permaculture

[Koreen Brennan <cory8570@yahoo.com>]

Thanks for sharing Juan. For the record, it's not all like that! There are 
people who take a lot more care with design and who accept the feedback loop 
more thoroughly. Please don't conclude that all permaculture is like the one 
experience you have described. 

I've made some major mistakes (and most people who have taken on difficult 
projects have) but also learned from them and that is the real test of 
permaculture. 

 

Koreen Brennan

Urban Permaculture Design Course Tampa Bay - Feb 22 - May 18, 2014
www.growpermaculture.com
www.facebook.com/growpermaculturenow




On Monday, January 27, 2014 5:03 PM, Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com> 
wrote:
 
Juan, thanks for this excellent story. Designing with carefully stated goals 
in mind, rather than falling in love with a technique, be it natural farming 
or hugelkutlur or whatever, is critical.  One of the reasons permaculture is 
so hard to sell to "numbers" people, and to farmers who must make a living 
from their land, is that we are designing for the needs of more than just 
humans. We are sharing the yields. I think this was lurking behind much of 
what the author of the "Trouble" article was trying to get at when she talked 
about how little actual food was coming from some permaculture sites. Food 
forests are probably not going to produce as much human food, in terms of 
nutrition, as an annual vegetable garden can, unless we shift to eating a lot 
of nuts or grow carb crops in the openings. 

I think part of the great appeal of food forests is that we intuitively know 
that they create tons of habitat and ecosystem functions, and we eco-types 
want that. But people forget that when energy flows are dispersed among many 
recipients, the net yield for people almost always goes down. Many people 
build a food forest thinking they are going to get lots of meals from it—they 
think their goal is to have a food forest, but their goal is really to have 
food. But unless large parts of a food forest are devoted to standard calorie 
crops at first, while the nut crops mature, they won't get much food from it 
compared to what they could get from the same amount of ground devoted to 
annual crops. 

The author complained that one forest garden was using up good farmland that 
could have been yielding more human food, but she was ignoring the non-human 
yields. That's one-dimensional thinking, and it's thinking that permaculture 
is primarily about food. It's hard for me to look at a straight veggie garden 
and feel that permaculture's ethics and principles are being met, because 
it's all for people. Even adding some flowers leaves out all the perching and 
bark-probing birds, and many, many other species. If you live in an area 
where forest or shrubland is native, you need to mimic that structure to 
provide for the rest of nature. If you have an intense annual garden, you 
should be tending several times as much good habitat to make up for it.

So most complete permaculture systems, if they are to truly practice 
EarthCare, must be more extensive than a comparable food garden. And in a 
time when the everything is measured in money, and when we want direct reward 
for all our work, the "low" yields per acre of natural farming or of food 
forests are going to be looked at by the measurement people as inefficient. 
That's because permaculturists, at least, the smart ones, know that we are 
sharing Gaia amongst all creatures.

The trouble with permaculture, as many of the article's commenters pointed 
out, is not permaculture, it's the permaculturists who don't get that.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com


On Jan 27, 2014, at 12:11 PM, Juan Manuel Burgos wrote:

> Personally i believe and fell that this article hits just right in the nail 
> in some aspects that need to be seen with new eyes about permaculture
> 
> I'm definately not as much experiences as many of the permaculture 
> teacher's and practitioners around here, or that i have met in the time (4 
> years aprox.) since i'm practicing and discovering this magnificent 
> art-science-game that's permaculture design as a tool for reconecting 
> ourselves to the earth, it's messages, it's language, and also with each 
> other. we inhabitants and crew of this "spaceship" called Gaia, or Mother 
> Earth. But after many experiences, and specially the last year, where i've 
> been taking care of a small piece of land (400 sq Mts), hosting workshops 
> for other teachers, teaching a bit myself, and also implementing many 
> "recipes and techniques" i can say i've lived on flesh some of the things 
> mentioned by the author.
> 
> It's quite noticeable at this point of permacultre history that not 
> everything that has been taught and said about it it's just like that, 
> right, an unquestionable truth. In fact, i feel, that as every other model, 
> it has to be questioned. Let us grant ourselves the chance of doing it with 
> an objective, critic, and open heart-mind attitude, so as to "obtain a 
> yield" from the experiences we live and also the ones other fellow partners 
> are finding on their way.
> 
> Not all the world wants to be a forest garden. That's a fact. We speak of 
> regeneration of the eart, ok, let's do it, but sahara desert, probably will 
> want to be just like that, it is the porpouse of it's existence, same as 
> some other landscapes. We're in a point where experience shows as what 
> works, what doesn't, and for sure when future generations take our place, 
> they will say to them (with a thankful and mindful attitude) thank you 
> ancestors for doing the best you could, we can see now that you've missed 
> the point here and there, and we have to responsibility to keep on working 
> to continue and improoving what you've done. Personally i even think that 
> they will almost transform the name...maybe DInamiCulture...the only thing 
> that's permanent, is change.
> 
> My biggest teacher this year has been the vegetable garden. At firts, 
> implemented during a workshop (the way i see it, a little bit to 
> "hyperventilated") held by a well known teacher from around here 
> (argentina). Without a detailed design, a lot of soil was moved, in a 
> single day. The idea was to make a "Ecosistemic Garden" something similar 
> to what Emilia Hazzelip proposes as Synergistic Agriculture. After a year 
> trying to plan and implement sowing, harvest, growing, managing, etc. of 
> this piece of land, it was obvious it had to be redesigned. Completely. 
> After a big and hard work, alone, it was done. Now the space usage has been 
> optimized, water-wise design implemented, maintenance tasks far better 
> done, and many more benefits. The first proposal was a chaotic garden, 
> profitable for Gaia, but not for people, at least in the context of a plot 
> of land that you expect to get a yield in the short term, so as, in the 
> future, implement a garden that can
 manage itself without that
>  much energy. Now, it is another fact that there's some kind of work that 
>we have to do in order to obtain a yield. Nature works "Wu Wei" style, but 
>it takes a time to do so in spaces where we have to regenerate broken 
>cycles. Until that, it's wise enought to honour and respect what elders and 
>ancestors have done, according to each specific context, and not fall in the 
>tendency of "Reinventing the Wheel" constantly. One tendency that many of us 
>seem to have, in some grade at least.
> 
> Just my two cents, sharing a little bit of recent experience, flowing along 
> with this open minded attitude of viewing this we're doing objectively and 
> reduce our margin of error. Of course, our mistakes are valuable indeed, 
> for they hold the possibility of growing, evolving and learning about this 
> path of re-connecting with the nature, it's language, and the way we can 
> correctly interact with it and everything that surrounds it.
> 
> Juan Manuel Burgos
> Integral Permaculture Designer
> Ananda AIken MultiEspacio PermaCultural
> http://anandaaikenmultiespacio.wordpress.com

