To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>, Andew Millison <amillison@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [permaculture] Perma-Data needed!
Date: Sat, 4 Sep 2010 22:04:52 -0700
> From: Andrew Millison <amillison@gmail.com
>
> Hello,
> I'm putting together a funding proposal for a State agency who are
> requesting Permaculture training for their staff.
>
> I need to include data in the proposal with *verifiable sources*. Some
> examples of the types of statements I'd like to clarify and back up are:
>
> * Intensive garden agriculture is X% more productive per unit of area than
> conventional mechanized field cropping and require X% less
> energy/water/dollars to maintain.
>
> Does anyone out there have sources for useful data to make
> Permaculture-supporting statements? I'd really appreciate any input.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Andrew Millison
> www.beaverstatepermaculture.com
Hey Andrew,
This doesn't exactly address the "Intensive garden agriculture" X%
elements you listed above, but it might help you as a data point...
As I might have told you on a tour earlier this year, we've started
recording the weights of all the food we harvest from our yard (about
7000 square feet of growing space), and putting into a database with
caloric information. We've only been keeping records since April
15th, so don't have a full year-long picture yet. Much of our yard is
in immature fruit & nut trees, or less-than-optimally-designed
chicken-ravaged playground, or
perennial-vegetable-experiments-turning-out-not-to-yield-us-anything-much,
so I wouldn't use our data for calculating yield or calories per
square foot.
BUT I think we have a very good assessment of home-scale garden time
input:food output with our data. We've harvested an average of nearly
600 calories a day, and estimate we spend at most an average of one
hour per day between the two of us to maintain and harvest everything.
--
"The absolute bottom line is: what methods of food production build
topsoil while using only ambient sun and rain? *Because nothing else
is sustainable.*"
Lierre Keith, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability