permaculture

[Norris Thomlinson <norristh@gmail.com>]

> From: Andrew Millison <amillison@gmail.com
>
> Hello,
> I'm putting together a funding proposal for a State agency who are
> requesting Permaculture training for their staff.
>
> I need to include data in the proposal with *verifiable sources*. Some
> examples of the types of statements I'd like to clarify and back up are:
>
> * Intensive garden agriculture is X% more productive per unit of area than
> conventional mechanized field cropping and require X% less
> energy/water/dollars to maintain.
>
> Does anyone out there have sources for useful data to make
> Permaculture-supporting statements? I'd really appreciate any input.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Andrew Millison
> www.beaverstatepermaculture.com

Hey Andrew,

This doesn't exactly address the "Intensive garden agriculture" X%
elements you listed above, but it might help you as a data point...
As I might have told you on a tour earlier this year, we've started
recording the weights of all the food we harvest from our yard (about
7000 square feet of growing space), and putting into a database with
caloric information.  We've only been keeping records since April
15th, so don't have a full year-long picture yet.  Much of our yard is
in immature fruit & nut trees, or less-than-optimally-designed
chicken-ravaged playground, or
perennial-vegetable-experiments-turning-out-not-to-yield-us-anything-much,
so I wouldn't use our data for calculating yield or calories per
square foot.

BUT I think we have a very good assessment of home-scale garden time
input:food output with our data.  We've harvested an average of nearly
600 calories a day, and estimate we spend at most an average of one
hour per day between the two of us to maintain and harvest everything.

Our harvest log, periodically updated when I feel like doing data
entry: http://discountpermaculture.com/cgi-bin/harvest.py

My first blog post introducing our harvest log:
http://farmerscrub.blogspot.com/2010/05/harvest-log.html
A new blog post I just wrote with comments on where we're at now:
http://farmerscrub.blogspot.com/2010/09/harvest-log-update.html

I hope that helps you, Andrew, and anyone else who's interested!

Norris Thomlinson
Portland, OR
http://farmerscrub.blogspot.com
http://discountpermaculture.com

-- 
"The absolute bottom line is: what methods of food production build
topsoil while using only ambient sun and rain?  *Because nothing else
is sustainable.*"

Lierre Keith, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability