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Comment by cyberax | Hacker News Reader

"Permaculture" (n) - growing things in your garden to eat alongside supermarket-bought food, while pretending to be a good green farmer.

Reality bites. You simply can not grow enough calories to feed yourself, in a way that scales to the whole planet. Or even a significant part of the planet. You need staple crops such as beans, potatoes, wheat that are not fun to grow. You need fixed nitrogen and likely phosphorus for fertilizer, unless you happen to live on a very good soil.

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The vast majority of permaculturists don't do it with the goal of 100% self-sufficiency. Interdependence is part of the game.

How would "interdependence" help? If anything, it makes it even worse. Growing enough staples even for yourself and your family is hard, growing it for trade is even more complicated.

Try it, and pretty soon you need to actually do real agriculture.

It's a better use of space than manicured grass.

Interdependence with larger agricultural systems. Grains are great to grow at scale and I'm glad I can buy them in a grocery store. Tomatoes are great to grow at home and I'm glad I can do that too.

Beans and potatoes are fairly easy and fun to grow? They are very "set it and forget it" and produce a lot in one season. Although if they get infected with some kind of fungus or virus, that could put you at risk of starvation if you haven't planned ahead.

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

Also, beans and potatoes _are_ fun to grow.

traditional farming depletes the soil, so the whole 'doesn't scale to the whole planet' is only a good argument over an artificially short time horizon.

I'd imagine then that 11,000 years of traditional rice farming in the Yangtze River Valley must have really sucked the life from the soil and there's barely another millennium or two left there.

Traditional farming in the UK has had a run of a few thousand years on land that isn't flood plains ..

Perhaps you're thinking of more modern farming practices?

> I'd imagine then that 11,000 years of traditional rice farming in the Yangtze River Valley must have really sucked the life from the soil and there's barely another millennium or two left there.

They have. Traditional farming is very taxing on micronutrients.

China (and Egypt) used a lifehack called "silt". Basically, they use it to periodically replace the topsoil.

Well, yes. Permaculture seeks to adopt practices from the kind of long-running success stories you're describing. For historical reasons it does so much more with respect to paleolithic practices than bronze age ones, but there's nothing to permaculture which requires it.

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