A Day in the Life of Geoff Lawton

While lidar mapping is probably the future, right now I think it’s a luxury most folks don’t really need.

It’s a bit weird to describe permaculture as an “infection”. I think he means well, and I’m a huge fan, but it still seems like a negative connotation.

When folks suggest Permaculture be an “international standard”, I know some think it could or should replace modern agriculture, but realistically I don’t believe it’s going to, at least not any time soon. Anyway I think both methods have a lot to learn and benefit from the other. Modern agriculture might benefit a lot from things like: polyculture, no-till, pasture cropping, regenerative Ag, etc, yet might remain a hybrid and not necessarily become 100% permie.

Mike, what do you think Permaculture has to learn from industrial agriculture? It seems to me that since industrial ag is the norm, any more fringe approach will have already started with full knowledge of the parts of that that might be valuable.

Paul talks about infecting minds with permaculture all the time, so that way of looking at it feels pretty normal around here.

And while I don't really know how to use it, my county GIS website already has LiDAR surveys of the entire county available through their web-portal. I live in a small and poor county, so if we have it, I sort of assume most places do. If someone knew how to benefit from it, it might not cost anything extra. Below are the pics of my land from aerial photography and LiDAR as examples:

I think there’s more to learn. Don’t you?

Someone spent many thousands of dollars on a lidar survey.  what value did it gain? Beforehand, you had thousands of dollars and a map accurate to 20 cm, afterward, you don’t have that thousands of dollars anymore but your map is now accurate to 2 cm.  Was it worth it?  Is your permaculture practice that much better as a result?  Did anyone pause to consider the purchase, or was it just technology that was impulsively applied?  

I ask because I want to know what role high-tech plays or doesn’t play here. I did a survey on asking folks to describe “appropriate tech” but there was no trend or correlation.  Sometimes folks embrace high-tech, other times they shun it. Is there any rhyme or reason to this?