Beginning with Permaculture

Ladybug eating aphids.

The use of pesticides, insecticides, herbicides, synthetic fertilizers, etc. is at an all-time high, especially among large agriculture growers.  Why?  Modern agricultural practices involve growing single crop species in high-density plantings in hundreds of acres of fields at a time.  Now if you were an insect, what does that kind of farming look like to you?  . . .  An astronomical glut of food that is wide out in open with nothing to disguise or distract you from digging in.  And so it is with diseases too: if you’re a fungus that’s adapted to eating corn than a 1,000 acres of nothing but straight corn is essentially begging you to dig in and  invite all your friends to the same banquet.  The farmer checks against these invasions with ‘chemical-cides’.  Nature has a different approach to this issue: lots of diversity in which different organisms check against each other in what becomes a natural balance.   the ladybug eating aphids off the plant in the picture at above is an excellent example of this balance.  the ladybug is a natural predator of the aphid and is saving the plant and its crop simply by taking care of its own needs; no pesticides involved.  This sort of natural checks and balances requires little or no energy to maintain which is why it is Nature’s way.  Monoculture farming requires a lot of energy to maintain precisely because it is unnatural; in essence, conventional farming is spending a lot of energy to fight and keep nature at bay.  What if we farmed more on the basis of Nature’s principles instead of industrial principles?  But is this sort of ecological farming practical?

Allow me to introduce you to a system of farming based on Nature’s way as discussed above, it’s called Permaculture.  Permaculture is a system that creates plant/animal/human/insect/fish/fowl/arachnid/weather relationships; in essence, it is farming based on ecology, not factory made chemistry.  In permaculture, you don’t see things as ‘bad’ and ‘good’, you study the ecology of the environment and figure out how to make that ecology work for you.  For example, there’s a large field that my mom owns that my grandpa used to farm.  However, there’s a good 5-10 acre stretch on this land that could never be farmed because it’s all too frequently boggy and wet, especially in the spring.  So that particular stretch of land has sat and been unproductive for decades.  But with the idea of permaculture, that land has become viewed by me as a valuable resource: are there crops that love water?  Yes there are: the berries!  Raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, and black raspberries really appreciate generous watering.  If I view the property through the lens of permaculture I see an unproductive area blossom into life without drastically altering the landscape (like putting in drains or pumping out all the water) simply by considering the ecology: a wet area needs plants that appreciate water.

Permaculture food forest - lots of growth, different layers, balanced relationships, plenty of production.

Permaculture appeals to me because it creates a balance – an ordered balance that humans exert some control over so as to focus ecological relationships on heavy food producing crops.  In this sense food is produced but all the pest issues that traditional farmers are exposed to are controlled by natural ecological relationships.

Take, for example, a forest.  My wife grew up in northern Idaho, and there’s a lot of forested area there.  Big, fir trees and a handful of other evergreens, but not much else.  What if some of those trees were cleared out, the wood used to make grow boxes or used for fire wood to heat the house, and in their stead have fruit trees and nut trees?  The area could still be densely forested but now it’s much more productive food-wise and the remaining evergreens still have their role to play as well: wind protection (especially in winter), a good source of pine-straw mulch for weed suppression and organic matter, anchoring the soil, soil acidification from the breakdown of pine needles (a huge benefit in alkaline Western soils), etc.  The basic idea is getting a maximum output from your garden with a minimum of inputs which is accomplished by simply taking advantage of the already existing relationships between plants and their environments i.e. ecology.  In this sense, gardening becomes very profitable: it saves you time and money.

Large-scale agriculture during the harvest season.

Some people may say that’s not profitable.  I disagree; let me tell you why.  What if I were to tell you that the ANNUAL subsidy for large-scale agriculture farming in the U.S. was $20 BILLION each year?  The United Kingdom puts out a huge annual subsidy as well.  What does that mean?  It means that every time you go to a store and purchase your food, that’s the second time you’re paying for it!

Large scale, monoculture fields are not sustainable economically or environmentally.  Modern conventional agriculture consumes quite a bit more energy than it produces (hence the subsidy) and the amount of fertilizer being poured onto the land is no longer increasing crops yields because constant synthetic fertilizer use over the years has sterilized — essentially killed — the soil.  This yield plateau has a lot agronomists concerned.

Just from what I’ve seen, permaculture can produce a LOT of food without damaging soils; in fact, keeping and encouraging a thriving soil is what makes permaculture so productive.  And the best bit is – it requires a lot less work.  There’s still some hard work involved, but during the majority of the summer, it may only be a few hours on a couple of days of the week.  During planting time and harvest time, more time will be put in, but other than that you’ve got worms, ladybugs, nitrogen-fixing legumes, cyanobacteria, honey bees, praying mantises, and oodles of other plant-ecological relationships working for you around the clock and you don’t even have to pay them, give them other benefits, they don’t take holidays off or take vacation time, etc.  This saves tons on inputs: labor, fertilizers, pesticides, heavy machinery and the diesel required to fuel them.

Building my own permaculture farm would be living a dream and raising my family in the best way I can think of.

Right now I’m getting a master’s degree in agriculture which has led me, although indirectly, to find and believe in the value of permaculture.  In my first semester I took a class on forages for pasturing animals and how to combine different forage species to increase feed protein levels for livestock while decreasing the need to fertilize the pastures.  It was fascinating.  Shortly after that, my wife and I started looking up gardening and farming videos on YouTube and we found several good videos on permaculture.  Putting it all together has been fascinating, and we can’t get enough of it.  After I finish my degree here, I really don’t think I could go to work for a huge company that uses massive amounts of pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers to produce something on their land that the government then has to subsidize in order to make it work.  It just doesn’t sit well with me.  I guess we’ll have to see where our future takes us.  After all, most of the jobs in agriculture or horticulture are for large scale operations because that’s what our government supports.

I would love to go back to the land my grandfather owned, and turn that boggy area into a fertile berry and fruit producing ‘food forest’, as the permaculturists call it, and build up the fertility of the land.  I could volunteer to teach at a local high school, and bring up a new generation of students with different ideas about how farming can be done.  Then I would work, side by side with my wife, on our permaculture farm during the summers, and build up a life and legacy of learning, improving the land and myself, and living the way I believe is best.

Permaculture is something we’ll be talking about and referencing a lot more in the future.

Photo credits: http://www.gardenraisedbeds.co.uk, http://www.permacultureproject.com