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Comment by roboben | Hacker News Reader

Most fun thing about permaculture is the fact that no one is making money from actually applying it but rather just selling courses, books and other media. It’s funny since the first thing you learn about it, is that you don’t need to spend a lot of money doing it.

Beside that, permaculture is nothing more than a framework for systems design. Can be applied to much more than your garden.

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A few people are making money from it, but they're content to make money. The majority of people doing homesteading are:

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.

Why is money the main goal? If you see everything through that lens, then of course permaculture seems incoherent.

If money is a primary concern, why grow food at all? Just strip-mine your land instead, or simply engage in real-estate speculation and landlordism.

I agree. Actually, I suspect optimizing for anything will probably backfire.

I wonder if there can be a sort of ecosystem effect on money that works like produce. If you overproduce something, it ends up going bad and rotting. Maybe you could have a currency where if you don't use it, it diminishes. That would make sure that money would be spread around, just like an abundant harvest would be shared widely before it goes bad.

> Maybe you could have a currency where if you don't use it, it diminishes.

Isn’t that what inflation is? Maybe at a lot slower scale, but the long-term effect is the same.

It sounds more like a decaying/expiring CBDC

https://bfsi.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/policy/digita...

You've basically reinvented communism.

>That would make sure that money would be spread around, just like an abundant harvest would be shared widely before it goes bad.

Yes, that's how we get "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs"

I was wasn't trying to eliminate money. I was thinking more along the lines of incentivizing feeding the money back into the economy.

I though clinton said something along those lines? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_economy,_stupid

If you buy actually valuable expensive input from the outside world for making food, you should sell actually valuable output to make it worth it. Otherwise it isn't sustainable.

Sure, making money on things that aren't actually valuable is all too easy, but that would defeat the point. "Economy", formal and informal, seems to be a big and acknowledged part of permaculture culture.

If "permaculture" meant "hobby farm", then you'd be correct.

However, permaculture is centered around a radically different approach: maximally leveraging existing ecosystem features rather than trying to fight them, or trying to wipe the ecosystem clean and turn it into mere substrate for building something artificial.

A correctly implemented permaculture "farm" should require minimal or no artificial inputs at all, instead relying on a composition of self-sustaining closed loops (e.g. food waste goes into compost and a worm bin, where the compost is used to grow more vegetables while the worms are used to supplement chickens foraging in the garden and eating pests like slugs)

Even if that, you need shovels. You need a lot of stuff that wears out, that you can't make yourself. You need to participate in an economy. Some of it can be with other permas, but much of it likely won't.

It's always been like that. Farmers from the stone age on have used tools manufactured a long way away.

No one said anything about avoiding participating in an economy or abstaining from tools.

You seem to be confusing permaculture with primitivism.

The whole point of permaculture is to not require expensive inputs.

Could you link to some of the #2s you follow?

People making a living:

https://www.youtube.com/@gregjudyregenerativerancher

https://www.youtube.com/@savvydirtfarmer

https://www.youtube.com/@JustaFewAcresFarm

https://www.youtube.com/@PeteKanarisGreenDreamsFL

https://www.youtube.com/@MikesBackyardNursery

https://www.youtube.com/@FraserValleyRoseFarm

https://www.youtube.com/@edibleacres

https://www.youtube.com/@regenerativeagriculture

Hobbyists, but doing it right:

https://www.youtube.com/@Selfsufficientme

https://www.youtube.com/@simplifygardening

https://www.youtube.com/@GardenerScott

https://www.youtube.com/@RedToolHouse

https://www.youtube.com/@MySelfReliance

Some of these folks do sponsored content, usually widgets or toys or something, but they're pretty up front about it. A few of them I follow religiously, others I choose which videos I'd prefer to watch.

Oh this is what you meant - making a living through permaculture. Can confirm that SelfSufficientMe strikes me as a great dude with engaging content.

Also, Justin Rhodes and Joel Salatin youtube channels. Joel focuses on poultry, and Justin also raises pigs and cows. Both are heavily into permaculture.

I only have a few backyard chickens, but I’m trying to apply their principles where I can. It’s scalable, luckily.

The Gardening Channel With James Prigioni is another great channel.

https://www.youtube.com/c/jamesprigioni

> no one is making money

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

Permaculture is mostly about growing food for yourself and local friends

People joke about the fact that you're not really saving any money doing this vs buying the produce at the store, and they might be right, but it's not about the price of food, it's about learning the knowledge needed to grow your own. It kind of freaks me out that 98% of the US population would starve if our ag system seriously broke down. We could seriously use some resiliency there.

Oh you save a ton of money on produce and it's higher quality. I save seeds and don't have to buy new seed every year. I use woodchips, leaf compost, manure compost and whatever else free I can get close by. My neighbor has a huge pile of woodchips that he's offered so I've been using those instead.
This week I harvested morels which the local grocery store sells fresh for like $40/lb.

There is a catch, and that catch is you eat whatever is in season. It does require getting creative with recipes. I live in zone 6B and have fresh greens from April - December. Winter squash will store well into the spring. Nuts in the shell will last years. I have black walnuts that I harvested in 2019 that still taste great.

That doesn't really count all the money and/or time required to get the garden into that productive state. I've spent a lot of time and money on mine. And I don't mind that, I love working on it and it is both decorative and productive. But everything grown in my garden would have been a lower overall cost to me if I had a house with no garden at all.

For example, you listed those free items of compost etc. I also make my own and get freebies wherever I can. But when we moved here the ground was in a poor state so we have paid quite a bit for extra soil compost and mulch. We could have purchased a house with a great existing garden and mature trees - did view one, but then the house itself needed a lot of work. One way or another its expensive. Another example, I could get a lot more free/cheap material if I had a trailer. Suitable second hand trailer around here would be $1000 to $6000. That's a lot of supermarket vegetables.

I think it's still important to note that it's not a constant for everyone. I too like the previous commentor got to save money albeit with a lot of initial backbreaking work for a small garden. I think most could with a lot of work, some stingyness.

I had shit soil when I started too (long story but I overpayed for it to prevent cracks due to a shit foundation)

I ended up getting great soil from a tomato & peppers nursery/seed selling business i had helped out before. They were moving and i helped em out with that again and they have to refresh their mix once every few years anyway or they can harbor diseases that can fuck up their year. I also got a bit of forest soil which was probably not allowed (it's within close distance and i hauled 3 baskets for every new plant i put down) and then a bit of additional soil from a nearby cellar being dug which was shit but i had to raise an additional bit of garden regardless of whether it held veg or lawn. Additionally I got a few trailers of free horse manure that I scouted local 2ndhand sites for because there's too much manure in this country I'm in. I used my dad's trailer who needs it regardless for a lot of other stuff he does. I got some free seconhand fencing mesh for peas to grow on. Cut bamboo my neighbour couldn't get rid of to support it all and some other plants. I now have a secondhand plastic greenhouse. I still don't have plastic for low tunnels yet but anticipated late frost by simply putting cut plastic bottles over my plants.

The only thing I actually spent on was a few cheap tools, seeds and a few rare herbs/berry bushes & 2 small fruit trees. Oh and last year I had to spent on water due to persistent draught but this year I catch water from the shed and wood storage into some free secondhand IBC vats.

Since then I think I've more than paid back for the help I've been given with the amount of veg I've given away. It has cost me boatloads of time to get started tho but...I've really enjoyed it. My daytime job programming keeps me sitting still away from the sun otherwise.

Certainly we get help from our neighbours, and they've also let us use their tools and trailer on occasion. We've done less for them, but I have made them a lot of coffee. Still, if we hadn't spent money we wouldn't have got nearly as far with our available time.

>we have paid quite a bit for extra soil compost and mulch

Literally the opposite of what permaculture is about. Redirect your food waste! Make your own compost! Mulch with cardboard & newspaper!

I didn't say I was doing permaculture. I know what it's about. We certainly incorporate bits of it, for example I do make my own compost and I do mulch with cardboard and other available materials. And we built a hugelmound. However, I'm not going to give up my job or fart around for 10 years to get things done when we can make a call and get a truck load of mulch. Plus the company that we buy from takes greenwaste and turns it into mulch and compost, so apart from the commercial component it's not that different a lifecycle, just a different scale.

Many permaculturists would probably starve too. It's pretty hard for a person with a backyard to consistently produce the 2500+ kcal needed per day, and also process and store it so that it's available outside of harvest season as well.

