Stop the presses! "Permaculture beats conventional ag," Science

When they prove what we all saw with our own eyes--

https://phys.org/news/2024-07-permaculture-sustainable-alternative-conventional-agriculture.html

It's a good feeling.  

OK, I'm not sure it's actually proving what I put in the clickbait headline or in the clickbait headline that I got this from, it was sent out on the local permaculture list, but it's an encouraging read.  I didn't read the actual paper.

I read this a few weeks ago and wondered where they got their data.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/carbon-footprint-of-homegrown-food-five-times-greater-than-those-grown-conventionally/ar-BB1h5G38

Robert Ray wrote:I read this a few weeks ago and wondered where they got their data.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/carbon-footprint-of-homegrown-food-five-times-greater-than-those-grown-conventionally/ar-BB1h5G38

Good thing I wasn't drinking hot tea when I read that because it would be all over the sofa now. What the...? I wish Mr. Mollison were able to comment on that "research".

Wow!!!


Again, WOW!!......  Stop the presses is right!

Although not as high profile as "Nature" magazine itself, "Nature Communications" is part of the same scientific publishing group and to have an article cited there actually using the term Permaculture, defining it, and proposing it as a framework for promoting 'Agroecology' is pretty awesome.

Original article and abstract pasted below: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01405-8\

Although, as Joshua noted, a practicing Permie did not need extra info to convince them of the positive attributes of Permaculture, for Paul W. and others actively engaged in speaking and promoting Permaculture, it never hurts to have a mainstream scientific study like this in your back pocket to aid in convincing those in the mainstream of agriculture of the 'validity' of the Permaculture approach.  Good find!

Tours of the sample farms would be interesting.

That is not anything new, the permies family already knows that homegrown is so much better than store bought and we all have been tell everyone about that for years.

Robert Ray wrote:I read this a few weeks ago and wondered where they got their data.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/carbon-footprint-of-homegrown-food-five-times-greater-than-those-grown-conventionally/ar-BB1h5G38

Just making clear - this is a different article from the pro-permaculture one, but it's not making anything like the same comparision. They don't link to the original research, but actually, aspects of the findings do make sense. Much of the carbon footprint from the home grown food in the study was in things like new garden sheds and tools, raised beds built with new lumber and filled with purchased commercial compost, gravelled or paved paths, and so on.

Unfortunately, home veggie gardens can be very, very permie, or they can be an extension of the home decor, prone to gardeners following fashions and changing everything in the garden year to year because someone else did it on Instagram. And other places they looked at like allotments can have a high turnover, so someone does their plot how they want one year, and then the next year, someone else comes and pulls up what the previous tenant built and does something else.

I've seen photos of incredibly beautiful home vegetable gardens touted as being environmentally friendly, where the embodied energy in the hardscaping would need 100 years of highly productive veggie growing to go anywhere near break even, both on financial and environment cost. That's before counting the trucked in compost and the nursery purchased plants.

The article writers' point -- to use recycled materials as much as possible, to maintain rather than replace structures and hardscaping, and to design things that will last in the first place, is very permie.

That makes a lot more sense than the article's title in and of itself.  Thanks for that clarification.

I have bought a lot of fencing...and I don't feel great about it, but on the other hand the pigs weren't going to wait until the living fence grew to size before escaping.  

Jane Mulberry wrote:

Robert Ray wrote:I read this a few weeks ago and wondered where they got their data.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/carbon-footprint-of-homegrown-food-five-times-greater-than-those-grown-conventionally/ar-BB1h5G38

Just making clear - this is a different article from the pro-permaculture one, but it's not making anything like the same comparision. They don't link to the original research, but actually, aspects of the findings do make sense. Much of the carbon footprint from the home grown food in the study was in things like new garden sheds and tools, raised beds built with new lumber and filled with purchased commercial compost, gravelled or paved paths, and so on.

Unfortunately, home veggie gardens can be very, very permie, or they can be an extension of the home decor, prone to gardeners following fashions and changing everything in the garden year to year because someone else did it on Instagram. And other places they looked at like allotments can have a high turnover, so someone does their plot how they want one year, and then the next year, someone else comes and pulls up what the previous tenant built and does something else.

I've seen photos of incredibly beautiful home vegetable gardens touted as being environmentally friendly, where the embodied energy in the hardscaping would need 100 years of highly productive veggie growing to go anywhere near break even, both on financial and environment cost. That's before counting the trucked in compost and the nursery purchased plants.

The article writers' point -- to use recycled materials as much as possible, to maintain rather than replace structures and hardscaping, and to design things that will last in the first place, is very permie.

If the original paper from the University of Michigan had included permaculture sites/practices as well I think the data outcome would have been different. I believe the author was pointing out how a more permaculture approach would do just that.

Robert Ray wrote:If the original paper from the University of Michigan had included permaculture sites/practices as well I think the data outcome would have been different. I believe the author was pointing out how a more permaculture approach would do just that.

That's my feeling about it, too. The suggestions in the MSN article were very permaculture - build the stuff that needs bought in input once, and then maintain it, rather than making one's veggie garden a fashion statement.

Sadly, this is what happens when things get trendy. On the one hand that Instagram-perfect landscaped yard including edible plants that cost $10,000 to install might just be the gateway drug to more sustainable gardening. But more likely, it gets ripped out and turned into a cactus garden or whatever the next gardening trend is. It would only take one or two of that style home food garden in the sample to completely skew their figures.

Joshua Myrvaagnes wrote:That makes a lot more sense than the article's title in and of itself.  Thanks for that clarification.

I have bought a lot of fencing...and I don't feel great about it, but on the other hand the pigs weren't going to wait until the living fence grew to size before escaping.

Things like that are essential, of course. We need some tools and structure! But I'm pretty sure you won't be ripping the pig fence out next year and replacing it with a newer style because it's "so last year"!

I found the article positive, overall. It's not anti-home food gardens and not anti-the non-plant stuff we need to be able to grow things. I suspect the negative title wasn't intended to tell people to stop growing food at home, but ask them to think how it can be made more sustainable. Unfortunately all most people will see in their social feed is the title.

Jane Mulberry wrote: The suggestions in the MSN article were very permaculture - build the stuff that needs bought in input once, and then maintain it, rather than making one's veggie garden a fashion statement.

I expect that a lot of urban people believe all the ads about needing fertilizer and this equipment and this sort of "stylish" gardening, but that's how all the garden centers make their money.

Permaculture needs to keep putting the word out that there's a better and much cheaper way to grow food.

However, neighbourhood peer pressure is a thing. Figuring out ways to balance the expectations of a group, when what you want a polyculture, gick-free front lawn, is a factor. People who cave to that to fit in, likely face increased costs of any food they try to grow.

So what Jane says is key - buy quality, maintain it, and resist "keeping up with the Jones". And then convince everyone that they can learn all about permaculture. It's possible to do permaculture in a half-barrel. It's possible to do permaculture on you front porch (people look so guilty when I answer the door and they've swiped a mini-tomato from the planter - but that's what they're there for!) We just have to keep trying to teach any neighbours we can.

There are so many influences on people to do the high input style gardening. All those TV shows where a garden is made over in a weekend, garden centres. Many of us live in societies where buying lots of new stuff is encouraged as being good for the economy. Some people have to comply with HOAs that make low input gardening more difficult because everything needs to look nice. And we usually start off gardening how our parents gardened.

Hubby was raised by one of those keen 1950s style gardeners. She prided herself on her grow-bag, artificially fertilised, greenhouse tomatoes, and on having more flowers in her "front" than anyone else on the street. But everything was bought in new twice each year.  Bags and bags of compost to replace the fertility taken away in her garden "waste" collection.  At least fifty plastic flats of new plants every season as everything from the previous season was thrown out. A manicured patch of lawn. Sprays for everything. A hundred flowering plants in pots, all needing watering twice daily in summer. Chop the trees down because the leaf drop is so messy.  It was a pretty suburban-style British garden full of annuals, but hugely expensive both environmentally and financially.

Unfortunately, he was well endoctrinated in her gardening ideas. It pains him every time some passer-by makes a negative comment about our little suburban patch of forest garden not being neat plain lawn like everyone else on the street, the way it was when I moved here. But there are far more positive comments. There were no birds or other wildlife before. Now we have a garden full of life. But I'm still having to encourage him to chop and drop the weeds, to save the fallen leaves, to recognise that lots of bare earth between plants is not a sign of a good gardener.

Jane Mulberry wrote:....It was a pretty suburban-style British garden full of annuals, but hugely expensive both environmentally and financially.

....and modeled on the estates of the aristocracy.  Whether we like it or not, this model pervaded the minds of even the peasant emmigrants who traveled from Europe to other lands.  Ironically, they were leaving their own countries to find a better lifestyle, out from under the boot of the aristocracy -- only to find themselves desperate to create their own estates in that palatial image.  In my region of the northern Plains of the US, visitors from other countries comment on the  *immense* amount of mowing done to make a 5 acre (~2 hectare) homestead look like the grounds of Buckingham palace. It's a hard meme to purge in the minds of the general population:  "A man's home is his castle..." is an oft heard saying,....cuz it's not enough for it to just be his 'home'.

And then there is the issue of inputs to produce food...since there have been active efforts over the decades to breed crops that responded well to manufactured inputs (e.g. 'green revolution') instead of the compost we can all make ourselves.  Equally active efforts now need to be employed to seed-save and landrace select those varieties/progeny that do well with the compost-input scenario.  All takes time,.....but the evidence for success is available from so many circles.

While I was watering my front porch poly-culture (1/2 barrel growing 1 very large Yellow Grape Mini-tomato plant, 2 Maxi Filet beans, a handful of walking onion bulbs, and 3 tomatillo plants) it got me thinking:

Could everyone please think about an entry-level thread here on permies, that we could suggest people share on F...b...k (assuming you have such a thing - I admit that I don't but I have friends that talk about it) or email to their friends, that might help to open people's minds to an alternate - a permaculture way - of getting beautiful flowers to grow naturally?

Do we have a thread specifically about starting flowers from seeds? Alas, I must admit that most of my flowers look after themselves and self-seed. I am definitely did not catch the flower "bug" from my Mother, and I was aghast when neighbours asked her if those were tomato plants in her new front garden bed and why they were there. Why Not??? Tomatoes are yummy! (Apparently, they had got some topsoil for that bed from a farmer and they self seeded and Dad refused to put perfectly good tomato plants - yeah Dad! Besides tomato plants do flower and I think yellow flowers are pretty.

Maybe, just maybe, Paul's innoculating the world through permaculture is finally taking root out in the public domain. World domination here we come.

Loved Jay's comment on her dad getting a load of topsoil that had tomato seeds in that now have tomato plants growing among the flowers, sneaky but workable way of getting non-permie people to start seeing this as their new normal. What a great thread.

I remember the first house my parents bought. I was almost a year old when we moved in and stayed for five years.

The subdivision was built to be housing for the shipyard during WW2. Most of the houses were two bedrooms. These were what we would now call starter homes. Everyone had tiny yards.

But most everyone had gardens!

It could be my imagination or miss remembering, but I recall front flower beds with “specimen” plants: tomatoes!

The regular garden was in the backyard. A neat, little patch of flower bed in the front yard would feature two or three tomato plants.

When we moved to the new (to us house) we had a larger yard. Behind our property was a junk yard.  The immediate neighbor was a little old lady that loved watching our chickens. She could sit on her back porch and see them beyond her garage.

Needlessly to say, my father put in a larger garden.  He kept bees in the chicken yard. The chickens were happy to eat any bugs around the bee hives.

Anyway, in the new house we didn’t plant vegetables in the front yard. I grew up “knowing” that having a garden was important.

Between “life” and depression, I don’t always plant a garden area these days. I tell people that you can plant a tomato in a bucket on your front porch if that is all you can manage.