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Comment by zeroCalories | Hacker News Reader

I've always been wary of the permaculture community. Firstly, a lot of the things advanced by them are simply not scalable to the entire human race. 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, the waste product that they managed to scavenge, and the infrastructure they pay little to no taxes for. 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. Failure to realize this lead to the dumb memes about how global supply chains are supposedly bad, without realizing that having many small factories around the world would actually be more environmentally harmful than shipping products to where they can best be processed. I'm sympathetic to fears about long term sustainability and skepticism about globalism, but I generally don't like the type of stuff they advocate for. I generally agree with calls for increased regulation and a reduction in waste though.

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>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)

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?

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

Most studies I've seen suggest that the larger the farming operation, the more efficiently it's able to use resources. Most of those were small/organic farms instead of a backyard garden, but I don't see many reasons to think it would be better.

>When properly applied, permaculture is about minimal effort.

You still put in more effort than most people. Someone working a median wage job will be able to buy more food in the time it takes you to maintain your garden. The only exception are the very poor.

>Yes, that's also the point of permaculture: diverting waste streams and closing loops.

Diverting waste is good, but when scaled up it won't be sufficient. You won't be able to get free fertilizer from people that prune trees because everyone will want it, and that's assuming a lot of this waste would still even be produced in an environmentally conscious world. You will most likely need to produce all of it on your own.

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

To be fair, this is just from the permaculture people that I know. Many of them work very little and pay nothing in taxes, use medicare, and are still well off because a lot of their labor is untaxable. They live in suburbs and the country where stuff like roads and water are provided to them at a loss to society.

>Most studies I've seen suggest that the larger the farming operation, the more efficiently it's able to use resources.

Yes, this is true for modern agriculture, because it's an industrial process that benefits from economies of scale. Unfortunately that process is unsustainable and will ultimately deplete our fertilizer resources while damaging the environment.

>Someone working a median wage job will be able to buy more food in the time it takes you to maintain your garden.

Permaculture isn't about returning to peasantry. Permaculture is about integrating food production into society while expending minimal effort (less effort than even mowing a lawn).

>You won't be able to get free fertilizer from people that prune trees because everyone will want it

Fertilizer doesn't need to come from pruned trees. In fact, wood chips alone don't really make for good compost.

Properly designed permaculture systems coupled with local programs such as neighborhood composting and an understanding of the local ecosystem can produce a huge amount of food with very little effort or input.

>Many of them work very little and pay nothing in taxes, use medicare, and are still well off because a lot of their labor is untaxable.

OK, and? Maybe the answer is to reform how we structure society and taxes instead of claiming that low-impact sustainable lifestyles are somehow a form of "theft".

You could make the same argument about how people who refuse to buy a new iPhone every year are "stealing" resources because they don't contribute enough to an economy structured around overproduction and waste. It's absurd.

To be fair, the person you're responding to didn't use the word "theft" which you're quoting. That came from someone who replied to them.

The point isn't about wood chips in particular. I'm saying that the waste you're diverting won't be enough to sustain you if everyone is trying to get it, and ideally there wouldn't be any waste to begin with. That means we will return to some form of industrial process, and the bigger the better. Of course, we will want to encourage people to farm sustainability through policy, which will be far easier if there are a few centralized operations instead of a large number of small distributed operations.

>OK, and? Maybe the answer is to reform how we structure society and taxes instead of claiming that low-impact sustainable lifestyles are somehow a form of "theft

You're avoiding taxes while depending heavily on tax payer provided services. Not scalable for a modern society.

> You could make the same argument about how people who refuse to buy a new iPhone every year are "stealing" resources because they don't contribute enough to an economy structured around overproduction and waste. It's absurd.

No? It's not about contributing to an economy, it's about contributing your fair share for the public good. A better comparison might be crypto people that want to avoid taxes by doing all transactions under the table.

>the waste you're diverting won't be enough to sustain you if everyone is trying to get it, and ideally there wouldn't be any waste to begin with

There's always going to be food waste in the sense that we cannot eat every part of every vegetable. And, again, there are many other ways to generate things like compost and fertilizer without using waste — cover crops, aquaponics, etc.

>avoiding taxes

I "avoid" taxes by keeping old electronics alive, repairing things I find, and helping friends do the same. Is that wrong, by your ethical framework? This fascination with taxes is utterly bizarre.

>It's not about contributing to an economy, it's about contributing your fair share for the public good.

Large parts of the economy don't operate for the public good. Giving money to Monsanto, for example, is actively detrimental for the public good.

> There's always going to be food waste in the sense that we cannot eat every part of every vegetable. And, again, there are many other ways to generate things like compost and fertilizer without using waste — cover crops, aquaponics, etc.

But you can't escape entropy in a closed loop system, and anything you can do a large scale food factory can do better.

> I "avoid" taxes by keeping old electronics alive, repairing things I find, and helping friends do the same. Is that wrong, by your ethical framework? This fascination with taxes is utterly bizarre.

No, I'm not advocating for waste to help the economy. That's a classic fallacy in economics, and I don't feel the need to expand further. I just want your work taxed.

> Large parts of the economy don't operate for the public good. Giving money to Monsanto, for example, is actively detrimental for the public good.

You're missing the point again. I don't care if you buy a new iphone or not. If you're working, and especially if you're producing a lot of value, I want you taxed. We could have the tax man come take 30% of your yield and distribute it to the poor, for example.

>But you can't escape entropy in a closed loop system,

???

I can't escape entropy anywhere in the universe. What is your point?

>and anything you can do a large scale food factory can do better.

It can do it "better" by creating huge amounts of damage to the biosphere and the people consuming the food. Generating large amounts of unhealthy garbage is not a desirable goal.

By your logic, we should direct all food production resources toward industrial Soylent factories and nothing else.

>If you're working, and especially if you're producing a lot of value, I want you taxed.

How do you tax community service, or a neighborhood food forest? That sounds completely nuts and dystopian.

>We could have the tax man come take 30% of your yield and distribute it to the poor, for example.

So... an IRS truck comes by to collect zucchini and tomatoes? lmao

I don't think you're grasping the concept of permaculture at all. It isn't about business.

Maybe you ought to consider that we could abandon capitalism and structure society to eliminate poverty altogether instead of faffing about with taxes? It seems you're more concerned with spreadsheets than actually improving the lives of humans.

Stop obsessing so much about money, because it is clearly becoming some sort of mental prison for you.

Money is an abstraction, but you're treating it as more real than the stuff it's tracking. You've completely lost sight of the territory, and have confused it with the map.

> It can do it "better" by creating huge amounts of damage to the biosphere and the people consuming the food. Generating large amounts of unhealthy garbage is not a desirable goal.

You're the one whose mind is trapped in a prison.

> By your logic, we should direct all food production resources toward industrial Soylent factories and nothing else.

You keep making these huge leaps of logic. I'm saying that given two ways to achieve the same thing, I want the cheaper, and more environmentally friendly way to do it, which is large scale production.

> How do you tax community service, or a neighborhood food forest? That sounds completely nuts and dystopian.

If your labour is a donation to the public it wouldn't need to be taxed. But the reason we focus on payroll taxes is because it's the majority of work and it's easy to track. If everyone lived outside the system we would need to find a new way to tax people.

> So... an IRS truck comes by to collect zucchini and tomatoes? lmao

If no one is working a w2 job, then yeah.

> Maybe you ought to consider that we could abandon capitalism and structure society to eliminate poverty altogether instead of faffing about with taxes? It seems you're more concerned with spreadsheets than actually improving the lives of humans.

You're in this system now. I have about as much sympathy for you as I do a libertarian that commits tax evasion because he believes taxes are theft.

>I want the cheaper, and more environmentally friendly way to do it, which is large scale production.

Industrial farming isn't environmentally friendly. It's only cheaper because the environmental damage is considered an externality.

>If everyone lived outside the system we would need to find a new way to tax people.

If everyone became a communist, you'd be desperately figuring out how to revert it? Absolutely bizarre.

Why are you so obsessed with taxes? There are other, much better, ways to distribute wealth.

>If no one is working a w2 job, then yeah.

Is this a joke? You really expect IRS agents to seize produce from community vegetable gardens (given away freely already), and believe this is a productive use of time and resources?

Where would these vegetables go, anyway? And for what purpose?

>I have about as much sympathy for you as I do a libertarian that commits tax evasion because he believes taxes are theft.

hahahah are you for real dude? non-profit community food programs are tax evasion?

you've lost the plot (pun intended)

> Industrial farming isn't environmentally friendly. It's only cheaper because the environmental damage is considered an externality.

