What is permaculture? (2015)

1. At-home farmers who are eating healthier, but paying for the privilege.

2. People who are quiet because they're actually making very good money doing what they're doing.

3. People who haven't quite grasped that permaculture and/or homesteading are still farming, and farming is still hard work despite how blog-friendly you make it.

4. People trying to sell their "next best thing" marketing to hopeful mommmy bloggers.

I am currently a #1 hoping to become a #2 eventually. Online, I predominantly follow #2s and they never try and sell me classes, PDFs, etc, because they're busy making money farming.

your comment makes me think of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35847327

Permaculture is mostly about growing food for yourself and local friends

And people do: http://permacomputing.net/

Checkout "Stefan Sobkowiak - The Permaculture Orchard" via his YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@StefanSobkowiak. TL;DR, he purchased an apple orchard and started applying permaculture principals to create sustainable business. For example, he took every third apply tree and cut it down to replace with a "Nitrogen Fixing" sort of tree in addition planting other smaller plants and shrubs in between the trees (see "syntropic agroforestry") and overall he's had tremendous success. This would be the best video of him explaining his success with applying permaculture - https://youtu.be/zArUk3THIV0.

Another person to checkout is "Shawn Dubrowsky - EdibleAcres" via his YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/@edibleacres. He basically applies permaculture principals to feed himself/wife on a substance level and runs a tree nursery business.

This is what the "but we don't need to farm animals, it's a waste, we can just eat the plants instead" crowd don't get.

You can't eat the kind of plants you can grow, where people grow plants to raise animals.

Sure, keep saving to buy land, but don't forget it is something you can practice in the middle of the city too.

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

The idea with permaculture is that you minimize (ideally eliminate) the need for fertilizer, herbicide and pesticide imports using effective composting and crop rotation (biological nitrogen fixation) and integrated pest management (raising insects that eat crop pests etc.) and water recycling systems and so on.

Scaling this approach to tens of thousands of acres for reliably feeding even a medium-sized city seems challenging, but there appear to be some 1000-acre permaculture farms out there. However, yields are likely to be lower per acre with this approach as practices like using high fertilizer imports to allow double-cropping don't fit the permaculture model.

First, assuming that people are growing all sorts of things, and not trying to monoculture, you will get an explosion in different kinds of insects and their predators.

Second, you should get an explosion of colour

thirdly, assuming the growth of trees, creepers and other vines, coolers daytime temperatures, and reduced winds

fourthly, and possibly more importantly, much higher water retention.

Big Ag is extremely destructive to the environment, because it doesn't respect existing environments & ecosystems, instead seeing them as a blank canvas for terraforming and imposing industrial processes.

Where are you getting the idea that Big Ag has less environmental impact than a backyard garden???

>They will say stuff like "it's practically free to have all this free food I grew on my lawn", while ignoring the massive amount of labor they put in,

It doesn't require much labor. That's one of the main points — permaculture is about working with nature rather than against it. Instead of tilling and pumping soil full of mined fertilizer, you use the natural processes appropriate for your local environment to support your crops. When properly applied, permaculture is about minimal effort.

>the waste product that they managed to scavenge,

Yes, that's also the point of permaculture: diverting waste streams and closing loops. For example, composting is a great way to make high-quality soil while diverting food waste from the landfill where it would anaerobically rot and generate methane. Permaculture can (and should) be low effort.

>and the infrastructure they pay little to no taxes for.

Huh? Where are you getting the idea that permaculture encourages resource theft and tax avoidance?

You should watch John Jai on Youtube. He's in thailand a country where the GDP per capita is a fraction of the US and yet he has more land, 3 small paid off huts and enough food to raise 4 kids all with plenty of time left over to read books. "Life is easy" he says, not bragging about his riches but rather to let people know about an alternative way of living.

People give modern farmers a lot of crap, but overall they are very interested in taking care of their land, and using as few fertilizers and pesticides as possible, if for no other motive than the profit one. As universities discover new best practices for regenerative ag, crop rotation and the like, farmers are overall very quick to adopt them, and the ones who don't go out of business. For instance, a lot of farmers have already adopted practices like no-till farming, cover cropping, and double cropping.

Another example, a soil scientist YouTuber named GardeningInCanada explained how the 'tilling' that farmers do with their giant machines is actually just slicing a cut a few mm deep in the soil with a disk, dropping in new seeds, then pushing the soil back over the cuts with another implement.

