who do you think has the best large scale permaculture system?

Good point, Siu-vu-man,
But the health problems of Americans are not caused by eating spinach, blueberries and cranberries. Those are three of the healthiest things on the planet. In general, I agree, however.
I do think, as I mentioned earlier, that cheap bulk unhealthy bad food is not the solution to the now worldwide problem. Barely organic food is also maybe a stepping stone at best. I think we're going to have to think seriously about food as medicine and medicine in the form of food. That's easier to do with smaller, local, more permaculture type farms than giant big ag. Where we're already at in terms of big ag doesn't feed people well now. Doing more of it will feed us even more poorly. so I agree.
John S
PDX OR

hi John, true, but the 3 alternatives are even more nutritious per calorie but yes, i agree, better to grab the low-hanging fruit first, which is a feat in and of itself. so much of what we choose to eat now are empty calories : more engineered to satisfy cravings, rather than to sustain the bio-machines that we call our bodies so that they can operate to maximum potential. hence, the "need" for a bloated healthcare industry to deal with the fallout. this is such an enormous topic with so many interrelated variables, it's really difficult for most everyone to wrap their minds around fully, especially when one realizes that much of the west's economic output (GDP) derives from creating & sustaining unhealthy environments.

there is another huge factor that i'm willing to wager that Cassie's dad understands at least intuitively -- much of the soils that are used for agriculture are depleted of nutrients. sure, cover cropping with clover, etc. may help to reintroduce nitrogen, but that is only one element out of dozens that are missing. someone with a large tract of land has 2 choices essentially : spray with chemical fertilizer or remineralize using natural processes. both require outside inputs and investment in time, energy & large equipment. one is a proven easy fix that will more or less guarantee an immediate yield, but has numerous long-term consequences (salt accumulation, bacteria/fungal dieoff, etc.) which further destroy the land for future generations. the other is unproven in the conventional practical sense, and may have to sacrifice yield for one or multiple seasons for rehabilitation.

perhaps this is also where the "permaculture" mindset can interject into conventional farming : developing and trial testing radical alternative methods to speed up natural succession in mineralization that can be used by mainstream farmers to eventually wean themselves off the addiction to chemicals. i read somewhere once (maybe in the forums here) about someone saying that it is folly to try to convince a conventional farmer to rethink everything that they have been doing for decades but that it might be reasonable to encourage them to dedicate 5% of their land as an experiment. if it works over a given time period, do 5% more. i would add to that it might be more of a convincing argument to color the proposal in economic terms (large risk on a small amount of capital (land) to achieve a long-term return at lower cost) and appealing to common ground (the realization that the soils are depleted).

i'm quite sure that none of this is news to everyone reading here, so the above is written simply in an effort to help construct a bridge between the "permie" mindset and that of conventional farmers on the ground.

Peter Ellis wrote:So, maybe this is worth thinking about - How many farmers are needed to feed the world with industrial agriculture, versus how many farmers are needed to feed the world with permaculture? Measured in terms of individual productivity, industrial agriculture blows permaculture out of the water...Permaculture works against economies of scale, i.e. it is not more efficient to have a one thousand acre food forest than to have a one hundred acre food forest. Permaculture is largely incompatible with mechanization (Mark Shepard has some arguments here, but I think my point is valid). Permaculture uses more human labor and less machinery, so no one farmer running his combine over thousands of acres of wheat or corn.

But, is it a particularly good thing to employ fewer people? We have some pretty large scale unemployment. Maybe smaller farms that are more productive per acre and more profitable per acre and provide more people with gainful employment would be a good thing? Say you took a cureent thirty thousand acre spread and broke it into sixty five hundred acre permaculture operations. Many more people would need to be employed working on these farms, but the collective production would likely surpass the production of the single industrial agriculture operation.

If we had a shortage of manpower, the issue of productivity measured in man hours could be a legitimate concern. We might not have the resources to produce enough food. I think that we do not have that shortage, but that we are coming up on a point where the fossil fuel that has allowed us to leverage our manpower tremendously will become the limiting factor on the industrial agriculture approach. In other words, we are approaching a point where we will no longer have the option of industrial agriculture due to a shortage of petroleum.

I'm going to disagree with the notion that there is a surplus of workers willing and able to do the labor needed to harvest broad acre permaculture food forest type systems. While there are many people unemployed, they are often unwilling or unable to do the difficult manual labor needed. In the US, in order to alleviate the worker shortage we have set up an array of guest worker programs. Back in 2010 (when the economy wasn't exactly good), the united farm workers had a "Take Our Jobs" campaign where they tried to get US citizens to take the jobs of migrant farm workers. Out of thousands of people responding to their campaign, only a few dozen actually followed through.

I do find it interesting that when I read about farmers who are a bit skeptical about making a switch to regenerative techniques from industrial techniques that they tend to do a plot trial and then they see the benefits for themselves and end up making the system-wide switch. When trying to win over industrial farmers, I think one strategy is to leverage this idea and encourage them to trial regenerative techniques on some subdivided piece of their landscape. I'm confident that the majority of them would make the system-wide switch if we just stand by them a bit and help them learn this better way.