The goal isn't to have one person produce all that for themselves, or about back-breaking labor.

Permaculture encourages community, not hyper-individualism. It's about working with nature rather than against it, and directing the benefits of it to everyone.

I think some of these folks who are on several acres, and who have poultry, cattle, pigs, and extensive gardens, will likely not starve.

But life will be hard, once the fuel and electricity run out, even the ones who are totally off grid with solar and storage batteries. Just basic stuff like screws, pumps, pipes, tools, not to mention medical care, pharmaceuticals etc.

Not starve if left to their own devices. But if they're anywhere even close to a city or town, or a group of other people who don't have those things, they better be prepared to defend it.

In fairness, some permaculture people talk about this, for example, food forests which can produce an impressive amount of food which a city dweller would not recognise or know how to cook even if they did. If you have a large enough food forest then you could be providing some kind of subsistence living long after someone came for your cows, sheep and pigs.

Honestly the person who knows how to farm, raise crops, and process their harvest and meat would probably be better off not defending their herd in that scenario.

The groups of people coming from a city to pillage a farm clearly have no idea what they're doing long term and in all likelihood wouldn't survive much longer. Killing and processing am animal isn't a skill most people have. They could easily ruin the meat and would almost certainly waste most of it. And what comes next, unless they know how to hunt as well?

All that said, I hope we never see anything close to this ever play out. No matter what the specific scenario that breaks down society for more than a few days, a lot of people would die along the way and who knows what would come next.

Yes, I hope so too. After a collapse of civilization, likely only highly organized and well armed groups will survive. Families on 10 acres will be killed and their farms stripped of food & tools.

The whole scenario does seem unlikely though.

>After a collapse of civilization

Collapse is a process, not an event. Collapse is happening all around us, yet we're not all turning into gangs of marauders. When catastrophes happen in poor countries, they don't turn into roving gangs of marauders either. People tend to work together, actually.

>likely only highly organized and well armed groups will survive

[extremely USAmerican voice]

Agreed it seems unlikely. In the meantime, I really can't worry too much about any specific scenario and outcome. Any major systemic failure leads to uncertainty and what comes next is anyone's guess. Instability is hard to predict, best thing to do is just keep a level head and take it one step at a time.

Doing genealogy, my ancestors were surprisingly good at that sort of thing. Then they learned to read and studied farming practices and stuff and got much better at it.

Of course it depends on the size of your backyard, and how long, and critically on trade networks/community.

My grandmother was a subsistence farmer in rural Poland. Their family had a sizable plot of land, farm animals etc. Still, without supplementing income with odd jobs, they'd starve. They were hungry a lot of the time anyway.

I mean, resiliency, yes, I am all for resiliency, besides "produce enough food for everyone", "be able to continue producing enough food for everyone despite 5- or 6-sigma disasters" is the most important thing for an agricultural system to do.

But, like, why would the agricultural system break down? If that's a possibility in your society, maybe ask why that is and try to fix it, rather than trying to have everyone go back to subsistence farming.

The agricultural system doesn't need to break down in order for us to realize it's deeply damaging and unsustainable. Ideally we'd realize this and change our ways before breaks down — that's why permaculture exists.

You're confusing permaculture with prepping.

> The agricultural system doesn't need to break down in order for us to realize it's deeply damaging and unsustainable. Ideally we'd realize this and change our ways before breaks down — that's why permaculture exists.

I'm pretty sure the systemic fix isn't going to be everyone having their own backyard plot.

> You're confusing permaculture with prepping.

Well, if you're talking about "98% of the US population would starve" that's absolutely prepper talk.

Yeah, and even if you're that worried about societal agricultural instability, you're better off spending hobby time to make something like a dead-simple replicatable potato growing kit and distributing it out at a loss. Barring something truly irreversibly apocalyptic, that'd provide most of what's needed until things rebound.

Or you could get involved in public policy.

I assume there are some boffins somewhere in the US's $4 trillion dollar budget -- USDA, probably -- who are coming up with plans for things like "what if wheat is decimated by a blight?" or "what if Missouri is just, all flooded?". Probably a bunch of academics at various Midwest universities, too.

There are already grants and other public programs to support community gardens and local agriculture; a community garden should be the perfect place to apply permaculture.

