A farm for the future (video)

Great videos showing the differences between a standard farm and a Permaculture farm.  A must see..

www.viddler.com/player/ce56603d

That is one I haven't seen.

I especially like the bit about grazing animals all year!

I really liked the whole video. I think it serves very well as an introduction to permaculture. I'm going to make my wife watch it sometime. Hopefully.

This documentary recently aired on the BBC and wanted to share this with you: About old farms changing to new techniques (read: permaculture).

Added bonus features: Beautiful English country side views and a very interesting part on pasture management....

This is part 1 of 5. Each part is about 10 minutes. You will see the next part to view as the old one stops playing. Available in HQ



Enjoy!

Pascal

Bird wrote:
Bump

This one deserves a BUMP

slowly, slowly i'm getting there

Thanks for that bump, good video.

Thanks for the bump. I had forgot where this video was and had been wanting to watch it again.

great video, "A farm for the future, ç
    If you are a person who does not like too much, doom and gloom, jump the first third, i don't really know if its a whole third, of the video. the doom seemed to go on for ages, move on to the next part that is the opposite. I nearly turned it off because i could not get through so much doom and gloom as there was at the begining, i find doom easier to take as a second course than as a first one. I suppose i am fairly easily set worrying and don't like too much of it, though i was not sure that it is so certain that we will be out of energy soon as the first part of the video claimed, partly because I so enjoy thinking of wonderfull clean energies and partlyn because i hav eheard that there is much more petrol than we h ave found though i woudl rather they didnt use it an ddirty the atmosphere more.
  The permaculture bit is really great. agri rose macaskie.

I don't know how you can call this 'doom and gloom' at all. I think Rebecca Hosking is showing genuine concern about our future and she is showing a way out!

This documentary was made for and aired on the BBC in february and april of 2009 and it seemed to have woken some people up. Skipping the first 3 parts (you are talking about the youtube version) would seem a bit strange as it displays the whole motivation and reasoning of why permaculture is so important! Most people still do not understand how it all works and what the possible consequences are.

This film has combined the whole story and examples of alternatives in a brilliant form. It's worth watching the whole thing!

Pascal

Oh yes, I forgot: Recently, Deutsche Bank predicted 1 barrel of crude oil would cost about USD 175 in 2016.

Today, it costs USD 80 and 1998 it was around USD 18. You do the math.

Pascal

Thanks for the bumps.  That's a great video!  It didn't really say anything we didn't already think to be true, but I always enjoy people talking about their gorgeous bio-diverse low-input farms. Briton has that stone wall hedgerow thing that is so...old and old world looking, quite the contrast to the wild west coast.  We found it instigated many discussions as we watched it: "Oh wait Pause it! Blah blah"  It's not all that doom and gloom, I'd say it's realistic about both our current unsustainable dependence on fossil fuels and the wonderful complexity of the eco stystems that will save us. 

Seeing Martin Crawford and Patrick Whitefield in "person" was neat too. 

The cattle grazing next to the oil refinery in Ireland is emblazoned on my brain. 

mARINAJADE
It talked  of things that i did not have a clue you could do. and as it is to be supposed that people who know a lot, a little and nothing about farming and organics and permaculture  will all use a forum like this is is to be supposed that i am not the only one who might be finding  information they did not know existed in this tape.
  my grand mother had a farm in wet clay soiled cheshire and she stored an enormouse quantity of grass as silage and more as hay as she bought the cattle in  winter so that they would not tread the grass into the ground and leave a muddy mess instead of pastures and i did not know that you could look for a mix of grasses that left such a intermeshed underlayer of stems that thee grass would not be trampled into the mud by the cows feet.

      I was  happy to know the facts she mentioned about how petrol dependent we are in agriculture an d i alread y know that petrol means more carbon dioxide so i don't have to have the stuff mentioned too often. I don't like people woh reduce hope and so effort on how to make natural engergy work. I thought the whole tape was going to be about just that and so nearly stopped listening after a while of it.

    There are lots of reasons to use permaculture that have nothing to do with petrol, such as that modern farming empoverishes soils.
    Salts land up
    Soils  lose a lot of their ability ot absorbe and retain moisture without organic fertilsers if they weren't using chemicalfertilisers they would have to use organic ones that include plant matter passed by an danimal or fallen were it grew and died.
      Without organic matter there is no food for usefull soil microbes and fungi and insects.
Lying fallow or overgrazzed soil is left uncovered , it seems wheat lands don't lie fallow in the USA but they do in lots of other countries, the uncoverd soil looses its soil through wind and water erosion.and can end up as bare rock.

    The use of herbicides and pesticides give us cancer. agri rose macaskie.
 

Bump. 

Yeah Rose, I feel you about the doom and gloom.  For those of us who've heard it before....gee whiz do we really have to listen to it again?  I sent the video to my mom and my sister, I hope they watch it. 

Another amazing image - gobs of seagulls flying in to feast on worms as perennial pasture is first plowed up to plant grain in 1982......and the complete change in the soil as she films the same process a few decades later.....nary a bird is interested in that dirt. 

