Comment by vram22 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vram22 | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, Jean-Martin (JM) Fortier (Quebec) is a good example, though there are better / more comprehensive ones, and at larger scale too, see below. And JM is not even doing full permaculture, e.g. not using multi-height crops (i.e. ground covers through plants of a few more different heights to top canopy trees, 100 or more feet tall), so as to use more of the available sunlight and underground nutrients (shrub roots can go deeper than herbs, and trees even deeper, and what is brought up from deeper can be shared with shallow-rooting plants via compost, chop-and-drop, etc.). And he still makes fairly high profits per acre / person / year, i.e. overall. He has many videos about his work, both the technicals and commercials, on YouTube. Search by his name as well as for a great series titled Les Fermiers. And some examples higher on the axes of land area as well as permaculture and / or regenerative agriculture, vs. "just" organic farming, include:

- Gabe Brown, 20+ years at it, 4 or 5000? acres, mixed grasses (grains) and broadleaf crops, cover crops, livestock (beef, pigs, etc.), land getting better each year, saves hugely on synthetic fertilizer and pesticide (see a chart in his Treating The Farm as an Ecosystem video), profits better too, and higher than his synthetic-using and tilling neighbors and state averages (ND, USA), and going up the value chain, so getting more of the final consumer dollar vs. middlemen. The average take for "conventional" US farmers is quite low, he says. Oh, and he does not need or take govt. farm subsidies, as many others do.

Has many videos too, search for his name. Check the comparative stats and photos.

- Richard Perkins, Sweden. Not sure of area, but above a few acres at least, maybe 25. Mixed stuff again. High profits again. Videos again. Many years' good results again.

- Last but one of the best, Geoff Lawton (NSW, AU), long time permaculture expert (learned from Bill Mollison), doer, 66 acre Zaytuna Farm, is real mixed farm plus demonstration site, yearly trains many interns, consultant (to small orgs through to countries). Ditto for many of above points like axes, diversity, profits, improving over time, cost savings, etc. etc.

Edited for typos.

Also see, very significantly, Elaine Ingham, soil (biology) scientist, Ph.D., also founder of startup soilfoodweb.com (to consult and get her research applied widely).

Almost all the farmers I mentioned above, quote her work with respect and apply it in their operations, and consider it key to their results. She (along with many other researchers, over years, not a sudden thing) has come out with some rather startling results that, as I said, are being applied by these guys and many others. A key result is that it is the quantity and diversity of the life in the soil that is as (or more) important to soil health and hence farm results (now and long term) as the actual levels of plant nutrients in the soil. And this is because it is the soil life (they use the term "biology" for it, but okay, go with the prevailing term the experts use) that makes the chemical nutrients available in forms that plants can actually use, via a deep symbiosis and mutual helping that happens between plants and the soil biology, which includes bacteria, fungi, archaea, nematodes, arthropods and small animals.

Another quite surprising / non-intuitive result is her saying that most or all soils on earth, already have many times more the amounts of nutrients than plants need, like 1000x more, including macro (e.g. N, P, K) and micro ones (like trace elements), so the limiting factor is really the soil biology, which depends a lot on soil organic matter content (all those critters need to eat), humidity and temperature, all of which are helped by organic farming, permaculture and regenerative agriculture practices like applying organic fertilizer (manure, compost, etc.), mulching, and cover cropping (according to her, more for the organic matter than for the nutrients per se).

Check her video below in which she talks about all these things.

Watch "The Roots of Your Profits - Dr Elaine Ingham, Soil Microbiologist, Founder of Soil Foodweb Inc" on YouTube:

https://youtu.be/x2H60ritjag

Thanks a lot for sharing all this. I'm a geek for efficient farming and this is great! You've provided content for months.

Welcome, and glad you think so :)

Forgot to say:

Gabe runs his operation with only a handful of people, maybe 4 total, plus a few interns, who are more of a liability than asset, so also say Richard and JM - at least initially :)

And Gabe uses some machines for scale, including a few he and friends innovated / improvised, IIRC.

Another such farmer like Gabe, JM, Richard etc. above, is Krishna McKenzie, Solitude Farm, Auroville, Tamil Nadu, India. Englishman who studied as a kid in a J. Krishnamurti school in England, came to Auroville ~20 years ago, started Solitude with friends, and has been there ever since. Inspired by Masanobu Fukuoka and his book, One Straw revolution. Has met him. Mixed crops, fruit trees, grains (including millets), many vegetables including common ones, plus less-known but traditionally eaten high-food-and-medicinal-value indigenous local and Indian ones, some in regular beds, some intermixed in a food forest, again utilizing more layers of sunlight and underground soil than single layer traditional monoculture. Again, has intern program, video channel, trains others in the community, gives talks, runs a popular on-premise vegan and raw food restaurant supplied by the farm itself.

Nowadays doing more training work and helping others in the area to bootstrap community permaculture gardens, since there is much more interest in food security, local food, lowering food miles, traditional-but-forgotten-plants-as-food, weeds as food, etc., since the coronavirus pandemic started.

>Search by his name as well as for a great series titled Les Fermiers.

I should have said that Les Fermiers is in French - Quebec dialect, ha ha, they pronounce oui (French for yes) as way instead of wee, for example, but it has English subtitles, so English speakers can easily understand it.

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