Polyculture Pros and Cons

I'm really itching to put polyculture and hugelkultur techniques into practice in a SPIN farm business (i.e. farming in suburban yards). But when I tell people I'm going to do 'polyculture' for a market garden business I get worried looks. I know there are so many benefits, known and unknown, about growing food in a polyculture but I worry about the labour efficiency of harvesting when, so it seems, planting stuff in monoculture rows and blocks wins out. Any thoughts on the pros and cons of polyculture vs. organic/monoculture practices in the context of an urban market garden enterprise where income/sq. ft. is the key to profitability?

I'll list off a few things I've thought about.

Polyculture Pros:
- Faster sowing
- Less pest loss
- Better flavour and nutrition
- Fertility grown on site
- Better pollination
- Improved yields

Polyculture Cons
- Slower harvest
- Difficult to calculate income and predict results
- Seed loss/hight up-front seed costs

Organic-Monocrop Pros
- Predictable income
- Established and reproducible techniques/results
- Fast harvest

Organic-Monocrop Cons
- Increases loss of carbon and nitrogen due to tillage
- Increased amounts of compost required

I'm pretty much sold on polyculture. All I see are pros. If there are cons, I don't consider them to be significant. Be forwarned: It is not in my power to offer an unbiased opinion.

In an urban market garden, there are 3 key aspects
-curb appeal
-giving the customer what he wants
-high production per unit area

The analogy I like to use is to compare an artisan bakery to the bread section at Walmart. You are bringing the idea of all natural gardening to them city dwellers. This isnt row crops, and the people will respond well to a scenic, attractive, colorful and aromatic environment. Flowers and aromatic herbs enhance the place. Hanging baskets add beauty, as well as a marketable product. Keep the place neat and tidy-clear, smooth paths, unmistakable borders to the growing areas. Salad greens do very well in this environment. They add color, texture, and diversity which is ideal for appearance.

Getting the customer what he wants is what polyculture is all about. Customers want to stop in and get their salads, dinner vegetables, snacks, sandwiches and ingredients all in one stop. They want everything, all the time. The solution is continuous planting of a wide selection of crops. Some of these, a few of those, a bunch of them. Planting areas for a particular crop need to be small. For more of the same crop, you'll put more in next week, and again the week after that. The practical advantages of this solution is the eyes are filled with an array of shapes, colors and sizes of everything under the sun. This set up also presents opportunity when a customer sees something interesting or irresistable smack dab in the middle of the cucumbers.

Hugelkulture suits the urban environment in raising the ground up. This reduces traffic across the beds, and puts the plants at an ideal height.

Production per unit area demands attention. Consider raising transplants off to the side in a more efficient manner. You can get the seeds going in a fraction of the space required in the beds. This also means the water demand is a fraction of what it would be in the beds. 1000 plants in small containers on a few shelves takes a fraction of the water and time as they would when planted across a prepared bed. When a space has been cleared by customers picking it, or by your own harvesting, you have more plants ready to go right back in that spot. All you'll need to do is add some compost, the plants, and a bit of mulch. Transplanting keeps the production area moving ahead full tilt, with plants at optimum spacing. With polyculture and transplants at the ready, there is always something that can go into an empty space, and every change keep up the visual display. These potted plants, ready to go, also serve as another product for sale.

This sort of operation is perfectly suited for customer interaction. If they had the ability to pick their own produce, they can get it as fresh as possible, exactly what they want, and enjoy the adventure of the pleasant surroundings. Can't get that at walmart. If much of the harvest labor was removed, along with it goes processing/washing/packing/moving/putting away the product. There will be some customers who would prefer not to get their hands dirty. Your harvesting can then serve areas that need to be renewed-put that stuff on the market table, at a higher price of course.

Best wishes in your endeavor. Keep us posted.

I've been starting to sell polyculture food. Harvesting is only a downside at first when you or someone OS only had monoculture harvesting experience. Once you or your polyculture harvesters know the plot by heart goIng in to "find" a harvest of strawberries is effortless because you know where they are. Along the way you can harvest other things that are done.

The thing that hooks people is flavor. I've been harvesting peaches lately(15 herbs and veggies growing working the trees rootzone) and almost everyone said they were the best they have ever had. And right now EVERYONE is selling peaches. So there is a lot to compare to.

So in the end it's no harder it just takes a transition period to move into polyculture systems. I help the owners of the land I farm on and their monocrop/blockcropped garden is sooooooooo much more work. I easily spend 5x the work just helping them vs working on My plot. It can be done and we it just takes practice.

a couple of difficulties I have found in my polycultures..

recognizing the plant that is growing..esp when a lot of plants look very much the same..like cole type crops..

keeping hubby from pulling things thinking they are all weeds..as well as visitors..

Here's some folks making a polyculture community "supermarket" garden: http://permaculturenews.org/2011/11/17/fresh-worlds-wildest-supermarket/

If you plant rows of A and rows of B and rows of C; then organization is easy. Also easy if you make a circular guild.

But if you start planting more randomly, with less attention to patterns, then the garden becomes more confusing (like a wild forest) and harvest is more difficult.

But those tend to be more fertile, self-sustainable and healthier, just like a forest, especially if planting is dense and habitat is varied (clearings here and there and lots of edges). Much less water needs. But dense planting also attracts slugs.

Matt,

Ask yourself why you need to tell people you will be doing polyculture. I don't think it is necessary to tell people that. It may only serve to hinder you. I would simply get my farm going and produce food. If you do that, you'll be demonstrating what you do. People will be more convinced by what they see than what you tell them. If you are producing delicious healthy edibles, they won't care if they are polyculture or monocropped except for the few who are already sold on polyculture. Go for it!

Benjamin Burchall wrote:Matt,

Ask yourself why you need to tell people you will be doing polyculture. I don't think it is necessary to tell people that. It may only serve to hinder you. I would simply get my farm going and produce food. If you do that, you'll be demonstrating what you do. People will be more convinced by what they see than what you tell them. If you are producing delicious healthy edibles, they won't care if they are polyculture or monocropped except for the few who are already sold on polyculture. Go for it!

At the same time, putting that word out there puts it in the mind of your customers. Now you have an opportunity to educate them! Don't we want people to know why polycultures are better?

Check out some ofpauls videos with "Skeeter". He grows with a polyculture style and he is very successful with several crop sights in Tonasket Wa.
He has a great balanced approach to growing for a commercial selling crop.

At the same time, putting that word out there puts it in the mind of your customers. Now you have an opportunity to educate them! Don't we want people to know why polycultures are better?

The proof of the likely results of running a market garden business and giving potential customers information that only makes them doubt you is in the original post:

"But when I tell people I'm going to do 'polyculture' for a market garden business I get worried looks."

Why suggest to someone looking for business advice that they should do the very thing that is already being a source of friction? You don't want friction in business. You want customers to easily do business with you. Isn't the better way to grow the food, market it, then show/tell them the techniques you are using? For most customers, knowing their food is grown without chemicals is enough. Telling them more when you have nothing to show just makes them look at you sideways...unless you're only marketing to people who are already sold on polyculture or you just like constantly "educating" and trying to overcome misunderstanding, objections, and confusion. I wouldn't think that's a good use of time for a business, but your mileage may vary.

Wow. What a great response. Thanks everyone for the advice and encouragement.

To clarify, the people giving me 'worried looks' upon announcing my intention to deploy polyculture are farmers with conventional organic experience. I do respect their worry because I haven't done polyculture in a commercial farming context and thus don't have the confidence to say, "well actually I've done it and it's awesome, so I must respectfully disagree."

I don't think many people outside the permaculture world know what polyculture means so I think I will follow Benjamin's advice and grow vegetables in polyculture and let people's taste buds sell the product. Then when customers and other farmers ask me my secret, I'll say the magic word - 'polyculture'. I hope to demonstrate the advantages of polycultures over mono crop and interplanting to both farmers and customers. Hopefully I will be able to carve out a niche for this higher quality produce and charge accordingly. A big part of the SPIN farming business model is selling to restaurants so I think polyculture has a definite advantage there. Who knows, maybe in a few years polyculture will become a household word meaning the best produce money can buy.

Jordan: I share your opinion about the need to transition from monoculture harvesting techniques to polyculture. I'm sure there are many efficient ways to harvest polyculture systems as this has been the most widely practiced method until the plough was invented. We just need to rediscover and adapt those traditional food system practises to contemporary situations.

Of course if I, and we, are too successful in promoting polyculture, then everyone will do it and it won't be as valuable - but I think that's a good thing! Hopefully by that time I'll be rich and retired on my permaculture homestead/oasis.

I've found the same as Jordan- if you spend time in a system you know exactly where something is growing. While I don't have anything to back this up beyond speculation, I believe that humans are very adept at this type of "foraging within a territory" since we spent quite a long time doing it for survival. People are always surprised that I can "find anything out there." And I don't even know a half of a percent of what folks who have been practicing permaculture and foraging for years do.

And I guess that is part of their problem- they see a polyculture as something scary, when in fact it is quite exciting and invites you to explore. A polyculture inherently lends itself to thinking about complex relationships and I believe is a wonderful way to keep our brains sharp.

I agree with the others- do it! And your loyal customers will eventually know where everything is; including where the best growing conditions are for each plant, so they get the tastiest ones!

Matt,

I hope you come back to this thread and tell us your progress. I'd like to know how it goes for you. Luck luck!

I can back up your speculation joshua, I have a friend he was pretty bad at the whole gardening thing. Managing raised beds or rows. One day I showed him an intensive polyculture system( 30 crop species in a 15x40ft area). To him it was sort of a nightmare to go in there and harvest, nothing was in individual beds or rows. Plants growing on top of plants on top of plants. Other than that he loved the concept.

As time went by he stopped looking at it in the same way. Rather than learning and remembering where he planted things, he started to learn to look and identify individual plants and the niches they occupy. Instead of looking for a bed of this he started to search for plant specific features. At this point when he's here I can say go get some hot peppers and in no time he can have a whole basket, along with a few other things he finds along the way that need to be harvested.

Over time I've been able to narrow it down even further. And can tell you which vegetable or herb is better and where that specific plant is.

It takes time to learn but so does anything, people love harvesting more in a polyculture system over monoculture also, nothing like walking into wildflowers and herbs and veggies and trees to go gather basil, or squash, or carrots. Instead of "go pick this 300 yard long row of onions." in full sun, sterile everything around you.

i hope it gets easier with time. Right now, half of the time I forget what I put where and am not familiar yet with a lot of the plants I am growing. so, for me, mixed results.... It looks cool to have everything kinda growing all over the place and at least the chickens find lots of things to eat. maybe memory training would help

I am doing more polyculture myself, and see three potential challenges...

1) whey you use a factory model, you plug one widget in when the other widget comes out. So if you are doing broadcast polyculture, cycling new crops in might require you to switch to transplants, and at some point have a big soil disturbance to reset the cycle. Soil disturbance can be vary useful if you are dealing with rhizomatous weeds.
2) The other limitation might be harvest planning, in that when you control composition, you know what you are going to have for market--you have a known quantity and composition of product to sell. With polyculture, you might not get this level of control, and have too much of one thing and not enough of another to meet demand... particularly in the CSA model. Ever got a CSA box with too much of something you don't really like that much? This might also suggest a hybrid model, where you are mixing 2-4 crops based on knowledge of what kind of yield you want.
3) Finally, if you are dealing with disease issues, controlling rotation might become very valuable... While I have been told that polyculture solves all disease problems... I also know people have been rotating and fallowing fields for a LONG time.

I think these are all design hurdles, not game changers. Check out Eliot Coleman's thoughts on the 'hidden farm' in his 4 season harvest book... niches in time and space where he can squeeze another crop out of the same area. So there are lots of variations on polyculture... from a 10 species broadcast, to transplanted intercropping.

Paul: My thoughts on your design hurdles.

1) Factory Model: Polyculture does not lend itself mechanical planting or harvesting. It seems more of an artisanal form of farming. There are people out there using mechanical methods like Helen Atthowe but she seems to be doing more what I would call intercropping or companion planting, i.e. planting two or three things together in adjacent rows. She has had good results but this does not really capture the full power of polyculture in my opinion.