John Wolfram wrote:
I'm going to disagree with the notion that there is a surplus of workers willing and able to do the labor needed to harvest broad acre permaculture food forest type systems. While there are many people unemployed, they are often unwilling or unable to do the difficult manual labor needed. In the US, in order to alleviate the worker shortage we have set up an array of guest worker programs. Back in 2010 (when the economy wasn't exactly good), the united farm workers had a "Take Our Jobs" campaign where they tried to get US citizens to take the jobs of migrant farm workers. Out of thousands of people responding to their campaign, only a few dozen actually followed through.

Here in the UK most of our manual/seasonal farm work is done by labourers from elsewhere in the EU, while at the same time we still have high levels of local unemployment.

I think the whole unwilling to do hard work thing is also part of a long-term cultural change. If you grew up in a family where hanging out in your yard and doing a couple of cool experiments was fun and you got great food out of it, you're likely to see the upside of it and see the benefit. Also if your friends do that. If you grew up in a family and among friends where watching TV, playing video games and surfing about lives of celebrities was the norm, you'd see that work as unreasonable. Part of what I'm trying to do is make a positive pebble wave that connects with others on the idea that working to make the world and your neighborhood a better place is a worthwhile lifestyle. So is biking to the library to get books. A lot of my students grow up in families where Dad works in a nursery or does construction and landscaping, and so they don't see that as such a terrible thing. Their parents are almost all immigrants, but the kids are American citizens. I think permaculture is going to be an easier sell to those who grew up and know others who think that working on projects is fun and interesting, and getting exercise is not a bad thing.
John S
PDX OR

There's more to this question than people are thinking.

I'm starting to think the real answer isn't a large farm. Even at 30,000 acres, it wouldn't be the 'best' or even the 'largest' permaculture system.
Generally this is considered a faux pas in Texas, but I'm going to tell y'all for the sake of putting my cards on the table - my family has a >5k ranch in the Texas hill country. The last real offer on it was $60,000,000, the last high offer was 80, but it's not really for sale - my grandpa, who may be quite more stubborn even than Cassie's dad, likes to take offers just to imagine the money, but we've had it since I think 1938. It has its own natural springs, caves, miles of roads, hunting camp, two large stone houses, smaller houses. Sounds like paradise, right? See the website my brother made for it years ago - pipecreekranch.com/ We've got lakes, one with a concrete dam, ridge roads, the works.

It's been the cause of some very nasty fights, one that split my father and his sister apart - they don't talk - and my grandfather (96, turns 97 next month) hasn't helped but threw fuel on the feuding fire. It's been, in my opinion, basically mis-managed since white men set foot on the land in the 1840s, as has much of the hill country. It was once prairie, with the Comanche riding around on our land, and through Bandera Pass, the Lupan Apache. The settlers, as one (now deceased) old-timer JB Edwards told me, were so terrified of the Comanche that they let the trees grow right up to the house before they'd allow anyone to so much as chop a branch off. Now areas are unnaturally overrun with junipers - locally called 'cedars' - whereas they once clustered on the hilltops. In the 1930s, a government grant paid for JB and his brother to drag a massive several-ton chain between two bulldozers. One as far up as he dared drive it on the hillside, one down in the valley -- everything taken down. You can still see the massive scars on the mountainsides. It also seems to have semi-plowed, in effect, all the topsoil. At any rate, the land seems to hold less water and be very flood-prone. Another recent government program let us pay a Mexican to drive a Bobcat all day with a tree-cutter, to cut the junipers down individually, then pile them up and burn them. Another government program paid for British Petroleum ("BP") solar panels to be installed, to pump well water over to various water troughs along the ridge. But without much grass growing in the drought, there's not many cattle the ranch can support, so they're only rarely used. The politics of who-does-what are rather convoluted, but basically it doesn't matter because no one in the family has both the work ethic and the knowledge base to manage it well.

All of which is why, despite working on farms in Massachusetts (Morning Glory, Edgarton) and Ohio (Foxhollow, Mt Vernon), and getting an Environmental Studies Minor at Kenyon College, and making a documentary film on agriculture including interviews at The Land Institute in Kansas, an organic farm in California, and with fishermen and professors in southern Louisiana, and taking Geoff Lawton's PDC last spring and building a permaculture aquaponics system at my house and designing a plan for an acre plot here in Dallas, I've not even touched this ranch with a 10-ft pole, until yesterday.

Because yesterday I saw Gabe Brown's talk in Idaho last fall, and just couldn't help myself. As far as convincing my own family of the merits of permaculture, I think a moral argument, or any form of discussion that could take aim at how they do things presently, would be met with quickly shut ears and perhaps hurt feelings. They already all read "Holistic Management" by Alan Savory back in the 1990s, and nothing really changed. The only way that might work is to slowly feed them very feel-good videos. But I haven't really been doing that even. Probably the only thing that would work, and I think Cassie and anyone else who has to share land with others might try this, is to ask for your own manageable-sized plot of land to experiment on.