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Ann Owen�s article on Resilience.org and Richard Perkins in Permaculture
Magazine give very short shrift to the level of thought that the topic of
the role data, or lack thereof, plays in permaculture. I hope to hear
others thoughts on this. I�ll offer mine.

First, it seems an underlying assumption about why permaculturists need
good data is because we are having a hard time convincing farmers to adopt
permaculture. I�m not sure there is commonality among permaculturists of
what that would even look like. Are we talking farmers giving up their row
crops for hugelkultur mounds, sheet mulch, pastured poultry, food forests?
Or are we talking about farmers adopting permaculture as an integrated
design system? I would hope the latter. That way we can evaluate whether
the above techniques would even make any sense on a farm scale.

Second, if we are looking at permaculture as a design system, what does it
look like to have data on that? How does one compare a farm designed using
permaculture to one that wasn�t? Does it come down to crop yield to labor
ratios solely? I would think this is a rather limited view on yield, as
most permaculturists I know would consider quality of life for the farmers,
ecosystem health, ecosystem services, and many other factors. For ecosystem
services alone, any ecologist will tell us, they are very hard to quantify.
I think most of us would agree that the lack of viewing agricultural
practices through a lens of ecosystem impacts and services is what has
gotten us in a lot of trouble to begin with. So how do we quantify that
kind of yield, and all the other theoretically unlimited yields to be had
out there?

Last, a story�I had a consultation on a 30 acre integrated animal/vegetable
farm last week and ran directly into the issue of farmers adopting
permaculture. When I bluntly asked the farm owner what he was looking to
net financially, he said, �we aren�t netting a profit, we just need to stop
losing money�. As he said that, we both swallowed pretty hard as we hit
upon the deep sadness of what it means to be a modern day farmer. It was a
candid moment as we looked over the rolling farmland. For many farmers it
is more a question of how to keep doing what they love without going into
debt to do it. To a large degree farmers are underwater. They can�t
consider an alternative to what they know because their slim margins can�t
support the risk. It�s easier for a farmer to say, �permaculture is for the
birds�, than to consider it seriously, because they actually can�t consider
it, seriously! We�re in a state of triage for farmers and the planet. The
question is how do we stop the bleeding using permaculture design?

Unfortunately, this is what we are up against, and it takes a tremendous
amount of creativity to solve these problems, not just data. I don�t doubt
the value of data, as there might be some surprises in there, but we can
make some pretty educated guesses about what the data at this point will
tell us, i.e. that we have a lot of work to do to improve marketable crop
yield in permaculture designed systems. So is data what most
permaculturists really need to focus on? I tend to think we need a longer
period of wide-eyed enthusiasm to try out all the crazy ideas we can come
up with to see if they work, and if they do, document them, then replicate
them, then document that. Its apples to oranges in a way; comparing
something that has had some 40 years to experiment with versus 10,000.
Patience with those overly zealous permaculturists who think they can save
the world might actually serve us, as they might be the ones to find that
bigger kernel. What�s it gonna hurt, our chance to reach farmers with
permaculture? I haven�t been wide-eyed enough to believe that for a long
time now. There are much bigger issues preventing that. I do believe
permaculture as a design system has a very good chance to solve some of
those bigger issues, which might be what most permaculturists should focus
on.

Jason Gerhardt

-- 
PO Box 4355
Boulder, CO 80306
720-496-9744