Then we regulate it. And anything you can do a large scale operation can do better :)

> If everyone became a communist, you'd be desperately figuring out how to revert it? Absolutely bizarre. Why are you so obsessed with taxes? There are other, much better, ways to distribute wealth.

> Is this a joke? You really expect IRS agents to seize produce from community vegetable gardens (given away freely already), and believe this is a productive use of time and resources?

> Where would these vegetables go, anyway? And for what purpose?

In the USSR they would take everything and redistribute it as needed. The point is that we need a way to collectively pay for things that does not depend on good will. Our IRS agents are going to take your food and distribute it to high skill workers and students that need to focus on their speciality.

> hahahah are you for real dude? non-profit community food programs are tax evasion?

If it's all a community garden, hope you won't mind the IRS coming to take 30%~100%.

>In the USSR they would take everything and redistribute it as needed.

lol no

Please stop spouting off-topic PragerU talking points.

>Our IRS agents are going to take your food and distribute it to high skill workers and students that need to focus on their speciality.

Is this a joke or trolling attempt?

You seem to be stuck in some weird neocon "they're going to take YOUR stuff from YOUR personal backyard!!!111" fear mindset.

Permaculture is about creating sustainable food supplies in a distributed manner. Those students and high skill workers will be able to gather this food themselves, because it will be ubiquitous, freely available, and local.

>If it's all a community garden, hope you won't mind the IRS coming to take 30%~100%.

Fine by me if the IRS wants to run a garden-to-doorstep program, putting zucchini in a basket and walking it down the block. It's free for the taking anyway, because the idea is creating abundance for all. Seems like a lot of work to provide a relatively useless service IMHO.

Why would the IRS be in charge of food distribution logistics, anyway? You'd think this would be rolled into USDA duties like WIC, etc.

Nit: there is definitely more effort involved in gardening than in mowing a lawn.

Nope, not with a well-designed permaculture setup

Lol ok we will have to agree to disagree about what makes a good garden. A well kept garden requires daily work, planning, determining crop rotation, and many other things that go way way beyond mowing a lawn.

"Permaculture" isn't a synonym for "gardening"

True. It is vastly larger than gardening which in and of itself is rather more complex than mowing a lawn.

Firstly, I absolutely agree with both people here. Industrial agriculture is large-scale enough to be able to use everything with extreme efficiency. Secondly, modern industrial agricultural practices result in the transformation of nature into an unsustainable hell-scape which will collapse in on itself within a few centuries at the latest.

But I don't think you should consider humans as separate from nature, there is evil to being artificial and there is no evil to sometimes going against nature. Humans are, by their nature, a species who take natural fruits and labour upon them to transform them, to give them a new use-value. That is a, if not even the, universal constant which has held through every age of human (pre)history. Humans, just as bees or termites or elephants or trees, transform nature by our nature. Everything natural is artificial and everything artificial is natural. To transform nature, to bend it and to change it is our species being, it is part of our role in nature to transform it as do countless other species. However, unlike those guided by pure instinct, we have both the ability to imagine and project through labour that ideal into reality. Importantly, that's not really any more artificial than a beehive is, artificial is not a very well defined concept or in any way scientifically useful. Once again, it is part of our natural role, our nature, to transform nature around us. When we do transform nature in major ways, we speak for the trees, as much as destroy them. However, our societal development has led us into a transformation of nature which is wasteful and unsustainable. These are very scientifically useful concepts and things like sustainability can be experimented upon and proven. Imagining alternative transformations is the first step to projecting them into reality, to transforming nature once again in a way which has a long-term benefit for us all. There do however exist major economic barriers which can never be broken which prohibit permaculture on any real scale, though that's only true as long as the economy is as it is now. Beside the point for now. My point is that it is not useful to consider ideal and badly defined concepts like artificial and natural and a struggle between the two. It is much more useful to think in terms of our nature, how our nature and labour is governed by our society, how by our nature of transforming nature that leads to the current unsustainable mode of life, and then think about what needs to be done within that more explanative framework to imagine not only unreachable ideals but to project them into reachable ideals in the real, material world.

We are nearing, if not already well past, the inflection point where solar panels powering industrial chemical sugar production can make sucrose and feed plants (and therefore animals) better than the plants would naturally produce themselves using chlorophyl with the same sunlight.

