permaculture

[Koreen Brennan <cory8570@yahoo.com>]

Yes - these articles are simplistic looks at permaculture design which is a 
worldview  as much as anything. What would happen on this planet if every 
designer of any system, whether agriculture, industrial, community, economic, 
political, etc, thought about all the ways that they could incorporate 
permaculture principles into the design? It doesn't take a rocket scientist 
nor decades of careful study to understand that observing a system, accepting 
feedback, capturing energies and reusing waste, producing a yield, creating 
resilience in systems, etc, etc, are going to have positive and desirable 
results. If some people want to do that with food forests in their backyard, 
great. If some people want to do that with market gardens, great. If some 
people want to do that as urban planners or bicycle athletes or dentists, or 
whatever, great! Of course, our ability to apply these principles can always 
be improved upon. It seems to me to be far more
 productive to focus on helping each other improve upon those things rather 
than argue about which is better, market gardening or enthusiastic backyard 
gardeners? As Jason says, there are bigger problems at stake and frankly I 
feel that all of us, in all sectors, will be needed to solve them. It seems 
that are biggest challenge we face may be in figuring out how we can work 
with each other rather than against each other......And that is really too 
bad. 

And maybe working with nature instead of against her might just help us 
figure out how to do that with each other too. 

***
From Jason:
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.


Koreen Brennan

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




On Tuesday, January 28, 2014 7:51 AM, John D'hondt <dhondt@eircom.net> wrote:
  

<<What you say strikes right to the heart
 of the mattter Jason.
But we have complications here in Europe. To be recognised as a farm we need 
to maintain 14 livestock units on our land consisting of cattle and sheep (6 
sheep for one livestock unit). We have also been working towards 
permaculture for almost 30 years and because of this we now loose our only 
subsidy in the government's drive towards more industrial farming. More than 
40 % of our acerage is under trees and shrubs and that made we just lost our 
only subsidy or about 1/3 rd of our gross income.
This means that we will be haemoraging losses for every livestock unit we 
produce from now on. And because of our weather conditions (climate is gone) 
there is no way we can grow high value plant-food-crops enough to survive 
financially.
We find ourselves on a sinking permaculture ship.

John in Ireland

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
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Tuesday, January 28, 2014, 12:50:28 PM, you wrote:


JDh> <<What you say strikes right to the heart of the mattter Jason.
JDh> But we have complications here in Europe. To be recognised as a farm we 
need
JDh> to maintain 14 livestock units on our land consisting of cattle and 
sheep (6
JDh> sheep for one livestock unit). We have also been working towards
JDh> permaculture for almost 30 years and because of this we now loose our 
only
JDh> subsidy in the government's drive towards more industrial farming. More 
than
JDh> 40 % of our acerage is under trees and shrubs and that made we just lost 
our
JDh> only subsidy or about 1/3 rd of our gross income.
JDh> This means that we will be haemoraging losses for every livestock unit we
JDh> produce from now on. And because of our weather conditions (climate is 
gone)
JDh> there is no way we can grow high value plant-food-crops enough to survive
JDh> financially.
JDh> We find ourselves on a sinking permaculture ship.

JDh> John in Ireland

At risk of going off-topic, but I am slightly puzzled by your post. The 14 LU
requirement, isn't that for the organic scheme? Are you loosing your Single 
Farm
Payment because of the tree/scrub cover?
Or are you loosing your organic scheme payment for some reason?
It is a sad reality that the Irish
govt. has not even begun to embrace agro-forestry despite the many advantages 
it
offers in this climate. Under the agri-environmental schemes they pay farmers 
to
maintain, even develop new farm habitats and under the Single Farm Payment 
they
encourage farmers to rip them out. Just last week I sat with a farmer who was
docked SFP for a patch of gorse he had not excluded from his forage area. He 
is
in his last year in REPS (the Irish EU-financed agri-environmental scheme)
and in 2015 he is going to get out the bulldozer to get
rid of the gorse, one of the few native woody N-fixers we have in Ireland and 
a
good habitat plant for birds, early forage for bees and so on. The right hand
does not know what the left is doing. It's insane and frustrating.

Have you seen the recent article by George Monbiot on flooding, the CAP and 
the
Welsh farmers in Pontbren? 
http://www.monbiot.com/2014/01/13/drowning-in-money/
Incidentally the Pontbren initiative seems well-researched at this point both 
in
terms of economics and downstream (literally!) environmental benefits.

I hear your frustration, John. The climate/weather in this country, especially
in the wild and wet West is not one for locavore vegetarians or for perennial
cropping (unless you include perennial grasses in that definition). It is meat
and potato land with a few berries and annual vegetables thrown in. If we 
hadn't
f***** up the salmon streams and gotten rid of the ancient woodlands, it would
probably as "easy" to live off salmon and hunted deer and wild boar than it is
nowadays to make a living off sheep or cattle in an ever wetter environment.
We've seen a 10% increase in rainfall in the 1980-2010 period compared to the
previous reference period 1970-2000, coming from an already high base in the
west, and that's with a warming of only 0.5C. I am truly scared to think of a
2C warming scenario. Better build a boat and focus on duck production...
At 1200-1400 mm rainfall in a cool temperate environment at 53N (i.e. not a 
lot
of evaporation) I find myself constantly trying to work out how to get rid of
water, very much in contrast to the "slow, sink, and spread" messages coming
from other climes (and rightly so of course). We are headed here for twice the
average rainfall this January, on already completely saturated ground. I dare
not think of your own situation, John, with the hills behind you and the
forestry (anti-biodiversity matchstick grant-farming) drains dumping water on 
your land.

Searching for evapotranspiration figures for woodland v. grassland I came 
across
this publication recently: "Water Use by Trees" from the British Forestry
Commission: http://www.forestry.gov.uk/pdf/FCIN065.pdf/$FILE/FCIN065.pdf
They look at the issue from the view of groundwater yield (how much
groundwater discharge do we loose under different types of woodland) so we 
have
to read it and kind of reverse the message in our head (how much of the annual
rainfall can the trees remove from our super-saturated soils by way of
interception and transpiration - quite a lot as it turns out).
If we can double up evapotranspiration from grassland plus woodland in
agro-forestry systems we might stand a chance. Better still, we can fix 
nitrogen
(alder) and feed livestock (willow, alder and other species) with these trees 
and yield
fuelwood too.
Unfortunately neither the Common Agricultural Policy nor the Irish govt.
realize this, reinforcing the segregation into grassland on one side of the
fence and non-native conifers on the other with the latter dumping acidified
drainage water onto the former and killing what fish are left in the 
waterways.
As George Monbiot writes:
"If other farmers want to copy the Pontbren model, not only must they pay for
the trees themselves; but they must sacrifice the money they would otherwise
have been paid for farming that land. For � and here we start to approach the
nub of the problem � there is an unbreakable rule laid down by the Common
Agricultural Policy. If you want to receive your single farm payment � by the
far biggest component of farm subsidies � that land has to be free from what 
it
calls �unwanted vegetation�(10). Land covered by trees is not eligible. The
subsidy rules have enforced the mass clearance of vegetation from the hills."

Best regards from County Clare,
Ute