But let's say I / you / anyone convinces them - and there's often a "them" with large properties, say they're convinced completely, exactly as you could dream it, and set up a massive, profitable, permaculture-based operation. It seems anytime you give people something and say, "OK, share this," it's going to fail. As Geoff Lawton said, living and working with other people is very very hard - making, say, an 'intentional community' work is very hard. Even when they're all monks in a monastery, as two of my friends are, there's still massive drama and power struggles and people who cannot stand each other. Family is a crucible for this - it's a particularly tight-nit community who all have each other's strings-to-pull down by heart, at the ready.

Any profit venture is like making a movie. It's best when there's one director. Owning and operating land makes one the director, producer, and lead actor. No wonder my grandfather enjoys it, even at 96, with only in-name concessions of control to his (more easily controlled) daughter. And if she were in his position, I suspect it'd be the same. I've enjoyed shows like "The Men Who Made America." It's fun to say you know rich and famous people. I know several indeed. But it tears people apart, isolates them from the most valuable asset, which in my opinion is human bonds. Our family was mostly happy before my father and his sister began to see the possibility of owning / controlling this land.


So. What is the best large scale permaculture system?
Larry Santoyo's Los Angeles.


Happiness is having skills that fit you like a glove, living in abundance without chronic worries, surrounded by people you naturally agree with, working on a vision with your own hands that is out of love for those you've built bonds with.
Unhappiness is having contrived or coerced skills that fit someone else's bill, living in want and worry, surrounded by people that handicap or undercut you, working on meaningless projects with delegated hands that are done out of fear of losing control and power.



I know a dot-com San Francisco millionaire who's about my age, early 30s. He came up with the game "Mafia Wars," and owns properties around that city. The guy seems mentally unstable and severely isolated. He's a big preacher of entrepreneurship. He's pale and hard to reach.

I know Erykah Badu, who has multiple children by as many fathers, has one house (won't say where, she has stalkers) that is home to many people who seem to endlessly cycle through - her mother lives there, relatives, her entourage, Andre 3000, friends. She works hard but supports an ecosystem, and it sustains and nourishes her. She doesn't love to travel, so she does a lot of shows in Dallas and is a master of local promotion. She's gotten Dave Chappelle to come to her, and do local shows. The woman is as happy as a clam, and seems 15 years younger than her age.

Make a whole city like that, where things network into each other, where a supplier always is responding to an existing need, where enterprises are stacked and human bonds are formed naturally, a web of real skills, and you create stability in what economists call the 'informal economy,' which is nourishment. Geoff Lawton's ranch is the entire world, and he's always invited where he steps foot. As for what may happen with my family's ranch, I don't know. But it's not worth fighting over - my priority's not the plans or projects or profit, but the relationships. If something good comes of that, great.


Just my opinion anyhow.

I really enjoyed your post Preston . Money is not everything neither is land it's what you do that's important. I have never been as poor in financial terms as I am now nor so rich in experience friendship and love . I eat better am healthier and expect to live happier

David

Cassie Langstraat wrote:My dad is currently running 1,500 pregnant heifers on his land right now. They will calve in the spring. That will be around 3,000 cattle. He owns around 30,000 acres of land. He farmed about 500 acres of corn this summer, complete with tons of chemicals and fertilizers... He also used to do much larger acre wheat farming too. He truly believes that millions of people would starve without people like him providing these massive numbers of beef and big crops to the world.

He's not denying that permaculture could be more profitable or produce more on a smaller scale. He is just saying that there is no way we can eliminate Big Ag and feed the billions of people on the earth. I am not saying I believe him, I am just saying I have been listening to him talk about this for the two weeks I've been home and it's frustrating because I don't really know what to say back to him.

So several of you have said that I asked the wrong question, and that this debate is the wrong one.. So what is the right question? What is the right debate in this sense?

The right question is what does your Dad want for his children and his grand children and his great grand children for generations to come? Just ask him. A Joel Salatin/Gabe Brown business model will eventually produce 5000-8000 dollars profit an acre. On 30,000 acres, that's enough revenue to support MANY MANY families...ie many generations of your Dad's family! Each generation inheriting a better farm than the last as each generation improves the soil. Each year requiring less and less inputs until you hit that magic point when you have no more inputs at all....and instead get more and more yields.

To that generation, leaving more and/or a better life to the next generation is a common cultural paradigm. Maybe just maybe it will strike a chord. But it has to be your Dad's idea. So ask him? What does he want for his extended family for generations to come. Don't focus on things like running out of oil. Whether it runs out or not, it still cost money. Spending less on oil means more for his family. Same goes for every input. Let's say the conventional model of agriculture never fails? What if at the last second every pesticide that fails gets replaced by a new one. It still costs money. Every dime he spends on expensive inputs is one dime less he keeps for his future generations. Your Dad can afford it. But how many generations before there just isn't enough to go around. That's HIS legacy. Should be the most important thing to him. But again. You have to let HIM come to that. You simply can't do it. If you say it, you come off as greedy. But you can ask what he wants for you and the rest of the family, and their families, and so on and so on. See what he says.

BTW Here is yet another large operation besides Gabe and Joel:

Gabe brown has my vote, he is a actual income producing farmer. He spoke at our annual forage conference at Michigan state last year. I also would say Joel salat in for sure. I have seen at least one of the other mentioned speakers in person, however I am sceptacle about how much off farm income sales supports the farms of many permaculture speakers eventhough they have great working models and are sources for furthering research and genetic sources. Most systems just are not producing enough income or produce reliable crops yet to support a commercial ag business so that is why many of us are still burning fuel and equipment to farm large acreages and run commercial livestock as the reliable income producer.

John Wolfram wrote:My top pick would probably be the 2,500 acre White Oak Pastures in Georgia (Interview). Somewhere in the interview, the guy gives a great response to the "can't feed the world" argument where he basically states that as long as land is the limiting factor, conventional ag produces more, but once something else becomes limiting factor then a permaculture style system produces more.

I agree.

It seems to me that land is only a limiting factor because of industrial agriculture practices turning fertile soil into desert. The rate of loss of topsoil in tilling systems is astounding. While industrial farmers can "maintain" a soil with 2.5-3% Soil Organic Matter for years and years, it catches up with them during the next drought or other external "limiting factors". Regenerative practices turn marginal land or desertified land into productive land. Industrial practices don't do that. I wonder if conventional ag actually does produce more, though. Let's look at land and inputs. Does it take more to grow corn at 10,000 lbs/acre yield, giving 4.5x the energy put into growing it, given to cows at a feed ratio of 1 lb of beef for ever 8 pounds of corn, this is a 2x losing proposition. Forget transportation, the energy required to raise cows in AFO, forget all of it, and the energy balance is still inefficient. What is the energy balance of a managed intensive rotational grazing operation? The cows harvest their own feed and fertilize the land. The embodied energy in the electric tape is the only input. Efficiency is not a limiting factor, but it is a way to measure limiting factors.

Andrew Mateskon wrote: I wonder if conventional ag actually does produce more, though.

I don't believe it does, especially if one works on the small scale. Conventional ag produces more per human hour of labor, but only because of the massive inputs of petroleum products. But permaculture and other related methods such as Biointensive, are much more productive per acre. A permaculture world will require more people to grow food, but it will actually require less land because of the stacking of functions on a given piece of land. Bill Mollison believed most land could be returned to wild nature if food for humans were grown by permacultural methods.

I had an idea--the INFP-Bot farm.

what is the INFP-Bot? It's a robot that knows where everything is, even though it all looks like complete chaos.

One of the limiting factors for productivity in a polyculture (I know this from my own experience now) is the challenge of harvesting. But the INFP-Bot, like the INFP person who has papers stacked and scattered all over in complete disarray, has a perfect record of where everything is seeded. Maybe it patrols around and updates records as some plants die or others sprout, or maybe it's just recording where things are planted, but it can get you what you need.

The idea's not so fleshed out, but the basic principle is somehow harnessing information sharing to make up for the loss of "economy of scale" that polyculture can create.

INFP-B-7 would also be cute, like the droid in the new--oops, no spoilers.

Hello!

I have been offered 5ha of land to grow staple crops.

Since many years I grew small-sized permaculture gardens, with vegetables and perennials, but now facing large-scale areas, how does one practice permaculture?

We don´t want to do animal grazing, and there is already a small orchard/food forest and a small vegetable garden.
We want to use the remaining 5ha for growing staples like corn, potatoes, cereals, beans, amaranth.

How exactly to do this in a way of polycultures?
How to make it in a way that would still be harvestable in a practical manner? By use of machinery or hand labour?
How to improve soíl other than growing before cover crops?
Perhaps a solution could be to uses lines with trees like in agroforestry? Which trees would be best (climate is humid temperate, zone 7)?

I look for people that have already large-sized plots and have been growing staples in a more permaculture way.

I would look into what Mark Shepard is doing with Restoration Agriculture in Wisconsin, USA.  He is alley cropping nut and fruit trees  with annuals between the rows.  Many people won't know how big 5 ha is. I don't.  He has a summer rain, humid, cold winter continental climate that will have some similarities to yours.  I would want something to stop the sun from drying out and baking the farm in Portugal, so alley cropping trees makes sense to me.  I do a garden version of that here in PNW USA, a climate between yours.
John S
PDX OR

More than 10 acres!

The land I have been offered is 13 acre and located in southeast Austria.

Climate is continental (warm moist summers, winters usually mild but ocasionally hard freezes)
Similar to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Alleycropping by Mark Shepard is a good idea.

Does he till? If not, how? Does he uses machinery or land labour?
Does he uses polycultures in between thelines of trees?
Which crops? Corn, potatoes, grain, beans?
How does he harvest those polycultures?

I don't remember all those details because I am a gardener, not a farmer. I just kept what I could use. It's in his book, "Restoration Agriculture".  It's also a great book.
I think he alternates crops.
JohN S
PDX OR

Paulo Bessa wrote:The land I have been offered is 13 acre and located in southeast Austria.

Climate is continental (warm moist summers, winters usually mild but ocasionally hard freezes)
Similar to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Alleycropping by Mark Shepard is a good idea.

Does he till? If not, how? Does he uses machinery or land labour?
Does he uses polycultures in between thelines of trees?
Which crops? Corn, potatoes, grain, beans?
How does he harvest those polycultures?

Paulo, I wonder how has this shaped up in the past couple of years? Have you started managing the 5ha farm for staple crops, and are any agroforestry practices embedded in the system?

Dave Burton's link to Geoff Lawton & Mark Shepard talking about Permaculture for Profit (STUN) led to a 404 error.
Here is a current link to that video: Permaculture for Profit

It's really good (especially just after reading Restoration Agriculture by Shepard)

--
Some of the permaculture examples provided in this thread are in fact just traditional farming methods.
I feel compelled to say that permaculture is a holistic system that has as much to say about waste management and architecture as grazing and crop-growing.

I think that if every permie or gardener can feed their own family and give some produce to friends then it proves you can feed the world eventually - it isn't the system or the land that is the limiting factor, it is the attitude of us all that holds back feeding others. And I don't  mean don't  sell your surplusses, just make sure there are some. On our 1 acre I am canning produce for winter and sharing cabbages and fresh beans and jams with my friends and we have ony a hundred  or so sq. M in production.

I think that the one with the best large scale permaculture system is the Earth Mother, Gaia, or however you wish to name her. She currently has an infestation issue, but there are mechanisms at work to curtail that. Balance will eventually be achieved, either by slow catastrophe building to climax, or by productive exodus to seed other planets and create new biospheres.

So not only is it a working permacultural system, it has built into its structure the ability to self-replicate.

-CK

Oh my! I have so many questions about this thread, both economical and philosophical that I'm not sure where to start. We should also ask how do you define "best"? Best in Alaska, in Wisconsin or in Arizona cannot  be the same because of soil and geographic conditions and growing zones. There are many very good permaculturists  and I deeply admire those who can get the best out of their property, but creating some sort of competition to find "the best" is fraught with flaws IMHO.
I've heard a number of my large farmers in my area demand all the water and subsidies plus absolution for their pollution because they "feed the world".
While I realize that this thread is asking "Who?", I feel that before we even try to answer this question, we should ask ourselves: Should permaculturists aim to copy "large"? I must confess that the "feed the world" mantra is a burr under my saddle, a bee in my bonnet, so there goes:
Can we define "large scale"? An advantage that permaculture [of any scale] has, is that it does not rely on subsidies from taxpayers [Most farm subsidies goes to the largest farmers in 5 crops while the small farmers get little or no help. https://www.thebalance.com/farm-subsidies-4173885
So that is a first point: Large scale monocropping would not survive it it were not subsidized. Heavily. *They* do not feed the world: We all do with our tax dollars, if the world is indeed fed.
Second, large croppers can make a profit because they do *not* feed the world. Rather, they monocrop: They offer a large quantity of ONE product. It takes many other large monocroppers to "feed the world"...while getting subsidies. If hail or other foul weather comes, their entire crop is a loss and they cannot eat without subsidies that year. (In those years WE may have to feed them).
Third, when one uses the land so harshly, the soil too becomes monocropped. It loses the biological diversity that makes it produce good food well. It becomes little more than a medium to keep your plants erect. Is that a good goal?
Fourth, and as a segue to the previous point, it is well known that the crops that are thus produced have lost a great deal of *nutrition* in this constant race. So is that "feeding the world if the produce thus created does not offer the nutrition it should?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss/
Fifth, we come to pesticides. The myriad products that are used to kill weeds, kill insects, fungus etc. leaves a serious mark on our HEALTH: While we have an abundance of perfect *looking* food, we seem to live longer but in poorer health. These products make us sick and can ruin our water. So the question becomes :Are they *feeding the world* , or poisoning it?
Sixth, having an economy that has less and less farmers is really not good for anyone: Even if they are very large and very rich, there comes a point when they are very FEW, and their share of political power diminishes: Already, there are so many people who really do not understand where food comes from because they have never been part of it that they just expect food will always be there. Large farmers count on the political climate to work for them, if not always for others. That, in itself, is dangerous. The winds of politics are capricious, and as climate change becomes more real each cycle, the subsidies can be capricious too.
Should small farms even *aim* to "feed the world" as the expression goes? I aim at feeding my family plus a fair number of people, maybe give a little to a food pantry, but once you are self sufficient and have a little more for your old days, should you aim to be bigger?  just because ...[What?]. (Note that it is the same thing with personal wealth: some folks will never have enough, just because that is the way they are wired: Greed is indeed a personal trait, and a bad one.). When you aim to do such volume, you may have to cut corners, and then you have changed the manner in which you crop and may well lose the "permaculture" part. You may lose what makes permaculture live in harmony with Nature. You may lose your soul.
So, sorry if I do not exactly answer the question "Who?" but I feel that deeper reflection is needed before we can answer that question.

I think all governments should follow the ideas given here by Alan Savoury at Polyface Farm.  So simple. Tax relief is always welcome!

Cecile,

You are totally on the money. This is like saying "which tree should I grow?"