2) Harvest Planning: This is the biggest design hurdle in my mind and one of the major reasons many people choose to mono-crop or interplant in rows. For my first season I won't be doing CSA boxes or supplying restaurants because I won't know how much supply I can promise. It will take a few years to predict accurate yields from a polyculture. For example if I have about 1000 spinach seeds broadcast among 20,000 other seeds I won't really know how many pounds of spinach I can harvest in 6 weeks. Maybe it will be better or worse than average. I'll have to take notes and figure it out.

3) Disease: I agree that the method of crop rotation and fallowing works and is time tested. And I think that the principle of crop rotation and fallowing can be incorporated into a polyculture model. For example, in polyculture there are many plants which are not market crops, like flowers and nutrient accumulators. So some areas of your soil will be fallow, i.e. not mined, each year and allowed to regenerate. Then, in the case of annuals in a temperate zone, after winter most of the plants will be dead and the soil can be broadcast seeded again. The random seeding of the ground will allow those plants to self-select where they grow. Maybe the broccoli you sowed last year won't like its old spot and will instead grow great where a bean plant was. I could see altering the seed mix year to year to imitate crop rotation techniques would be a good idea. The way I'm planning my seed mix I have at least 6 different plant families in each mix and several species of each family.

I admire Elliot Coleman a lot. From what I have read he seems to be migrating to interplanting from monoculture. I would like to see him do some polyculture. I think that a polyculture of polycultures is the way to go. I see so much untapped potential from the beneficial plant interactions that polycultures allow.

I'm trying a different model for polyculture this cool season. Previously I had been planting a mixture of several crops in one bed, but repeatedly had problems with fast-growing plants like Turnips overwhelming slower-growing crops like Carrots. So this time I'm planting in very small blocks of each crop, about 4 square feet of each kind, making sure no closely-related plants are next to each other (Kale not next to Collards, for instance).

I'm sold on the polyculture . . my customers love the taste and the soil is weed free and improving
note: I just sowed my cover crop right into the mulch and now they are coming up as the summer crops are nearing their end. peas, crimson clover, purple top turnip, groundhog radish
I posted something earlier this summer that might be helpful: )

https://permies.com/t/16080/permaculture/Vegetable-polycultures#141440

i think the two forms could be mixed to form something wonderful. if you were say a farm to table. or even a CSA if you mixed it up with zones and a little creative you could clean up

Matt Baker wrote:I'm really itching to put polyculture and hugelkultur techniques into practice in a SPIN farm business (i.e. farming in suburban yards). But when I tell people I'm going to do 'polyculture' for a market garden business I get worried looks. I know there are so many benefits, known and unknown, about growing food in a polyculture but I worry about the labour efficiency of harvesting when, so it seems, planting stuff in monoculture rows and blocks wins out. Any thoughts on the pros and cons of polyculture vs. organic/monoculture practices in the context of an urban market garden enterprise where income/sq. ft. is the key to profitability?

I'll list off a few things I've thought about.

Polyculture Pros:
- Faster sowing
- Less pest loss
- Better flavour and nutrition
- Fertility grown on site
- Better pollination
- Improved yields

Polyculture Cons
- Slower harvest
- Difficult to calculate income and predict results
- Seed loss/hight up-front seed costs

Organic-Monocrop Pros
- Predictable income
- Established and reproducible techniques/results
- Fast harvest

Organic-Monocrop Cons
- Increases loss of carbon and nitrogen due to tillage
- Increased amounts of compost required

With respect I think a couple of your pro/con arguments are flawed. You are correct about a slower harvest, but seed losses need not be high if you plant in clumps or as companion plants. The first year can be a hybrid between bed (not row) cultivation and pure poly-culture. Save seeds from this grow and you will have plenty the following year. Also most seed companies provide bulk quantities of seed usually at a huge discount. Finally I would think that poly-culture is far more stable in terms of income. With a monoculture you do not have predictable results. You could have a poor crop year or everyone else can have a great one in which case the value of your crop goes down. Or the Federal government could stop providing you with tax breaks and subsidies.

I've had some inadvertent polyculture, because I've been unable to spend time in my garden (getting ready to move). My strawberries have suffered from sharing their space with dandelions and other plants.

This had me wondering--what sort of polyculture works for strawberries?

Poly culture pros are many which overcome their cons. As we know that poly culture is a part of Permaculture, in which agriculture in the same space of different crops are done which are helpful to maintain ecological balance and helps to avoid excess use of monoculture. Their advantages are it helps to increase biodiversity and provides habitat to more species which makes soil fertile. Moreover it avoids the susceptibility of monoculture to diseases. Only cons I am able to point out are slower harvest which is not big one as compare to its advantages. It’s quite acceptable as poly culture allows the different crops to grow naturally without any use of chemical fertilizers which makes soil acidic and reduce its natural fertility

Brenda Groth wrote:a couple of difficulties I have found in my polycultures..

recognizing the plant that is growing..esp when a lot of plants look very much the same..like cole type crops..

keeping hubby from pulling things thinking they are all weeds..as well as visitors..

My wife and I are looking at exactly this issue with polyculture. We are simply not yet familiar enough with plants to be able to identify what is what with adequate confidence. This past year she planted an herb garden, with a variety of herbs distributed more or less randomly.... and then we found that we could not identify many of the things coming up in the space (oops!)

So, for us, for the time being, our version of polyculture is going to be much more structured A given stretch of a bed may have multiple kinds of plants, but they will either be segregated so we know this area should be thyme and that should be basil, etc, or very, very distinctive and easy to tell from one another, such as tomatoes and bush beans and carrots

And whenever I watch someone Sepp or Geoff in their videos, my big question is "how do you harvest with any efficiency?". It seems to me that part of the process is pretty much never addressed, and it should be obvious that it is a critical question.

Just wanted to bump this topic and say this seems like a ripe dilemma for a split test. Small scale makes testing easy. I may split test a SPIN bed project with our already-underway 250 foot hugelkulture project. One of the findings, I anticipate, would be that the extra time spent harvesting would be rewarded with more actual food - most of which may not contribute to a market stand, or more accurately, a restaurant service program, but would still benefit us from a grocery standpoint.

Julia Winter wrote:I've had some inadvertent polyculture, because I've been unable to spend time in my garden (getting ready to move). My strawberries have suffered from sharing their space with dandelions and other plants.

This had me wondering--what sort of polyculture works for strawberries?

I'm experimenting with spinach and snap peas on the fence at the back. Also some North American liquorice.

Marianne West wrote:i hope it gets easier with time. Right now, half of the time I forget what I put where and am not familiar yet with a lot of the plants I am growing. so, for me, mixed results.... It looks cool to have everything kinda growing all over the place and at least the chickens find lots of things to eat. maybe memory training would help

I can relate to that. I have done a mixture of broadcast, specific seed planting and planting in actual seedlings of a few things. I see so many different plants sprouting that I am not sure what they are or if I planted them. As it grows older it is like a test to see how early I can Id the plant. It has really helped my plant identification skills.

Edit: I think the word polyculture is describing different things here. For instance I can throw a seed mix and a poly culture grows, or I can painstakingly select where and how many specimens of each species will be in an area and plant the seeds creating a PC.
One method seems Fukuokaian in nature and one seems more like smart intensive organic gardening practice. Of course the two could be blended by starting with broadcasting a seed mix and see where things take, then intentionally adding seeds to specific areas as the seasons pass.
Not a huge difference, but when dealing with annual vegetables it could make a big difference in produce levels versus nutrients lost from the system.

Julia Winter wrote:I've had some inadvertent polyculture, because I've been unable to spend time in my garden (getting ready to move). My strawberries have suffered from sharing their space with dandelions and other plants.

This had me wondering--what sort of polyculture works for strawberries?

mine seem to be thriving with sun flowers, garlic, carrots, arugula and a bunch of flowers that I forget the names of from a seed pack that said it will attract humming birds and butterflies.

Another advantage is that if you have a 30' x 30 foot patch filled with tomatoes, peppers and zucchini, that is exactly what the customer is going to see and buy.

On the other hand, if he came to buy some tomatoes and peppers, but sees a beautiful melon, or a bush bursting with snow peas or eggplant, he is likely to buy them as well.

Also, as he is wandering around selecting the ripe veggies, he will spot the things that will probably be ripe next week, and that makes him more likely to return next week. The anticipation of a ripe cantaloupe will have his mouth watering all week. A monocrop cannot do the same. It's just more of the same next week.

Paul sent me this link - it's an interesting look at polyculture, from a very analytical perspective.

http://balkanecologyproject.blogspot.ca/2016/12/the-polyculture-market-garden-study.html


Measurements in soil nutrients, time and financial investment, yields - it's exhaustive. I agree with previous comments though, the largest obstacle with polycultural farming definitely seems to be with regards to high yield harvest. I always look at things like this in terms of how we can sell big industry on the idea, and not being able to harvest with heavy machinery is going to be a deterrent, but the pros still greatly outweigh the cons.

Perhaps if enough experiments like this continue, we can work towards removing every obstacle and argument to polyculture farming practices.

That is a really cool website, and they've done a super interesting experiment!

Here's another image, showing their control plot:

The control plot has the same plants in the same numbers, just planted in more traditional blocks.

I encourage you to check out the webpage but the short version is: the polyculture required one more hour of labor over the season (38 versus 37 hours) but produced more food (130.1 kg versus 112.6 kg).  I thought it was interesting that the polyculture bed had significantly higher yields for everything but the summer squash (the yields for summer squash were about the same).  

I saw this thread in a recent dailyish, but no one seems to have taken the bait to bump it.

I am still looking for the secret of making poly culture less labor intensive. I work alone, I am disabled, and weeding is not optional.  Thus I have always planted in alternating rows, sometimes interplanting between the lines, and planting around existing perenials.

This year I tried scattering a mixture of seeds over newly made terraces, more in the interest of just getting something growing there ASAP than caring about a profitable crop.  The result was a weedy mess that didn't produce enough of any one thing to make a meal for my large family.  I ended up ripping everything out, throwing it down  as mulch and putting in transplants.  

Looking at the pictures that were posted earlier, these seem to imply a more organized poly culture with a limited number of plants spaced out in a specific pattern.  This seems much more manageable from a commercial production standpoint than randomly scattering 30 varieties of seed.

Many of the you tube videos I've watched recently on profitable sustainable poly culture market gardens seem to use this technique.  They grow starts in the nursery, and then plant out planned beds.  Thus harvesting is not so difficult, if you know what was planted, in which pattern, and some allowances can be made so that smaller plants aren't run over by vines or shaded out by giants.  And you know what the heck you are weeding around.

Anybody have any real life experience on what works, and what doesn't, especially from the labor end of things?

My problem with growing in a polyculture is harvesting time, I was working on  a brand new organic farm this summer don't get me started on the mistakes they made! But it was a "conventional" field system field was 300m long by 300m wide rows 300m long and about 1m apart. The biggest waste of time was walking from one patch of something to the next to pick it, since the plants were put in when they became ready (plugs) we had cauliflower in 10 different spots, now theoreticaly they should have been ready at different times, but in reality the late ones from one area overlapped with the middle of another and the early of a third. a wheelbarrow will only carry around 10 cauliflowes, so when picking 40-50 you ended up walking an extra km or more because they were not all together. This is a HUGE waste of time over a season.

Most of their plant rows were only two plants of the same type wide so it was pretty mixed. One other example that would be impossible I feel was the peas, those were 6 rows and we harvested them by crawling up the middle of two rows (low peas) if I had to stand up and walk for each plant I doubt they could have been harvested without 2-3 times the labour costs.  Now here Peas are compulsory as are Potatos those are the big draws to a road stand along with strawberries but those are a whole different kettle of fish.

