permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>]

It is a good question, Paul, and I think there are several layers of answers.

One is that farmers are incredibly conservative, with good reason, and won’t 
make changes that risk failure until they are assured by multiple examples 
that the new method is viable. So there’s a catch-22 for commercial farmers 
to make the shift: who’s going to be the first or even third? But I have 
observed that when a rancher or farmer implements a permaculture design—and 
keyline is one of the most common examples—a couple of the neighbors see how 
much more profitable the system is in the long run ( a former grazier 
neighbor got a 30% premium for the animals he ran) and they make a limited 
shift. But most of the neighbors regard the guy as crazy and won’t go near 
it. It took organic about 40 years to enter the mainstream—in a world where 
many old farmers had been organic--and that was only a relatively small shift 
in technique, while permaculture requires many shifts, and an entire shift in 
worldview. Much less likely.

Then there is the fact that to the average person, industrial farming and 
commercial organic are working sort of okay, so why change. We don’t “need” 
permaculture as far as the mainstream is concerned—food is cheap and 
abundant—so there is no point in fixing what isn’t broken. Inertia is a huge 
factor. Hell, we’re facing potential planetary extinction in the next 
decades, and we’re doing nothing about it, so how can you expect a species 
like that to give up industrial ag just because it kills a few birds, or 
whatever?

Add to that the giant subsidies for commodity crops and conventional methods, 
which creates a terrific economic disincentive to adopting a new system. 
There’s both expense and risk; that’s deadly. The competition from Big Ag is 
overwhelming. The food system is already stacked against small conventional 
producers; add in the extra cost (the lack of externalization) of 
permaculture design, and there’s little possibility of competing with it 
except in special circumstances. People want cheap food, and most don’t care 
how it is grown. So the market won’t support it and is rigged against it.

The food system is built by and for Big Ag, and the anti-organic, 
anti-permaculture propaganda coming from USDA and Extension is overpowering. 
I’ve been up against it, and many Extension agents are virulently 
anti-permaculture. WSU Extension's Linda Chalker-Evans, gardendoctors.com is 
a good example; her blog bashes permaculture repeatedly. So there is active, 
well-financed opposition.

Then there are the people like Lion whom you would expect to be an 
ally—aren’t we all aligned against Big Ag and business as usual?—who  bash 
permaculture. There are quite a few of those, throwing rocks at the friendly 
people near them instead of uniting against a common and deadly enemy. This 
is one of the stupidest things that our community could be doing, there’s a 
lot of it, and it’s self-indulgent and very damaging. It’s a sickness that 
the counterculture has and it delights and benefits the rich elites. We need 
to stop doing it.

Permaculture is just beginning to pass beyond the phase where only 
visionaries and malcontents can see its potential and the rationale for its 
use. I expect it will become more widespread (and it is) as we continue into 
climate disruption and energy descent. It has penetrated far more deeply into 
the less-developed world than it has in the industrialized nations because 
there is a need in that world, and little need, so far, for it in this one.

I don’t see farming as a potent leverage point for implementing permaculture 
design. I think, as Joel does, now that we’ve figured out that you can design 
anything using permaculture—which took about 30 years for us to grasp—that 
the biggest implementations will be (and are now) in urban and social 
permaculture. Those PDC grads aren’t designing many farms; there’s no market. 
They are designing their own yards, their neighbors’ yards, and organizing 
their communities, schools, and businesses along permaculture principles. 
When Big Ag starts to crack under its self-induced strains, we’ll take that 
one on. But probably not before. You don’t go up against your opponent where 
they are strongest, and Big Ag has trillions. There are much smarter places 
than farms for us to be working. That’s why there are a lot more permaculture 
neighborhoods than there are permaculture farms. 

That’s why people like Lion are missing the point when they fix on how many 
tomatoes we are selling. It’s the wrong metric. 

Toby
tobyhemenway.com

Just out: my new book on urban permaculture, The Permaculture City. Order it 
at your favorite bookseller or get a signed copy from me at  
http://tobyhemenway.com/book/the-permaculture-city/



> On Aug 25, 2015, at 8:23 AM, Joel Glanzberg <patternmind@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Great Question Paul,
> 
> I'd phrase it a bit differently, give that I don't think about it as an ag
> system but a whole systems design for human habitation of which food is a
> part. Food production has been a much greater focus in places that see food
> as an issue, like Africa, while land reclaimation has been more of a focus
> in the West.
> 
> For me the question is why have we not made greater changes in all of the
> systems we need to? When I see photos of Flowering Tree it is impressive as
> a food forest island in a desert...and then I wonder why is it still an
> Island? Why did Fukuoka's farm remain an island?
> I think that we have not been designing the processes of implementation to
> actually influence larger systems, somehow believing that folks will want
> to join in to a good thing.
> 
> I think that the real potential of PC is designing change efforts if we
> would use it in that way. It is ot about designing a farm but designing the
> process for the self-creation of farms...or economies, or communities. This
> is why observation of the forces is so critical. We are not trying to
> decide the best array but the smallest changes that will result in the best
> array. This is where we have failed in shifting larger systems: we have not
> been thinking about or designing these as essential portions of every
> physical design we do.
> 
> that's what I think
> 
> Joel
> 
> On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 11:35 PM, Paul Cross <charybda@newmex.com> wrote:
> 
>> 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
>> 
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> practicing and teaching permaculture
> while designing ecological, biointensive land use systems with integrated 
> elements for synergy, sustainability, regeneration and enhanced 
> nature-compatible
> human habitat --