Hacker News Reader

Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

> 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...

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com