Joel Salatin is fond of saying the difference between a park and a farm is that one has a farmer. The people operating the ecosystem have to work with the climate, soil, economic factors, etc. For large acreage farmers, this is either livestock or heavily mechanized. We have a huge amount of acreage in this state that have gone no-till. I would say (based on the totally unscientific metric of the cost of traditional implements on Craigslist) that tillage agriculture is quickly dying. The gap is now between no-till with Glyphosate and chemical-free farming with some other methods such as alleycropping or pasturecropping. It seems to take a generation of farmers (which in farming is often a grandchild taking over the farm) to make a change. The good thing here is that small farms (lets say less than 1000 acres) are still the norm. These are generally privately owned and can do what they want. The future of the massive farms in the midwest is more uncertain. I predict they will be bought by holding companies who will hire management, effectively run like a Walmart. There just aren't enough people who have both knowledge and money to make farms profitable on small margins. They will hire lobbyists to keep the same tax laws in place so they have a predictable way of placating the investors, running pro formas and training factory farm employees to do subset tasks.

If these corporations can realize an appreciation in soil leading to better crops and better profits, it is actually easier to convince a small number of holding companies than a large number of conservative farmers. So I don't think it is all gloom. There is already a pretty active discussion in "modern ag" about soil degradation and best practices. While these are not actually best practices, they are often better than current practices. There is a potential for snowball effects, i.e. if a conglomerate can build soil and appreciate a return on investment in another revenue stream, they will be the most likely to have more to invest. They can buy and improve degraded land, and sell improved soil properties for crops that deplete the soil. This is a big step from the current race to the bottom. Mark Shepard actually has the soil improvement built into his business case, he will no doubt sell at a major premium from where he bought it.

Harvesting: I am a huge fan of Mark Shepard. He has pigs that eat (estimates here) 100 kilos of apples. Based on the feed ratios even from a vegan-positive website, they convert that into 20 kilos of meat products. With modern ag, sprays, mechanical harvesting, etc there is a 20% loss just from spoilage. This seems very conservative, as it doesn't include areas not even harvested and "totalled" for insurance purposes. It's at least 30% I would guess. Then there is the transportation and processing cost. And you get most of the minerals back on your property instead of carted off. And most of the grains grown are (as mentioned) shipped to feed the same animals in feed lots at the same conversion rate!

Anyone who has done the math like Mark (I will find his business presentation and link) will tell you the margins are better further along the value-add cycle. So let the pigs turn the apples (rotten and good) into a value-added product. If you then have a large number of people producing on a smallish scale, you can use this new internet thing with process control software to aggregate 20-2000 farms to fulfill larger orders. Mark's company does this in a physical location, but I see it going more like Uber and Bitcoin- Publix or whatever needs 20k pork loins in August 2020, and they put out a call on the process control software. They want organic certified, free range certified, maybe we can even have a regenerative agriculture certification that is beyond that.  I have 100 pigs ready that month so I accept the offer. Through blockchain, you can actually find out that that pork loin came from TJs farm, was certified by Mark Shepard as Regenerative (TM) in July 2018 and spot inspected in 2020. You can use the Bitly link from the QR code and see a picture of the pig which includes the QR code on the eartag grazing in the silvopasture last week.

In short- I think there is a lot of possibility beyond simply upscaling farms.

Based on Bill Mollison's definition of permaculture, those large farms won't be permaculture unless they include human habitation, though they may be regenerative ag.  

All permaculture is regenerative, but not all regenerative ag is permaculture.

Tyler Ludens wrote:Based on Bill Mollison's definition of permaculture, those large farms won't be permaculture unless they include human habitation, though they may be regenerative ag.  

All permaculture is regenerative, but not all regenerative ag is permaculture.

Tyler, fair point. I would be absolutely ecstatic if we could get to regenerative, but I get your meaning. Found this link for Pasture cropping which is great and

The Mark Shepard economics plenary.  

It's interesting re-reading this thread, 4 years later.  I didn't contribute to it then because most of what I would have said had already been written.

But 4 years on, guys like Joel Salatin and Gabe Brown have proven themselves credible to the point that today there are hundreds of people using their strategies and techniques, not just here in America but all over the world.  I was watching a Youtube video of a guy this week who farms in Sweden and he referred to his mobile chicken tractor/pens as "Salatin Pens".  

Gabe Brown's stuff isn't even remotely controversial anymore: no till, cover cropping, intensive mob grazing, multi-species biodiversity in pastures and crop land . . . farmers throughout the midwest are copying him.

Just Youtube cover-cropping and you'll now find hundreds of videos, many produced by state agricultural resource boards.  The testimonies of hundreds of farmers who are now simply using this one strategy (cover cropping) are there as evidence that there is a widespread adoption of this technique.  

Going back to the OP -- they key phrase is "large scale".  I've read Mark Shepard's stuff.  I greatly admire what he's doing.  But does he fit the criteria?  Guys like Ben Fauk (who I also really admire) are more boutique than large scale.  The guys I grew up with in Kansas who still are farming their parents land are also farming 3 times as much.  The consolidation of these small farms has been relentless in the past 40 years.  They aren't going to mess with alley-cropping among apple trees.  They're farming 2000 - 3000 acres of wheat, milo and alfalfa.  But they've all gone no-till, and many of them now are experimenting with grazable cover-crops, mob-stock grazing and nitrogen fixing plants that overwinter.  This may seem like no big deal, but its a sea-change in philosophy and practice.

