permaculture

["John D'hondt" <dhondt@eircom.net>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "loren luyendyk" <loren@sborganics.com>
To: "Permaculture Listserve" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Saturday, August 03, 2013 6:31 AM
Subject: Re: [permaculture] The Gas We Eat


I think we all know that permaculture is the solution.  The problem is that 
most of the world is reliant on cheap nitrogen to survive- and my question 
is: How do we pragmatically shift from fossil fuel food to realtime sunlight 
food on the global scale?

< We won't Loren. Not pragmatically or otherwise because fossil fuel is a 
two hedged sword. The one cutting side made it possible for the human 
population to explode from about one billion to seven and a half billion in 
little more than a century.
The other cutting side at the same time is responsible for drastically 
reducing the carrying capacity of our planet. We are now loosing some 250 
species per day. That may seem a bit too far from our bed to worry about 
much but I can see it happening all around me and Ireland is not the worst 
place in the world. In the last 5 years we lost 95% of all our pollinators. 
In the last 15 years we lost most of the once plentiful sea fish and shell 
fish all around the coast here. That are just two examples that have an 
impact on my way of life directly and there are many more on the way that I 
can see.>

Fossil fuel food is cheap to produce, at least in the current system which 
does not account for all the externalities- which is basically environmental 
damage (ecosystem debit) as a result of food production.  Chemical 
fertilizer is about 1/10th the price of organic.  For example, if I am to 
give each tree 1 lb of actual nitrogen, it means I need to put out 25 lbs of 
organic fertilizer (4-0-0), or 2.5 lbs of urea (40-0-0).  When a farmer who 
is already struggling to make ends meet looks at this they say its 
impossible to be profitable with organics.  With annual systems you can 
rotate crops, and it is easier to grow your own nutrient.

<It is certainly difficult for a farmer to be profitable whether he uses 
organic or chemical fertilizer or nothing at all. Main reason being that a 
farmer has little to say about the price of the product he produces. In 
season I could buy 25 metric ton of potatoes straight from a farmer for 70 
euros or less per metric ton. Reason that farmer would love to sell to me is 
that he gets less from the big concerns he has to sell most of his crop to. 
Now you can look until your eye balls fall out here but you won't find 
potatoes under 1 euro per kilo anywhere. That is what the regular consumer 
pays and this means that somebody is making huge money on the farmers back 
(at least 930 euros per metric ton of potatoes). I could give litterally 
hundreds of examples like this.
So you could say that I have reasons to think it does not matter what system 
a farm uses, organic, chemical or permaculture. It will be very hard to make 
a living wage or real money at farming. There are a few exceptions but most 
of these are not quite moral or ethical. And before some market gardener 
feels insulted, I was thinking of a big multinational who has a million 
hectares cleared of all wild life and local population and then gets to use 
the land for a number of years for free and without caring whether it will 
not be a complete desert after that. This happens quite a lot these days in 
Africa, Asia and South America."

Of course we all know that there are other sources of nitrogen besides 
granular fertilizer, but this (biology) can take time to develop. 
Transition from chemical farming to organic can be a slow and expensive 
process, especially in perennial systems (orchards), so many farmers will 
not take that leap.  The transition to permaculture farming is even slower 
but potentially less expensive and more productive, as long as you don't 
have to pay for labor.

<agreed.>

It would take a tremendous effort (ie labor, hands) to produce the same 
amount of food the permaculture way as opposed to the way most of it is 
grown now- with machines at super high efficiency (albeit reliant on fossil 
resources, so not really efficient when we do a caloric accounting).  I am 
not promoting chemical or industrial farming, just making an observation. 
To feed the world with permaculture farming every family would have to grow 
their own food, and this is a pretty unrealistic proposal though definitely 
not impossible.