I was kind of surprised that the concept of rotational grazing didn't make it into the movie?  Seems like the ultimate solution for Briton....

  marina, What is rotational grazing? is it changing the cattle from feild to feild f it is then it is so normal in England that it would not be mentioend.
    THey are talking about keeping the cattle in in winter because the cattle feet sink into the winter wet soil, my grand mother bought them in in winter for the same reason, and even if you only left them a day out when th esoil on her farm was wet they would do plenty of damage .  In summer they were rotational grazed if that means moved from one feild to another the moment they had eated down tthe grass as far as deemed, thought. far enough if the recovery of the grass was to be good.
She has grass sown that was to last four years if i remember right, before ploughing and resowing.
  When the grass was eaten down so far thecows were moved on to let the grass recover.b she had about five or six feilds.

  Here in Spain in htose parts were traditional farming still goes on, they are factory farming more and more often, the shepherd moves the live stock on walks all day with them . I think the reason they don't change their route is they want to destroy pastures for fear of fires so they don't change their route  till they are sure they have done for the pastures, it would not do to have them growing back in such a way as to mean that when summer dried the grasses they could not get round to eating down all of them if you have a lot of regrowth it ccoul dnot be all let low at the onset of the dry season and there were enormoue quanitities of land that were likely to burn well left around.
  they risk theheir homes an dthe lives of their families if they leave the grass long. This is recognised and no tweighed up when talking of overgrazing or deertification. 
People don't believe in disinterested work . Women have always ckept the house with only very indirest gains that were to small to bring them on a level in power with their husband. If you have no money you can't for example pay for your childs university, help them with their business, unless your husband wants to. that is a very big lack of power.
  Money is not the only driving power to work adult loo for work for themselves though they could do nothing, Social pressures are a strong driving power.  Pride of work it is a shepherds jod to keep down undergrwth a good sheherd manages it. Also if htey are grazing someone elses land it can be becasue they keep down the undergrowth it is there jod lelling milk and lanbvs is just the perk.

  what are badly needed are bare areas instead of the whole area being a fire break.
    When they have comleted the destrustion of all platnts that leads to the erosion of the soil of  a place, it gets abandoned and slowly fills with cystus bushes that renovate the land, it is slow i have known cystus bushes on a peice of land these fitfteen or twenty years and the grass has not reappeared there yet. In other places th egrass is thick under the cystus bushes.agri rose macaskie.

Like many others, I was fascinated by Rebecca Hosking's Farm for the Future.  And I am keen to use some of the stats she mentioned - but I can't find their original source. 

Can anyone guide me to the origins, for instance, of:

Using Permaculture " ...a skilled gardener can produce up to six times more than a conventional farmer working land of comparable size"

Larry and Barbara Geno of the Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation in Australia have produced a document with huge amounts of information which I have attached. There are yield comparisons in there somewhere.

I also found several sources (which I could provide) showing that growing food without any energy subsidies (i.e. fossil fuels) is about six times more efficient than subsidised agriculture. Efficiency is measured as the ratio of energy inputs to energy outputs. Note that the traditional systems have a lower absolute productivity: the gains they make are in efficiency.

Thanks Josh - This is extremely helpful and interesting.  And yes, if you could supply the additonal sources you mention, that'd be great. 

I know that in Zambia (at the University in Lusaka) they have been running a Permaculture trial - next to one using 'conventional' methods.  In the same way, the idea is to measure energy inputs and outputs.  But it's some way off - and will likely take a good number of years to yield useful data. 

But also so important that Africa Permaculturalists are now engaging in the need for empirical data.  The fight for African soils is truly underway.  And the reality is that agri-bus is so much more tooled up in this respect than the rest of us, and is using the language of poverty alleviation to achieve its' goals.

Will have a look through the attached and see what I can extract and share.  Many thanks. 

GardenAfrica wrote:

Can anyone guide me to the origins, for instance, of:

Using Permaculture " ...a skilled gardener can produce up to six times more than a conventional farmer working land of comparable size"

John Jeavons in the book "How to Grow More Vegetables and Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine" claims 600% higher yield than conventional farmers.  Jeavons is strong on the double digging method, which is not quite the same thing as permaculture.

Also, it is not clear to me how you can compare yield across crops.  Crops like watermelon and tomato are incredible high yielding, but they are largely water.  A dehydrated vegetable doesn't count.  However, commodity grains must be low moisture. 

Watermelon might yield over 600% more than blueberries (watermelon is also much more efficient to pick).  Often the price difference more than compensates the blueberry grower for her lower productivity.
However in my opinion, to discuss value principally in terms of yield or price is unwise.

I think comparison in terms of calories would be relevant.

How many calories are produced by each method on the same size plot of land for the same period of time under the same climate conditions?  That, to me, would be useful information. 

Ludi Ludi wrote:
I think comparison in terms of calories would be relevant.

How many calories are produced by each method on the same size plot of land for the same period of time under the same climate conditions?  That, to me, would be useful information. 

