is "permaculture farm" an oxymoron?

paul wheaton wrote:

I think the primary difference between "permaculture garden" and "permaculture farm" is scale.  And when you get to a big enough scale, people use more petroleum and contemplate the use of pesticides.  

Further, Mollison makes it clear that one of the big functions of permaculture is to replace petroleum with people.   And once you do that, I wonder if you do better with the farm technique or with a whole lot of big gardens.

Suppose we have a 20 acre "permaculture farm" and 20 acres of "permaculture gardens".   And each has 8 people living there full time.   Are they identical?   My guess is that they are probably very different.  My guess is that the farm has one leader and 7 employees with lots of row crops growing in literal rows.   I think that the gardens are probably five pretty active plots about one to three acres each with a lot of "zone 3" and "zone 4" that is pretty shared - and one person acts as a leader for the whole property, but provides very little leadership over four of the gardens - and strongly focuses on just one garden.  

That path for me smells like "permaculture gardens" and not "permaculture farm."  

Am I the only one that feels there is a distinction?

paul wheaton wrote:In the last couple of years, I find myself cringing when I hear "permaculture farm".   It seems that people like permaculture, and they wanna farm, so why not mash the two together?  

In the spirit of "there are many schools of thought under the permaculture umbrella" I am putting my cringe into one school of thought.  So this cringe is really just me - although others are welcome to have the same feelings.  And I will not impede the folks grooving on "permaculture farm."  

I think the primary difference between "permaculture garden" and "permaculture farm" is scale.  And when you get to a big enough scale, people use more petroleum and contemplate the use of pesticides.  

Further, Mollison makes it clear that one of the big functions of permaculture is to replace petroleum with people.   And once you do that, I wonder if you do better with the farm technique or with a whole lot of big gardens.  

Suppose we have a 20 acre "permaculture farm" and 20 acres of "permaculture gardens".   And each has 8 people living there full time.   Are they identical?   My guess is that they are probably very different.  My guess is that the farm has one leader and 7 employees with lots of row crops growing in literal rows.   I think that the gardens are probably five pretty active plots about one to three acres each with a lot of "zone 3" and "zone 4" that is pretty shared - and one person acts as a leader for the whole property, but provides very little leadership over four of the gardens - and strongly focuses on just one garden.  

Chris Kott wrote:There are semantic issues at work here, but I think overall it's one of perspective.

Rene Nijstad wrote:

I wanted to address the OP: is permaculture farm an oxymoron? I think it is, because farm implies business / economy comes first, and permaculture implies ecology and people come first. Just based on that it's very difficult to unite these.
grow our crops and to be able to move around.

I wish to advocate for more gerts.   I wish to advocate for a 20 acre property that has 5 gerts and 5 others that serve other functions.   This doesn't exist yet, but I am trying to create an incubation space for it.   And I wonder if I can end up with greater productivity than richard and have happier people.    A tall order.  But I'm going to try.

paul wheaton wrote:I watched the little bit with Richard Perkins.   Of course, the guy is brilliant and so it is difficult to say anything that is contrary to what he says.  And, yet I will.  

He suggests that if certain techniques were economically viable, then the big producers would do it.  Since they are not, then it is proof that they are not economically viable.  

I think that if that were true, then he would be restricted to only using techniques that other large scale folks were using when he started.   And yet there are many things he is doing differently - thus proving, to my mind, the opposite.  

Further, the sort of production he is doing is different than the sort of production I wish to be doing, or that I wish to encourage.  And it needs testing.  Lots of testing.   And in the testing, I think there will be hundreds of people that will perform the test and fail - and even then, that is not proof that it will never work.   Because I have seen a lot of systems fail, and then the exact same systems succeed - and succeed magnificently.  Clearly there are elements to be learned.  

I feel that hundreds of times throughout my life somebody says "impossible" and then I do the work and prove that it is not only possible, but a far superior solution.  

Millions of people grow magnificent gardens that produce more food than they can eat.   And those people have limited space for their garden.   I suspect that if they had 20% more growing space, those people would grow 20% more food.    

I wish to advocate for more gerts.   I wish to advocate for a 20 acre property that has 5 gerts and 5 others that serve other functions.   This doesn't exist yet, but I am trying to create an incubation space for it.   And I wonder if I can end up with greater productivity than richard and have happier people.    A tall order.  But I'm going to try.

Chris Kott wrote:Rene, what I am saying is that economy and ecology aren't in opposition. They aren't at odds. Economy and ecology aren't even narratives unless you bring them into the scope of politics, and everything gets distorted through that lens.

