neighborhoods and doesn't require creating an intentional community and
moving
somewhere. Once a month people in a neighorhood gather at a rotating house
in
the neighborhood. They exchange home grown food, seeds, plants and food
growing knowledge. But the concept is rapidly expanding to include clothes,
books and just about anything that one person doesn't need and another
person can use. In addition to food this is building enormous community
cohesion that didn't exist before. On the whole this is a good path to
greater
local food security. We also have a budding Food Security Council that is
looking at the total picture of local food security and is bringing in the
local organic farmers as well. Currently Santa Barbara County which is a
significant agricultural county exports over 90% of the food grown here and
imports around the same amount. This is unsustainable, but we are creating
the systems to slowly change that fact.

So while everyone who can, and wants to should grow as much food as they
can individually, I think this is the way we get to more
community-sufficiency.

L


In a message dated 5/14/2010 3:25:45 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
toby@patternliteracy.com writes:

(warning: lengthy post that takes a while to get back to the topic) Thanks
for the thoughtful words, Ben. And Rain, it's not that I'm trying to
stimulate discussion, as that's too close to trolling. I'm trying to get
people
to think past cliches into deeper considerations of their assumptions and
beliefs before they do harm or waste effort. And, as Rain pointed out, I can
write more clearly than I sometimes do, but the "Myth of Self-Reliance"
article took about 18 hours to write, whereas I'm not going to make kind of
time for posts on listservs. I think my posts usually contain ideas worth
hearing, so I hope people will digest the things I ask them to think about,
instead of jumping to,"Toby wants to discourage us from growing food." I've
been pretty careful about how I've phrased this, so if that's where anyone
went, they have not really read it. If you are driven to think I've been
hacked by Monsanto, consider first that you may have misunderstood me. I
think
I get permacul
ture pretty well by now.

I often try out ideas here before moving on to larger forums, so I do
appreciate constructive feedback. When I get too much knee-jerk projection
of
people's own issues onto me, I tend to post much less. I've been pretty
inactive here for a while, and that's part of why. I have developed a pretty
thick skin and am learning, usually, not to get triggered by the real idiots
here--and I'll never be offended by Lawrence, I know him too well--but if I
run into too many people who will not think critically and won't read for
meaning, I'm outta here. Life is too short.

Back to the topic: I'm grateful to Ben for pointing out that we've already
done the "must grow all my food" thing in the 1970s, and we learned many
things from it, primarily that food production is best done communally, and
it's rarely good design to have all your food coming from one source, that
is, from your own labor. We also know that if we really want to, we can
grow a lot of food ourselves. So if developing self reliance skills is what
you personally need to do, great. But in permaculture, we don't begin from
dogma: I must have an herb spiral, I must grow my own food. That's not
design. That's top-down, dogmatic thinking. That's what I mean when I ask
"how
did anyone ever think that that was part of the permaculture credo?" We
assess first: what are my needs? Food is one. If you immediately go to: "then
I
must grow it all myself," you ignore an infinity of other possible design
solutions for that problem. Good design never starts with the answer. As
Larry Santoyo says
, we don't impose our solutions, we arrive at them. Striving to grow a
large percentage of your food is only an intelligent goal when a good deal
of
assessment leads you there. So I can't agree with "we should set it as a
goal even when we know we can't achieve it." I would never say "more of us
need to grow our own food." It's focusing too low on the hierarchy of places
to intervene. It might, sometimes, be the right path, but it rules out
countless other solutions. It never makes sense to let a cliche or dogma set
our goals. Our needs and resources set our goals.

We need a sustainable food system. Is Joe Public working in his yard a
sure way of making that happen? For my neighbor, that means spraying the
crap
out of his yard, killing the bugs, rototilling 4 times a season, buying
chemical fertilizer, and so on. Being in touch with his land has not made
him
Green. So there is much else that needs to be in place for "grow your own"
to be a useful directive, as much as I like the idea. Insisting on better
farm practices would intervene at a far more effective level, as would
"break up corporate farms," "encourage big food buyers to buy local" and
"create
urban farms." Think at those levels. Sometimes "grow your own" makes
sense. For Marjory, food is expensive, she likes gardening, and it sounds
like
she can't support the kind of food system around her that she'd like to, so
growing makes sense. But we usually want a hierarchy of food sources, like
a zone system. A one-level solution like "must grow all my food" makes no
sense unless deri
ved at by careful assessment of your own needs and resources, and it never
makes sense to prescribe that others should grow all their own food. There
are too many ways for that not to solve any problems, and to cause many
more. That's why I want to strike it from the permaculture meme-bank.

One of my criteria for any design is, "how many beneficial connections can
be created by this element or process?" Growing my food doesn't create
very many. It's often not even that good at reducing inputs unless you get
to
a developed perennial system, as annuals are very input-intensive unless
you have land to grow compost crops, and use humanure. A small farmer may be
less resource intensive than a home gardener. A multi-level solution to
food, where I connect my own commerce, cash or trade based, to the work of
many others via CSA, farmers markets, friends, and locally owned stores,
will
create a more resilient system that supports far more connections and
people than me working alone in my garden. Some people will find otherwise.
But
it never makes sense to set the goal before you assess the resources,
highest-category needs, and options.