I'm setting up my own system this year which will be wide beds and slightly raised (ground is very wet so water removal is important not retention) I've been doing it on a sub commercial scale for several years. And the most important thing I will be doing is making sure that all of one veg are in one bed (or 10 beds but you get the idea) The amount of time wasted walking between areas was insane. I tried a truely mixed up way this year at home, not really by design but really becasuse I didn't have time to prepare the entire area at once, yes it worked I got the same amount of crop as normal with a few exceptions. An overinthusiastic second year parsnip I had left for the bees shaded out my celeriac. bad planning on my part. I had a huge problem with slugs, now I live in a bog so this is pretty normal, but when growing in rows I can see and remove the blighters. (don't mention frogs/toads I have so many you cannot walk anywhere without commiting mass murder I am not joking here) I also had another problem, when all the crops are growing muddled up you cannot net things properly, and all of the cabbages growing in that manner had to be thrown, the butterflies found them and destroyed them. We have huge numbers of cabbage butterflies here, at work the field turned white with them, (we sprayed there)  

So in summery I think that growing mixed up presents huge problems with labour costs, it's fine saying pick what's ready, but that doesn't work when your customer wants 40 caullies 200 leaks and 40kg of onion not whatever random stuff came to hand. It also presents a problem with pest control. Look at natural "mixed" systems and then look closely every plant will have pest damage, no it doesn't kill it but it does make it unsaleable, and that's the issue, for myself a hole in my cabbage can be cut round, but for sale? That's now chicken food. If you are only picking one cabbage a week or a day for home consumption it'll make no difference to labour where you plant it and sure you can get the herbs to go with it on the way, but when you need to pick multiples, ineficiency really adds up.

EDIT I went and looked at that study a couple of posts up, I get the same yield per m2 as they do aproximatly, but with very different plants so probably not comparable (I'm also terrible with succession and weeding!) But the thing that struck me was right at the bottom, they total time spent on all beds 149hrs total produce 329kg I'll ignore the other imputs for simplicity. That's a little under 2kg per hour. Work that out at your local hourly rate, and an average price per kg of food. It doesn't work. here minimum hourly rate is around 110 DKK (no legal minimum)  at peak (early) season organic peas will sell for 40DKK a kg and squash for 35 a kg. kale is around 60DKK a kg So this system while it is quite possibly great for everything doesn't make it's cost back.

I really love the overall concept of Permiculture, that is, grab the low hanging fruit first and make the problem part of the solution. But it has some difficulties still.

For my farm the biggest is scaling up size to a production that fits my large farm. Organic or permiculture, this is one of the hardest challenges to overcome. An example of this may be nettles. While it is true that nettles can be eaten, I am not sure I want to eat 120 acres of nettles coming from my corn fields! Biochar is another example. I love the concept of biochar and was excited about it until I realized I would have to convert 1600 cords of wood into it before it would be much benefit to my farm. But it does not mean biochar does not have benefits, or that nettles could help reduce our overall grocery bill per year.

Mechanization is a challenge as well, for not only harvest, but other aspects, but I love to fabricate and think outside the box. My father is a mechanical engineer so together we work well. In another lifetime we could have made a formidable team with the design and building of unique farming equipment. As an example to what I mean, I am working on a machine to automate the making of hugels.

In 43 years of farming; one mistake I have often seen is people so engrossed in a particular method of farming...whether it be conventional or otherwise, is bringing their farm to the ground by failing to react to failures. Some practices just do not work on a particular farm. Gabe Brown has a lot of good ideas, but he once said his method could be done anywhere in the world, and that is just not true. I know it cannot be done on my farm for a host of reasons, but it does not mean a plethora of his ideas would not work well here, and I use some of them.

Farming is kind of like being a carpenter. Square level and plumb is the corner stone of that occupation, however knowing which one to apply when is what makes a carpenter great. It is the same with farming, to remain viable, sometimes it makes sense to revert back to a convention method of farming until more can be researched to ensure a farm thrives. A case in point is grain. I know of farms that tried grass fed only, did not have the experience or sward to keep the flock/herd healthy and experienced significant mortality. Good gracious, give some grain until the pastures can have the proper sward to sustain the flock. Continuing to drive ahead and only kill more animals is not very prudent. Sometimes it is okay to live to fight another day.

Polyculture is a tricky thing which works best for gardeners with experience, because you need to recognize the plants to keep and the plants to cut.  I'm managing a hugelbed vegetable garden with just one morning a week of work (long story - I don't live in that house anymore so I go by on Sunday mornings) and the polyculture thing is starting to work well there.  