Cassie's dad will not pick up a book by Mark Shephard or Ben Fauk, as good as those books are.  But a guy like Gabe Brown . . . he'll give him a listen.

Cassie, I noticed it’s already been mentioned but look into Colin Seiss and his “pasture cropping”. www.pasturecropping.com he’s just. Small farm only 40,000 acres. What he’s done is kind mind blowing, you could step it up and plant tree crops or keyline but he’s producing more bushels/ acre than his neighbors and stocks higher density of sheep with no “cides”. He feeds more than most large farms do with lower operating costs.

What I would consider as a large scale permaculture system would be a continent by continent integrated system within the biosphere of earth. In designing these integrated systems looking at the ideal scenes 7 generations into the future with all the petals of the flower not just the ones associated with farming. Think globally act locally. Describing these ideals scenes would be general statements that would be applicable anywhere. Abundant, healthy water available locally for example. There may be different ways to accomplish this depending on resources and other factors. There are sequences that apply i.e. quantity first then quality, sustainable first then resilient and finally regenerative. Cultures of the past and cultures of the future can be quite diverse and each of them although different could be in harmony with each other based on the needs and production of each. So who has the best large scale system? That depends on which system fully covers all the petals of the flower, is applicable to the location, makes sense based on resources and needs (supply and demand), does the most good with the least harm and where each petal is measured in terms of sustainable/resilient/regenerative with the quantity needed for the community it serves. There is no one size fits all and each have their own merits when applied under similar circumstances. In fact there may be no reason why a little of each could be incorporated into designs for our future.

David Livingston wrote:Zaytuna ? cannot remember the name of the guy, Geoff something

David

Zaytuna is the farm in Australia started, owned and operated by Geoff Lawton, a pioneer of the Permaculture movement. He has done both small and large scale Permaculture installation projects all over the world, and teaches many people about permaculture every year through his videos, PDC courses, and through internships on his farm. I have taken his PDC course, and it is very thorough and covers many things I didn't even know existed! He is amazing!

Here is more information on Geoff's work:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcgHvYWLs-Q

Willie Smits.

Sepp Holzer.

I think the system has been rigged for decades to crush the "small farmer" - hence the express "get big or get out."  

There are many schools of thought under the permaculture umbrella.  Forgive me as I express one.  Mine.  I defined a system for managing 20,000 acres in my book.  Willie Smits expressed that it is exactly what he does.   And rather than thinking of in terms of a farm, I prefer to think of it as a 20,000 acre garden with 2000 gardeners.  

Cassie's dad expressed something about how permaculture would only be good on a small scale.   I think there are hundreds of paths in permaculture where it could be a broadacre solution.  I just prefer something that is more like 100 plots that are about 200 acres each and each plot has about 20 people nurturing each plot.  A community of 20 people.  Gardening.  

Cassie's dad would be impressed with Gabe Brown, Joel Salatin, Alan Savory, Acres USA, The Stockman Grass Farmer Journal and maybe even Mark Shepherd.   But he is going to only allow discussion that is close to what he does now.   And he doesn't want to talk about pesticides or petroleum.  Nor does he want to hear a spec about any subsidies he is receiving (directly or indirectly).  He probably isn't concerned about persistent herbicides or growth hormones.  

Cassie's dad probably doesn't have a garden.  So he raises cattle, sells them and buys food.

I kinda think that if Cassie's dad is going to ignore paths that include people that get 95%+ of their food from their own land and ship out 20 million calories per year ...  all because they are not on the same size scale as him - I think it is fair that these people ignored Cassie's dad.   Cassie's dad is probably hyper focused on the current price per pound of beef at the stockyard ...   what's going to happen if he has three bad years in a row while hyper-dependent on a price he has no control over?  Like the apple industry.  And several other commodity crop industries.

I think that if you live you life like Cassie's dad, you MUST be focused on making a lot of money and squirreling it away or else you might starve.  But what really puts food on the table is food.  

Is there one person that raises enough food such that 90% or more of their family's caloric needs for the year are met PLUS they raise an additional 10 million calories?  I would be curious to know how many acres they have.  Five?  How many plots are there like this across the world?   A few million?  That sounds large scale to me.  

Far bigger than what Cassie's dad is thinking of.  But Cassie's dad chooses to not see it because he is a staunch advocate for system that is becoming more fragile with each passing year.

I'll throw another one out there.  This is one of my favorites as far as large scale goes.  Veta La Palma farm in Spain  The website can be switched between Spanish or English in the upper right hand corner.

The website says it's about 28,000 acres.  They are most famous for aquaculture and their wild aquatic bird habitat but also grow rice; pastures using grasses, legumes and marsh plants; raise dairy cattle and breed horses.

I first learned about them in this TedTalk which is quite entertaining and good for people who aren't already "sold" on or educated about the concepts of permaculture or holistic agriculture.  A chef visits them and has his understanding of food and farming changed.  I love how he talks about the fish skin.



Before posting, I was reading through the thread and it made me ask myself - is this farm permaculture?  Or permaculture-enough for this list?  All the comments in this thread made me look very closely at this, which is good.