That the economy stresses efficiency is logical. Ecology does this too. Economics simply describes human activity through tracking the movement of resources. Why would you spend more resources or effort on a given task in a farm setting than you had to? If those resources, that effort, which are really the same thing, could be put to work doing some other necessary task, wouldn't that be better?

Paul Wheaton wrote:I wish to advocate for more gerts.   I wish to advocate for a 20 acre property that has 5 gerts and 5 others that serve other functions.   This doesn't exist yet, but I am trying to create an incubation space for it.   And I wonder if I can end up with greater productivity than richard and have happier people.    A tall order.  But I'm going to try.

Jay Angler wrote:Although I don't feel that "permaculture farm" is anyway near as much an oxymoron as "sustainable development", I really, really want to support this statement by Paul Wheaton:

I wish to advocate for more gerts.   I wish to advocate for a 20 acre property that has 5 gerts and 5 others that serve other functions.   This doesn't exist yet, but I am trying to create an incubation space for it.   And I wonder if I can end up with greater productivity than richard and have happier people.    A tall order.  But I'm going to try.

Please keep trying because I believe this is an important model. It may not replace all the other models we need to transition this planet off fossil fuels and reverse the current dangerous extinction of plants and animals, but I believe that more Gerts would be an important part of any solution.

Su Ba wrote:Does Paul have an Eco-scale for farms?

Skandi Rogers wrote:My problem with people saying they have a permaculture farm or even the rockstar gardeners is that none of them actually make money on a level playing field, I do not know of a single one that does not take advantage of free interns

Su Ba wrote:

Skandi Rogers wrote:

As for free interns......I've had one wwoofer who I deem as fairly typical of the wwoofers in my area. Instead of making me money, I lost money in the long run. Most farmers around me feel the same way. A farm hand can be nice to have around, but when it comes to a financial benefit, most farmers around here have learned that wwoofers and interns are not worth it. They cost the farm money, mainly because of the time spent training and supervising them. That's not counting the damage they've caused and theft issues. To be successful with free labor, the infrastructure needs to be in place (that's an expense) and the supervision and trading needs to be fine tuned. If not, the farm doesn't financially benefit.

My husband and I are currently taking a business planning farming course (that we should have taken about 7 years ago, but I digress).  Half of the class is made up of people who are not yet farming, but want to start. We had a speaker (who was a graduate of the class from last year) come last month and she that said something that I thought was cringe worthy.... and the facilitator agreed.  She was encouraging the new farmers to try to get an internship on other farms so that they could "make all their mistakes on someone else's farm".  She was talking about how when you do this you learn from mistakes that you don't actually have to pay for because it's not your farm.  CRINGE!  

Rene Nijstad wrote:
To me, and that is personal, it seems that:
- A farm's main motive is monetary profit
- A garden's main motive is enjoyment
- permaculture's main motive is ecological sustainability

I say main motive, there can of course be secondary motives!

Does anyone have different definitions of the words in this thread? Did I make a mistake in defining these main motives?

paul wheaton wrote:

Here it is about 20 years later.   I think it is optimal to garden on an acre.  And then if you fill that with lush gardens, maybe have the option to expand to another acre.  When limited to an acre (with access to greater acreage for grazing) decisions tend to harmonize with gardening - how to romance nature within that acre.   And if you have 80 acres sporting the label "farm", decisions tend to be about optimizing production and profit for this season and suddenly some less than wholesome shortcuts start to look appealing.  

If you took that 80 acres and sprinkled in a dozen gardeners that each had an acre - and a few might eventually expand to two or three acres, and the whole dozen also had access to the full 80 acres for other projects (like grazing, or timber stuff), then, in time, (IMAAOO) the land will produce more food and more profit than if we started with the more farm-like approach.  

I think that this tiny bit of philosophy is the difference between "permaculture garden," "permaculture gardens" (emphasis on the "s") and "permaculture farm".

Just one steaming pile of my opinion.  And the core of what I am feebly attempting to share by starting this thread.

Chris Kott wrote:Rene, as Paul has stated elsewhere, generating a profit isn't, of itself, inherently a negative thing. T.J. has indicated as much, and I agree.

Rene Nijstad wrote:We went through a similar thought process. For us it turned out to be all scale connected...

...

And we then realized that although we cannot produce for wholesale market, we can produce for ourselves and our guests, the tourists, who can then pay us for a finished product: their breakfast and lunch, and at those prices we can produce with a profit.

So there: we went from thinking about creating a permaculture farm to wanting to be an eco tourism retreat based in a permaculture food producing park. It was in the end the only thing that made sense to us.