The goal isn't for everyone to have a backyard plot. You're still seeing this from a very individualist American viewpoint. In fact, no one should have yards at all (at least not as we understand them now).

The goal is to integrate food production into society in a more seamless and holistic way.

> The goal isn't for everyone to have a backyard plot.

That seems to be what it amounts to in practice though. Noble goals are a fine thing, but your steps towards the goal need to actually constitute progress towards the goal.

There's a huge range of solutions between fixing the fragility of modern industrial ag (I can only speak to the US system) and everyone having a plot and attempting to be completely self sufficient.

It isn't realistic or healthy to expect everyone to be self sufficient, there are plenty of food reasons we developed societies. It also isn't healthy or realistic for a country as large as the US to depend on a system that makes all of our food in a handful of industrial farms and feed plots so it can be distributed nationally by truck. It also isn't healthy to motivate said industries to measure output by pound regardless of nutritional value, sustainable practices, or animal welfare.

Permaculture often amounts to individuals growing food on their own land today because the system is so far removed from anything resembling permaculture that there aren't other options. Ideally permaculture concepts would be practiced by local farms and we would all be eating healthier food, grown in a more sustainable way closer to where we live.

>That seems to be what it amounts to in practice though.

In some cases it is. So what? Even that form of practice is valuable.

One can't expect the permaculture people to also stage an overnight revolution and reform society. The social changes I describe are needed badly, but they are outside the scope of permaculture itself.

Permaculture is is an important aspect of a much larger goal around sustainability.

> Even that form of practice is valuable

How?

> One can't expect the permaculture people to also stage an overnight revolution and reform society. The social changes I describe are needed badly, but they are outside the scope of permaculture itself

How can you claim permaculture is about the goals you described if it's not contributing to them?

The practice is valuable because it increases knowledge. You don't build large-scale projects first, you build prototypes first (and many of them) then iterate.

>How can you claim permaculture is about the goals you described if it's not contributing to them?

Permaculture is not about those goals specifically. It can contribute to those goals, aligns with them nicely, and many people who are into permaculture are also into those other goals, but it is not the goal.

The engine is not the entire car.

whether or not you save money and how much you save depends on how much your regular job pays. Sure, a google software engineer will be better off just buying all their food. but someone working a minimum wage job, will be much better off growing their own fruit trees. Here are some quick calculations/back of the napkin. with an average harvest labor of 3 apples per minute, that would produce 180 organic apples per hour or 40 lbs/hour or about 80$ worth of fruit per hour, not including time spend watering, pruning, irrigation and mulching (if done). Organic Berries on the other hand are 4-10 times more expensive, thus even giving some engineers a run for their money!

Pretty good assessment. I have the potential to be earning a high hourly rate but I don't count my time gardening as a loss because I enjoy it most of the time. I also can grow different things than I can find in the store and that's hard to put a price on.

plus you know it's organic, whereas the grocery store's "organic" label sometimes has some give to it. Some wheats for example, aren't entirely organic.

The organic label really ended up pretty meaningless unfortunately. Wish I had a link handy, but Joel Salatin has a few podcast episodes where they dug into all the loopholes.

The "product of the USA" label was also meaningless, thankfully it actually just recently got an updated list of requirements that make more sense. Previously you could bring in chicken raised in another country, do a bit of the processing here, and consider it produces in the USA.

> Beside that, permaculture is nothing more than a framework for systems design. Can be applied to much more than your garden.

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

I know a few people that make very good money applying permaculture principles. Not because they are applying the principles, but because they are very good at selling their produce and services. They know how to get to their target audience, specially people with more money to spend. I think this is true for any kind of agriculture or business.

Applied to much more than your garden is very true. I related all the principles of permaculture to my jiujitsu class. Hard to say if they helped, since I already had been practicing them in a different 'bundle', but definitely speaks to how universal they are in systems with complexity and feedback.

I find it fascinating. It's somewhere between a brilliant insight into the human species relationship with the other inhabitants of our planet and utter snake oil sold to new-agey people to be applied in utterly unsuitable conditions.

What part of permaculture is "snake oil"? Please be specific.

How do you know that nobody is making money applying it? It’s not exactly like you would know if they were, would you, since by definition they wouldn’t be advertising it?

> Most fun thing about permaculture is the fact that no one is making money from actually applying it but rather just selling courses, books and other media

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.

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