permaculture

[Paul Cross <charybda@newmex.com>]

I am not sure it matters much whether Lion understood (back in 2000) 
that Permaculture was a design system and not a farming technique. I 
think he was getting at this: if Permaculture is really some great 
design system for creating human habitats that provide for human needs 
while being ecologically regenerative, then show us the results. Show us 
all the small and mid-scale farms that are feeding hundreds or thousands 
of people, where the farms were designed by a permaculture practitioner. 
Then if you look at Andy's response, he says that Permaculture is the 
basis of Lion's microfarm, even though Lion's farm began before the word 
was even coined.

We've got over 7 billion people to feed and house. Permaculture has been 
around since 1974. Let's call it 40 years. That means there are a lot of 
designers out there now for a reasonably long period of time. Let's take 
just Toby's numbers here and extrapolate. He's trained 2300 people to be 
permaculture designers. They have each had somewhere between 1 and 15 
years to make and implement designs. Let's say these 2300  people have 
collectively done 50,00 designs. Now let's count how many people are 
being fed by these 50,000 designs. Oh but wait, only 10% actually became 
designers, so let's just add another 10 Tobys into the discussion, so 
that there were 23000 PDC graduates and then 2300 designers.

Let's count how many profitable farms there are out there now that were 
designed through this design system. It would stand to reason that if 
all these designers had all this time to do all these designs, we would 
have hundreds or thousands of permaculturally designed farms 
collectively feeding hundreds of thousands of people by now. But we 
don't. So either Lion's measure is off, or the design system is off, or 
the implementation of the designs are off, or permaculture designer's 
aren't designing farms. Or some other reason. Toby is a super smart and 
articulate guy who's taught the PDC curriculum. It's no reflection on 
Toby that permaculture designs are not feeding all that many people.

Let's say it costs $10 a day to eat. So $3650 a year. Then a 
permaculture farm with $100K annual sales feeds the equivalent of about 
27 people. How many $100K permaculture farms can we list?

If so many designers have had so much time and produced so many designs, 
why has it had so little impact on farming and on how people really eat? 
That is I think Lion's question from 15 years ago, and it still merits a 
response.

It's pretty easy to debunk the claim of permaculture as pyramid scheme. 
I hope Toby and others will consider tackling these other questions too.

Paul