Rewilding - bringing artificial human-made processes to grow thriving natural environments - is something we should definitely consider. We are capable of creating abundance beyond what nature provides alone

>But I don't think you should consider humans as separate from nature

I do consider humans to be part of nature. My point is that the dysfunctional processes we set up distance us from nature, try to attack nature — we kill bees with pesticides, then talk about inventing robot bees to replace them. It's insane.

Permaculture is based on an explicit assertion that we must pay attention to existing ecosystem features and work within them rather than against them.

there are many things that absolutely are scalable to the entire human race, at least outside of the city. Permaculture asks nothing of you but your effort. The "massive amount of labor put in is what's needed to produce that amount of food. It's only in rich countries where people can produce food for much less labor (by working a high paying job and buying the food at the market). there are many countries where people are much better off growing their own food, rather than working at a minimum wage job and buying the same food.

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.

I agree that permaculture might be an option for some people, but the difference isn't gdp, it's that there are no productive things to do in many of these low income countries. If their economy advances enough they'll find that working a job provides more for them.

I have long been interested in permaculture, but I have recently been coming around to your point of view.

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.

> 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.

You must be exposed to vastly different types of farmers than I have been. I've worked in the ag tech industry and have lived in Iowa most of my life. The idea that farmers are responsible stewards of the land doesn't seem to have any basis in reality. Half of the water bodies in Iowa are unusable because of pollution. Beaches at lakes are closed often due to bacterial blooms caused by farm runoff. Iowa has an advisory on limiting how much caught fish you eat due to farm pollution. In addition, farmers are destroying the top soil by not rotating crops (corn and soy is where the profit is at) and over tilling. This doesn't even touch on the hog factories that are literally overflowing with shit and all the damage that does to our environment and air quality. Where are you seeing farmers actually taking care of the land?

How many humans are those Iowa farmers feeding?

There are very few "modern farmers" these days, because most farming is done by agribusiness on an industrial scale with industrial processes.

The farmers you talked to are a rapidly-dwindling niche group.

You wouldn't be able to have a conversation with an agribusiness, just like you can't have a conversation with a corporation.

>Firstly, a lot of the things advanced by them are simply not scalable to the entire human race.

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.

I mean yes and no.

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

Land usage isn't a good metric, especially because land in the countryside is plentiful. This is another thing that pisses me off about permaculture people, they encourage inefficient use of land in urban environments, leading to a whole bunch of other problems, including higher land value, more need for cars, and MORE environmentally and economically draining suburbs. I don't want a community garden in my most important economic areas, I want housing and workplaces.

> they encourage inefficient use of land in urban environments

I think that depends on which country/state you are in.

In the UK, I'm sure there are people who want to turn everywhere into a market garden. However the permaculture hippies that I grew up with were far more pragmatic. They used the land that was near by and not being used.

But as you point out, there is a mix of opinion, and it all needs to be critically evaluated.

>This is another thing that pisses me off about permaculture people, they encourage inefficient use of land in urban environments, leading to a whole bunch of other problems, including higher land value, more need for cars, and MORE environmentally and economically draining suburbs. I don't want a community garden in my most important economic areas, I want housing and workplaces.

I dare say the vast vast majority of land affected by such influences would probably be lawn or the like otherwise. Suburbia in the vast majority of the western world isn't exactly rife with small scale subsistence farming and the places where these practices have contributed a meaningful amount are relatively densely populated places in Europe where it used to be the norm and plots were divided accordingly in an inflexible way before the scale of modern agriculture being common.

When it comes to market gardening for income you need more even if less. It is extremely rare for it to make sense in an urban environment where denser construction is an option not blocked by other factors. In many places you can get many manyfold the acreage by selling off and going outside of such urban environments.

> ignoring the massive amount of labor they put in

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).

I don't believe them, but I'll start my own farm if it can earn me anywhere near 50$/hr in profit.

It is a fair amount of work even with forest gardens (I grew up in a permaculture project that began a few years before I was born). I think the economics are only appealing to the rational actor if the labour displaces time spent in the gym rather than the office.

Which suits my lifestyle just fine, but if you don't enjoy gardening in your free time it's probably better to deliver for ubereats on a bicycle or something.

I'd really like a citation on the 'big ag has less environmental impact' claim.

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