permaculture

[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 10:38 AM, Pete Gasper, Gasper Family Farm <
farmer1@gasperfarm.com> wrote:

> What kind of soil is underneath those fields? Here in America we'd consider
> that too steep to plant or do much anything with besides maybe cattle or
> scrub timber. But then you can't run a combine with a 30' header across it
> and our soils of such geography tend to have stone a few inches down. But I
> wonder if human scale agriculture could radically expend food production
> here via methods like that.
>

 The amount of planning that goes into the design, construction and soil
preparation of those terraces is incredible. I read an article on a group
that rebuilt some that had been damaged from erosion when the walls
collapsed. I guess construction methods vary according to materials
available on site but usually a lot of dry-laid stonework goes into the
foundation of each terrace wall. Drainage and wall reinforcement is part of
the process. I think some Asian rice terraces date back thousands of years.
The steep terrain was all the people had to work with, little or no flat
land. Here in the US the best farmland, prime, not marginal, should be
protected from development and made available for agricultural use only
employing natural methods and materials and permaculture.

There is no reason that prime farm soil on hilly terrain could not be
terraced and farmed productively. Depending on slope techniques using
Yeoman Keyline plows to backhoes, to skid loaders to track loaters to track
hoes could be used. Water would be a big issue and impoundments would be
necessary. I am talking about earthworks only, without any masonry
components unless they are abundant on site and can be used in situ along
with the soil used to build the earthworks. An in depth permaculture
systems design could be created using polyculture, livestock, fish,
crustaceans, crop diversity, post harvest methods that recycle byproducts,
chinampas, all ideas taken from certain terraced regions in the Phillipines
where permaculture is practiced traditionally and is the de facto standard
for their agricutural practices.

Sepp Holzer is doing great things on his hillside farm in Austria. There
are vast universes of knowledge that can be gained from traditional
agriculture as practiced in every country of the world. For the US Asian
countries seem to offer the most with a considerable amount from Middle
Eastern countries such as Iran, Iraq and Afganistan, with particular
reference to the water conservation and storage methods and water delivery
systems, i.e. quanats in Iran and irrigation tunnels in Afganistan, all
ancient systems. Of course much of this would not serve large scale
agriculture methods, i.e. broad acre farming, very well but would be of
immense value to local small scale farming units, individual, family, small
farm. Traditional indigenous farming systems need to be identified,
documented and preserved.