What I think... like Sepp Holzer's it's diverse and supports lots of wildlife while producing lots of raised food.  Unlike Holzer's, this farm looks like it relies on more big farming machinery, like for the rice planting and harvesting.  I doubt they are hiring hand rice harvesters in Spain, right?  Thinking about what Tyler brought up a bit ago, I don't know how many people live there but I imagine some likely do live on site with both the size of the farm and also the herds of cattle and horses to care for.  Could this farm continue on its own natural processes, producing food and feeding animals and people without human care...?   I can only guess, of course., not having even seen it except in the video.  If the wetlands don't require human intervention to stay wet, then it seems like it would be possible at least for the fish and the horses, maybe cattle, to survive on their own.  For me, the ability to continue on its own in some form is the most interesting part of the permaculture aspiration.  

I've never achieved that goal. The ability to continue in a food-producing form is the elusive holy grail of permaculture for me and when I see systems that could make that work in any way it's very exciting.  This is probably not very relevant to the topic of finding examples to show non-believers, though.

I'd love to see how many people work on this farm.  I imagine the semi-natural aquaculture part to be less labor intensive than conventional aquaculture or gardens...?  It would be nice if they listed more about their practices.

This week my wife will be doing a sales pitch to the educational institution that she works for. She's going to try to sell them on permaculture, with the hope of starting a certificate or diploma or PDC  program. I offered to help find some hard hitting stats. Maybe some references to large projects contracted out to permaculturists. I know Geoff Lawton and Neal Spackman do that so I'm going to see what I can dig up on them. Maybe see what I can learn about 5th World from Verge.

The institution is very interested in the employability of their grads, so maybe some stats about employment opportunity?

I'm mentioning this here in case you want to toss me some info that you find particularly impressive. Send me a moosage or share it here.

Thanks!

Elaine Ingham trains people as consultants to farmers to improve their soil and profitability:
soilfoodweb.com

It would be a good one to show them.
John S
PDX OR

https://www.nature.scot/professional-advice/land-and-sea-management/managing-land/farming-and-crofting/role-agroecology/dehesa-spanish-agroforestry-farming-system

Dehesa is a great example

Pre industrial was all permaculture, you don't need to feed the whole world and even with 'enough' food we don't/aren't. Localised food excess traded was the model, it's how the picts and celts had salt from German mines and how Egyptian beads were found in Cornwall, those people weren't all eating the same thing, they fed themselves and traded excess. In the UK the spread of oaks coincided with people because we fed our pigs on acorns and made acorn flour, it's not mad to suggest they ate a variation of bacon sarnies at stone henge. Yes healthcare and life expectancy was low but in terms of production I'd argue we were richer

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/food/2023/jan/23/endangered-foods-why-our-diet-is-narrower-than-ever-and-these-seven-foods-urgently-need-saving

What do people think happened before the industrial revolution? Do we all believe it was like modern survival shows like alone or naked and afraid? Course not, people curated their resources and grew them to abundance or followed migrating animals, herds, fish, again managing them to abundance. The rainforest is permaculture,

https://www.permaculturenews.org/2017/08/08/terra-preta-amazon/

the dehesa and Chinampas and most areas of our planet were farmed in a nature positive way else they faced malthusean collapse.
Nearly all the world Ills can be attributed to this seperation from nature, sexism and rasism tie in too.
the regional fishermen are going exstinct with the regional fish. The common human has been seperated largly from benifitting from their labour or owning their resources.

https://www.ourseas.scot/

Monoculture makes us all poorer, unless the idea of life seperated into a series of tower blocks excites you, one block for verticle farming, another for people, one for pigs, oh and rip up the deep seabed for solar panels to power it. Sigh. When it all comes a crashing down those smallholdings that 'can't' feed the world will soon get bigger. At the moment the economic structure doesn't like small scale, it's get big or get out and human wages essential to permaculture which employs farm more people hobble what should be profitable permaculture farms. Driverless tractors anyone? Monoculture often cuts people out too, forcing us into urbanisation
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2cxvfg

https://www.odditycentral.com/architecture/chinas-pig-hotels-massive-multi-storey-pork-production-facilities.html

As mentioned above localised people protect their land which is large scale permaculture. Ever heard of gaia theory? James lovelock started out working for nasa trying to find signs of life, that led him to our own very much alive planet

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01969-y

Life supports life

https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/recognizing-indigenous-peoples-land-interests-is-critical-for-people-and-nature#:~:text=Although%20they%20comprise%20less%20than,they%20have%20lived%20for%20centuries.

This might not qualify as a farm though this might be worth a mention.

According to an Oregon State University professor, Andrew Millison:

Andrew visited a village in Maharashtra to understand the work that they do on watershed management. He was completely amazed by the work the villagers have learnt doing, thanks to the water cup competition, held by the Paani Foundation and described it as the biggest permaculture project on this Earth. He even made a short film on the same and shared it on his YouTube channel.

https://agsci.oregonstate.edu/article/aamir-khan-kiran-rao%E2%80%99s-paani-foundation-described-world%E2%80%99s-biggest-permaculture-project

https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/india/aamir-khan-kiran-raos-paani-foundation-described-as-worlds-biggest-permaculture-project-by-andrew-millison