Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikehain | Hacker News Reader

I've been recently enjoying a YouTube channel by a guy who turned his yard into a sustainable "food forest"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng-VskDFPpM

That is the video that led me to it, but after I saw it I went back through his video history to see how he got the whole project started and to see his progress over the years. He has a video in there where he recommends a series of books that he learned from, like Albert Howard's "An Agricultural Testament," Sepp Holzer's "Permaculture," and Masanobu Fukuoka's "One Straw Revolution." I've gotten started reading the first two and they're really great books.

View on HN

goodreads links for the books in question

Albert Howard - Agricultural Testament - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2225725.Agricultural_Tes...

Sepp Holzer's Permaculture: A Practical Guide to Small-Scale, Integrative Farming and Gardening - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10023218-sepp-holzer-s-p...

Masanobu Fukuoka - The One-Straw Revolution - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/976905.The_One_Straw_Rev...

---

You can read these books at archive.org.

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.270767

https://archive.org/details/SeppHolzersPermacultureAPractica...

https://archive.org/details/The-One-Straw-Revolution

Do you know about WWOOF? A great international organisation if you want to put your theory into action but don't have the means (yet) to start your own garden. Many of the organic farms are also permaculture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWOOF

It's amazing what they do. But I'd be weary of planting near urban areas. Both soil and water sources are very often heavily polluted with PCBs and other things.

In my city there's a club you pay a tiny monthly amount to get fruits delivered. And you can become a partner very easily.

His garden, is great for a snack or two, let's be serious about the rest. Grains, meat etc not gonna grow in a "forest" and one way or another we need those calories. Like or not we're gonna be 9 billion soon and they will need to eat.

I don't think this post is suggesting that all agriculture should take place in food forests. That's obviously not going to suit some species and would not be a balanced approach.

Folks definitely get yields of more than a snack or 2 out of food forests. Growing food from perennials in a multi-layered food forest is very efficient (minimum inputs), resilient (diverse layers designed to support each other, plants that are of age and established, healthy soil) and has many outputs (food, timber etc). Bill Mollison explains the birth of the idea here [0].

I am convinced that they are a key piece of the future if we are to feed the 9 billion people you speak of. I am also becoming convinced that industrial agriculture's tendency to plant vast amounts of monocultures does not have a place in that future.

Food forests are promoted through permaculture. The entirety of a permaculture farm wouldn't usually be dedicated to a forest like this. Grains have a place. So does meat.

There are plenty of permaculture farms out there producing meat, and it's not uncommon for this to take place in woodland. Within a forest you may find pigs and poultry[1]. As a part of a permaculture farm's systems there may be pastured cattle, poultry[2][3] and so on. Within this sphere you find farms like Mastodon Valley[4], where cattle are a key part of their regenerative agriculture. Then you have ponds designed for fish[5].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrtJbk8_GY8&t=16m20s

[1] https://youtu.be/GVQ8TUpvnDY?t=3m28s (woodland in this case, not a food forest)

[2] https://youtu.be/3Knn7ZH4Tiw?t=39m28s (a system where chickens follow cows in pasture)

[3] https://youtu.be/eFujalK2jHg?t=32m12s (using chickens to disturb an area in prep for establishing a new section of a food forest... continue watching for a few minutes to see an impressive chicken-pinning dog!)

[4] https://mastodonvalleyfarm.com

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2B2Nyji7v0 (establishing a fish pond and using cows from the farm as helpers)

Grains are cheap to buy. What these guys grow is expensive stuff out of reach for poor families.

that is the way forward, for a healthier future in our food and our planet. Unfortunately, the masses are still oblivious about those sort of techniques, and the big corps obviously don't want you to try it out.

Lets hope it wont be too late

With 7.5 billion people and counting, we have to be realistic about what it takes to feed everyone.

This is a myth. There is already enough food for everyone on Earth.

You might as well say climate change is a myth. We're out of agricultural space. Everything that means decreasing yields is a bad idea. The population growths, however land does not - it might even shrink due to climate change. While the high food waste is usually named as THE problem, it is only part of it and a wasteless utopia is far, far away - and stopping waste in place A doesn't really help people in place B.

>>We're out of agricultural space

This is not remotely true, unless you buy into the ridiculous Ausubel et al paper. Most conservative projections have it at 2040 for peak arable land, which is not the same as being out of agricultural space, and certainly not the same as denying climate change.

Efficiency of arable land per hectare is through the roof and continues to improve every decade by increasing multiplicative factors due to consolidation, regulation, and technology.

The problem is not food development, arable land, or generating calories at all. It is entirely in the distribution of the food and the political ramifications of such.

You're absolutely right - to add on, it's also the need to better disseminate farming technologies to people in the developing world, who get poor yields compared to Western farms (both organic and conventional).

Yes, thanks to the Green Revolution, which is based on 'chemical' fertilizers/pesticides and intensive farming practices. 'Permaculture' style 'farming' (it's more 'gardening', really) doesn't have anywhere close to the same yields.

(I have a 2 acre 'food forest', I'm not a 'Big AG apologist' or any of the dozens of other things I've been called over the years - I'm just realistic)

Actually this sort of farming does have more yield per acre, it just requires significantly more manual labour.

As tech evolves tho, I think we'll see chemical pesticides and herbicides replaced with mechanical solutions instead.

The world doesn't necessarily need to use industrial agriculture to achieve the same yields, the alternative is to be having many more farmers working smaller a plots and actually getting better yields from it.

If the yield of food per labor unit goes down, and we want to feed the worlds poor (aka keep food prices at least flat), that necessitates a substantial drop in farm labor wages. Seeing as migrant laborers are already pretty close to being slaves, reducing their wages is not going to result in a conscionable working situation.

I'd take environmental degradation over slavery, to be honest.

I meant 'yield per input unit', where 'input unit' is a not exactly defined mix of land, labor, external supply of matter, tools and technology/know how. Sure you can grow an acre of wheat to maximize 'caloric yield' (or potatoes depending on how much of the processing-before-consumption you account for...), or an acre of 'organic basil' to get a maximum 'pecuniary yield', or another thing or mix of things to maximize for whatever optimum function you choose. My point is that a 'solution' where we can theoretically feed 7/8 billion people if only double-digit percentages of them, say, pick apples from full size trees, careful to not damage the berries underneath with their ladders, instead of having a few people on tractors riding through dwarf orchards (just one example of something I happen to have done some economic analysis of the last week - there are similar examples in other areas of agriculture) is not really a 'solution' at all.

Now, I do agree with you that with even better technology than we have now, we can replace much of what we need chemistry for with mechanical solutions. Although, chemical application with modern systems can be dosed on areas measured in square feet, a long way from the 'a bit of nitrogen is good so double the amount is better' mentality of a few decades ago. But the future of agriculture is not in 'back to land' or 'permaculture' style farming. It's in more technology, not less, and less labor, not more.

A lower population would help.

Despite people's knee-jerk reactions, allowing the population to decrease doesn't have to mean anything about eugenics and economics doesn't require growth. On the contrary, growth and even staying at current levels have many problems.

The belief that we need to grow is carrying us toward disaster.

> The belief that we need to grow is carrying us toward disaster.

I can't agree with this more.

More than just belief, it is how the pension system works.

We need to think about an alternative to it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com