<Well no, not every family would have to grow their own food. It is well 
documented that a small family farm can produce many times more calories on 
an hectare say than is possible in a huge corn field on a similar hectare. 
And if we look at the food value of mineral and vitamin content and possibly 
the abscence of toxins there is no comparison at all.>

It is indeed a total conundrum- how would we feed the world without fossil 
fuels?  At this point the system is so entrenched that it is more likely 
that many millions (or billions) of people would die of starvation without 
cheap oil and natural gas.  And I am sure none of us would really want this 
to happen, as much as we may loathe fossil fuels.

<Well no, I for one would not like this to happen though I think that the 
end result will be unavoidable no matter what alternative clean energy can 
be developed. And I also think that the longer it takes for the end to come 
upon us the worse it will be. The carrying capacity of our world is being 
eroded ever faster.>

John in Ireland

<

Loren Luyendyk
(805)-452-8249
ISA Certified Arborist WE-7805A
www.sborganics.com
www.surferswithoutborders.org
www.globalpermaculture.com




> From: dhondt@eircom.net
> To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
> Date: Sat, 3 Aug 2013 00:35:48 +0100
> Subject: Re: [permaculture] The Gas We Eat
>
> Well yes, agriculture is sometimes defined as the conversion of oil into
> food through the agency of land. And as long as oil is cheap what with all
> environmental costs being externalized and companies like Monsanto making
> sure that there is no way back to more environmentally sound systems that 
> is
> likely to stay for a while. Until oil gets more expensive or until we 
> become
> extinct whichever comes first.
> Permaculture is our only hope really. I have never used artificial 
> nitrogen-
> there are some 8 metric tons of nitrogen gas pressing down on every square
> meter of surface on the planet and with a little bit of good management
> there are plenty of soil organisms that can convert more than enough of 
> this
> into plant useful food. Feed those organisms and you have all the nitrogen
> you could possibly want for free. Put out expensive artificial stuff and 
> you
> kill them off. Simple to solve I would think.
> John
>
>
>
> Nearly half of the world’s population owes its existence to food
>  grown with industrial nitrogen fertilizer produced from natural gas. (1)
> In 2004, journalist Richard Manning published an intriguing, if somewhat
> controversial, article in Harpers magazine called The Oil We Eat: Tracing
> the food chain back to Iraq. Manning notes that growing our food under the
> usual practices requires about 10 calories of fossil fuel energy for every
> calorie of food energy.
>   Preparing the soil to grow grains, especially corn and wheat, requires
>  a lot of energy and maintenance to rip up the soil every year in order
> to exclude other plants and create a non-competitive environment for the
>  seed to grow. In the case of no-till farming, energy is spent to make
> herbicides that, like the plow, block the natural process of ecological
> succession.
>
> full article:
> http://blogs.agu.org/terracentral/2013/04/28/the-gas-we-eat/
>
> Loren Luyendyk
> (805)-452-8249
> ISA Certified Arborist WE-7805A
> www.sborganics.com
> www.surferswithoutborders.org
> www.globalpermaculture.com
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> permaculture mailing list
> permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
> subscribe/unsubscribe|user config|list info|make a donation toward list
> maintenance:
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/permaculture
> message archives:  https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/permaculture/
> Google message archive search:
> site: lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/permaculture [searchstring]
> Permaculture Institute USA http://permaculture.org
> Avant Geared  http://www.avantgeared.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> permaculture mailing list
> permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
> subscribe/unsubscribe|user config|list info|make a donation toward list 
> maintenance:
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/permaculture
> message archives:  https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/permaculture/
> Google message archive search:
> site: lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/permaculture [searchstring]
> Permaculture Institute USA http://permaculture.org
> Avant Geared  http://www.avantgeared.com

_______________________________________________
permaculture mailing list
permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
subscribe/unsubscribe|user config|list info|make a donation toward list 
maintenance:
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/permaculture
message archives:  https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/permaculture/
Google message archive search:
site: lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/permaculture [searchstring]
Permaculture Institute USA http://permaculture.org
Avant Geared  http://www.avantgeared.com