I think growing your own food is certainly more valuable than just having a giant turf lawn, but if you really wish to provide the most positive ecological impact, I think you should look into things like rain gardens or bioswales that filter rainwater runoff (helping fix the 'dead zones' that high nitrogen creates in our waterways and oceans), and growing a large diversity of plants native to your region that support the greatest number of specialist pollinators, which in turn will feed other life forms. The way I see it now, there is already an overabundance of food for humans in the world, but there is too little food for insects, birds, reptiles, other mammals, etc. In other words, there are plenty of grocery stores for people around but I want my yard to be a giant grocery store full of food for pollinators.

If you are in North America, you can grow some native food plants like American persimmon, paw paw, American blueberries, and wild strawberries. But most high-calorie crops are not native (even corn, beans, and squash came from Mexico iirc) and even the ones that were here before European colonization are genetically very different than the native plants that they came from and do not really support any wildlife.

It's scalable to a large proportion of it especially in the west and other such areas with a fitting climate and should probably be incentivized tbh. One could say the same about lawns. Which were initially thing of the ultra few who could signal they could both afford to leave land unproductive and employ people to maintain it. Now there's a stupid amount of it.

And yes this type of agriculture requires a lot of extra labour which is often understated that I'll agree on.

>It's not even clear to me that "Big Age" is even a bad thing, seeing that their massive economies of scale allow them to produce more for less(money, environmental impact) than smaller farmers.

It's environmental impact is ridiculous I don't see how this is even debatable. Insect populations in many places have plummeted, topsoil is being eroded, etc.

It does indeed make more sense financially and by a good amount but a large part of that is due to cheap plentiful fertilizers a big share of which comes from fossil fuels and deposits in Morocco and the like that will at some point run out and/or get a lot more expensive to get. We could stretch these resources so so much if we were more efficient about using them by dropping/adopting some practices but we do not because it does not make financial sense to do so right now. Similar for irrigation issues in many areas.

The moment this inflow of fertilizer starts to end food becomes a lot more expensive, large scale tillage agriculture becomes more difficult and more labour intensive practices common in the permaculture community start making more sense imo. You can't keep going without such fertilizer inputs on soils that are ecologically near dead due to tillage, pest/herbicicides, etc

We can reduce our land use, amount of packaging materials and impact on the environment. We don't need to be dogmatic about it either since there's a wide open middle ground between what we do now and some kind of 0 impact, 0 pesticides, etc vision.

Permaculture has a much higher yeild, per unit of land compared to traditional western arible. The reasons are not really well understood. Possibly attention to pest levels, mixed crops, and much healthier soils (with a fucktonne of mushroom webs)

but permaculture isn't much different to subsistence farming.

But, the flip side is that industrial movement of food has stopped, limited or reduced the effect of localised famines.

There is a much mire equitable medium

I thought the whole point of permaculture was exploring tradeoffs between labour and space (i.e, that "yield per acre" of a small intensively managed gardening plot is surprisingly good, and conversely you can trade effort for yield with "forest garden" type stuff that requires less maintenance).

Mostly because they seemed so didactic about it: oh yes, sure you're growing vegetables for yourself, but you're doing it wrong, not observing principle X or Y.

Christopher Alexander adherents were always my favorite visitors, they'd talk about patterns as they understood them and ask questions about whether they applied. Somehow the permaculture folks all gave off a my-way-or-the-highway kind of vibe.

Vermiculture is something I do for example. It makes no sense from a time/ effort perspective on a small scale compared to other composting methods but I liked that what i got out of it as amendment for my potting was at least weedfree by virtue of my own sorting and went trough it all relatively quickly. If I had to restart on my plot I wouldn't bother but hey it was fun and whilst a good part of of my garden is extremely productive I also grow some stuff that takes waaay too much effort for what I get out of it just for fun.

But people are out there taking it to extremes without any second thoughts about whether it works and swear by it and end up dogmatic about things like compost teas. All fine and dandy when it's a little hobby but when it becomes more than that I hope most can differentiate between actually useful things and barely usefull gimmicks pushed by people selling more books and courses than veg.

First, as I get older I get much less sympathy for that in general. Get over your bullshit and act like a decent human being. It's not that hard and the rewards are worth the effort.

^ Thank you, thank you, thank you.

As a plus, the beans should help introduce nitrogen into the soil via the bacteria that grow on their roots.