I think it's quite the opposite of elitist to think this way. It seems to
me more elitist, if I gotta use that word, to assume that everyone has
access to land to grow food, the time to grow it, or is where developing
that
skill set makes sense to them. Creating a garden from scratch can take more
resources than most people have; I have worked with a non-profit that set
up raised beds in low-income areas because it cost too much and took too
much time for people to grow their own food. McDonald's was cheaper and
faster. Gardening for them was a subsidized future, and not a real solution,
not
unless a lot of other things changed first.

Okay, broken record starting to happen here. I hope I've encouraged people
to think about where their own place to intervene most effectively in the
food system might be.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com



On May 13, 2010, at 2:50 PM, Ben Martin Horst wrote:

> On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 12:37 PM, Rain Tenaqiya
<raincascadia@yahoo.com>wrote:
>
>>
>> I hate how discussions on this list (and everywhere else, I guess) get
>> polarized,
>
>
> Hear, hear. I'm constantly flummoxed by people's knee-jerk responses to
> something that they obviously didn't read carefully but onto which
they've
> projected their own insecurities.
>
>
>> as I've mentioned before, and I think Toby contributes to this.
>
>
> I don't think Toby contributes to this at all. I don't always agree with
> him, but his posts -- whether original or responses to ongoing threads
--
> are typically well-reasoned, measured, and insightful. Even -- no,
> particularly -- when I disagree, I find that he forces me to look at
issues
> from angles I hadn't previously, and I come away with a better overall
> understanding. Toby has opinions, yes, and sometimes strong ones, but I
> don't think I've ever read anything of his that I would consider
polarizing.
> Counterweights to polarizing opinions, perhaps, but not themselves
> polarizing.
>
> All Toby did in this case was to point out that the myth of
self-sufficiency
> is one that has A) inspired countless thousands and B) bankrupted,
> disheartened, and burned-out most of those thousands. All of us know
> back-to-the-landers who gave it up and went back to shilling for the Man
> because it was just too hard. Toby didn't say "You can't be
> self-sufficient." If that's what you really, really want, go for it. But
> expect it to be infinitely harder than you imagined. Toby just
realistically
> suggested broadening the question "How can I grow all my own food?" with
> "How can I obtain my food in responsible, satisfying, ecological,
> permacultural ways?" That's likely -- but not necessarily -- to include
> growing a significant chunk of it, and encourages thinking about our
> relationships with the ecosystems and human systems around us.
>
> With all the flak Toby gets on this list and others, it amazes me that he
> hasn't gotten defensive or dropped off entirely. I think it speaks
volumes
> about his moral character that he ignores the personal attacks and sticks
> with the issues at hand.
>
>
>> I know he wants to stimulate discussion, but he doesn't have to make
the
>> issues sound so black and white (and I just got done reading all the
>> wonderful essay on your site, so I know you can do better). On the
other
>> hand, I do appreciate Lawrence's restraint in the tone of his responses.
>>
>>
> Really? I don't generally think calling someone a Monsanto PR hack --
> particularly in permaculture circles -- represents a "restrained
response."
> Perhaps this was an attempt at humor. It sounds to me more like an ad
> hominem attack. It's language I'd expect from a troll, not a list
moderator.
>
>
>> I feel the question about how much land it takes to grow one person's
food
>> has been framed in a way that unnecessarily encourages this debate. A
more
>> interesting question, for me, would be, "How much area in food forest is
>> reasonable per person, given a certain climate and available gardening
>> time?" Cities can probably typically grow 50% of their food. If urban
>> areas were planted in food forest, a lot of the heavier food could be
easily
>> obtained just outside your doorstep, reducing transport fuel needs. New
>> aquaponics techniques also have potential for urban areas. Growing
food
>> doesn't have to be a grueling enterprise for the specialized farmers.
And
>> this leads to questions of social equity and justice: if you don't
grow a
>> substantial portion of your own food, who is going to do it? This whole
>> debate has taken place with the apparent assumption that we are all
equals
>> who can freely choose our work. Not so. Most of the people on this
>> list are probably white middle class people who would be buying their
food
>> from poor brown immigrants if they didn't grow it themselves.
According to
>> David Holmgren, the peasant class is only going to get bigger as fossil
>> fuels become more scarce. Growing more of your own food is a slap in
the
>> face to class specialization and the stigmatization of doing such
"lowly"
>> work.
>>
>
> I didn't hear Toby saying anything that would argue with any of the
above.
> In fact, the above paragraph seems mostly to follow directly from the
sort
> of approaches Toby suggests.
>
> I know it's too much to expect of email lists -- and, given the history,
> this list in particular -- but I really wish folks would sit down with a
> post, digest it, and mull it over for a while before responding. Give it
a
> couple hours before you click "Send." Yes, we'll still have a lot to
> disagree over, but I would hope we can do it in civil ways.
>
> -Ben
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