I think one of the hardest things to grok is that just about any weed is a positive - if you can cut it at the soil line and lay it down before it makes seeds.  In the PNW, I have perennial morning glory that I need to pull out of the ground as it grows so vigorously from its thick semi-tuberous roots, and Himalayan blackberry which also needs to be rooted out, but as I've made progress on rooting those out, I'm developing a pretty nice polyculture.  My chard is self seeding, as are radishes.  Buckwheat is self seeding as well, wild impatiens and calendula (flowers). I will buy starts of kale and tomatoes.  I have yet to be very successful with cauliflower, but I've tried it.  I'm not growing carrots there.  My main crop is the kale - those plants are huge and thriving and keep making new "heads" when I cut off what's there. Tomatoes are bearing well, although they need harvesting more than once a week so I've lost a fair amount. I have perennial rhubarb and asparagus, although those are still pretty small.  

If you know what you're looking at, you just keep cutting the unwanted plants (which could also be excess chard) at the soil line, you don't pull them out of the ground.  If you aren't going to eat the leaves, you lay them right down, preferably next to the stem of something you like.  It's a different mindset - yes, that weed might spring up again from the roots but that's OK, you just say "thanks for converting CO2 into solid matter" and chop'n'drop again.

I'm planning to scatter some lambsquarters seed on the hugel garden tomorrow, because that's a weed I love to eat.  When I was in Wisconsin I gave up on planting early spinach, because the lambsquarters came up all over quite reliably and all I had to do was harvest.  I bought select large leaved lambsquarters seed from Oikos tree crops when I first moved to Portland, but it didn't grow for me.  We had some lambsquarters show up in our back yard and I let it grow over six feet tall and set seed, which I'm now harvesting.  Hopefully this is acclimated to our area and will thrive without care.

So I guess I'm saying that polyculture requires skilled attention, but not necessarily hours and hours of it.  Recognizing seedlings is a bear, no doubt about it.  I'd love to hear from other people who are managing polycultures, how they get past the "what have I got here" dilemma.

I'm a huge fan of polyculture and I think ultimately it is the way food production should be done if we are going to stop degrading the land. But at the same time I don't agree that polyculture takes less work than monoculture.

The key is what level of food production are you talking about. In my home garden polyculture works great and it actually reduces my work level. But I'm doing everything by hand and I'm much smarter and more flexible than big farm machinery. For a large farm or really just average farm polyculture would take more labor. Also, my wife who did not grow up gardening and is still learning has trouble knowing what is what in my polyculture beds. I think her experience is fairly common for people just starting out.

If you look at the history of farming the practices that we permies don't like did greatly reduce the number of people working in agriculture. The cost was land degradation, increase reliance on chemicals and the loss of small and medium sized farms. But it allowed for a big increase in efficiency from a labor prospective and let people shift to other jobs in more urban environments. I don't think this can last and in my view the benefits are only short term in that they are now proving to be unsustainable and will need to be replaced with something new. That new system can either be a human designed system that works with the land or nature will just force us to a state that it likes regardless of our needs.

I think permaculture gives a lot of tools to help design that new system and polyculture will be a big component of it. So will an increase use of perinneals such as the hedgerows that used to surround farms in Europe. But this new system will be different than the old - it will rely less on chemicals, the land will improve not degrade, and we will have more small and medium sized farms. But that means more people working in agriculture than we currently have - likely a lot more. Plus people not working on farms will likely be growing more of their own food which again means more labor in food production but lots of other benefits.

I don't think we do ourselves any favor by trying to sugar coat permaculture systems. These systems are great for the environment, and they can feed the world while improving our health. But they are also more work in terms of the number of people working in food production. That is a tradeoff that some people won't like and regardless it is a huge shift and all systems are resistant to shifting from one state to another.

People have said that permaculture is a gift to your future self. That is very true but my current self is very tired at the moment from mulching a large area that used to be a parking lot. Eventually it will have rich soil and be filled with edible trees and shrubs. All in all a huge improvement and my future self will be able to enjoy it and the local wildlife will be much happier - but
I'm still very tired. Permaculture is an investment in the future but that investment requires work and energy now.

So my view is that we don't do ourselves any favor by saying permaculture techniques such as polyculture are easy or less work. Permaculture systems are hard work but by design that work load decreases with time. But in the short term it will still get you worn out.