Good point about calories, but there is still irreducible complexity.  Potatoes have about double the yield of zea maize and eight times the yield of wheat.  So just by switching to a potato based diet, would be like multiplying the amount of farmland. 

Ugh, calories is not good either. Commodity agriculture pushes for high calories and low vitamins and minerals along with other important nutrients...which leads to sick people.

Sweet clover yields a lot more than Alsike clover, which by most isn't even considered a pasture/hay crop, however when given a choice, cows won't eat Sweet clover and will scarf down alsike. Hybrid corn yields insane tons per acre, however purple corn has more antioxidants in it than blue berries.

You're right, Emile! 

But production of well-being is a very hard thing to measure and quantify.  But that's what people want to do with permaculture, to be able to measure it against other methods.  There seems to be plenty of evidence (to me!  ) that  permaculture produces possibly the highest amount of well-being per land unit, but how to measure that in a scientific way? 

For better or for worse, my answer is to forget about science. I am just gonna go with my gut...and my taste buds.

I've only recently (in the past few months) become interested in permaculture and forest gardens, so I thought I'd share the documentary responsible for my interest.  I don't know if many people here have seen it already; it's quite possible, but I did a quick search and didn't find any mention of it.  In North America, the doc was aired under the name Rebecca's Wild Farm, but its original title in the UK was A Farm for the Future.

It's available on Youtube, but the link that I'm posting has put all the Youtube videos organized one after another, so no need for searching.  There are five parts of approximately ten minutes each.  In a nutshell, it's about searching for farming/gardening methods that reduce or eliminate dependence on fossil fuel.

http://www.jessicacrabtree.com/journal1/2010/04/rebeccas-wild-farm

That was very interesting. Thanks.

I had a  search for some of the people featured in it and will take  a look at them later.
http://www.fordhallfarm.com/index.php
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22martin+crawford%22&aq=f

Ah, yes, I saw that one before somewhere. I think I saw it on some UK permaculture website, but I'm not positive.

i saw that oen too and enjoyed it,

there are PLENTY more  on this blog i came across here.

http://permaculture-media-download.blogspot.com

Watched it a couple months ago. Thought it was worth the time. Now, maybe if I had been practicing permaculture for years I wouldn't have found it as worthwhile. But as someone new to the concept, it was well worth the time.

This is my first post, prompted by my recent viewing of "A Farm for the Future."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xShCEKL-mQ8

While already a long-time convert to organic farming, homesteading, and peak everything due to resource depletion by population pressures worldwide, this video reawakened my dormant interest in permaculture, especially since the attempts by host Rebecca Hoskins to repurpose her family farm for future viability mirrored my father's attempts at a rough sort of permaculture on our own farm outside Eugene, Oregon while I was growing up in the Sixties.

I then discovered the BBC programs "Victorian Farm" and "Edwardian Farm" and am slowly viewing all those episodes, convincing me even further that the old ways are the best ways.

So I am looking forward to poring over all the threads here in every subject. Thanks for having me!

Thanks for posting that video, it was great.

I hope you all don't mind that I merged about six threads together into one.

It would be easier to know if i minded if i knew which six threads you put together. I should think that putting together threads is a necessary process if it is to be easy to follow the forums.
     I suppose there would be some point when i would feel very hurt if the things i worked so hard to research became the work of someone else as trying to get a repyutation for myself is a motive for writing though trying to make sure everyone gets the information that could be usefull to them is another one. I disaprove of women doing things for free it is one of the things that so holds women back but still i do this but i hope that one day it will get me somewhere as i wish to give women the example of getting themselves somewhere instead of of working out of holy good will. I think women have to learn to defend their interests or they will always be abused and they will never be allowed to contribute as a full voice in the workings of their families only as a half invalid person. agri rose macaskie.

Calista wrote:

I then discovered the BBC programs "Victorian Farm" and "Edwardian Farm" and am slowly viewing all those episodes, convincing me even further that the old ways are the best ways.

I am totally convinced that Victorian and Edwardian-style farming is about the HARDEST way you can figure out to grow food!

That is why I am here on permie.com, to find out the EASY way to grow food! 

Did you join together six threads about the same video?
  The government might be the people to study how often the same peice of food goes up and down the country from farm to factory, to shop and such. The first thing must be a study of it all so you have enough information to see if there are ways to simplify the system and then you can produce a government body and have some useful intervention that benefits us all or and agrevates us all. agri rose macaskie.

The threads I joined together were all about this video.

Ludi I agree    I love the videos, but the whole time I was watching them I kept thinking how things could be done better and easier.  The machinery was cool....

My daughter even happened by and said "hey they shouldn't be plowing that!"  Brilliant! Her education has taken hold.

The Farm for the Future videos are super too - I would love to read about the proper types of grasses to sustain cattle in a rainy damp climate like they have.

Jami McBride wrote:
The Farm for the Future videos are super too - I would love to read about the proper types of grasses to sustain cattle in a rainy damp climate like they have.

It would be interesting to see a few years down the road where that particular farmer has  gone and in what steps. She has to stay productive while changing over.

Jami McBride wrote:

My daughter even happened by and said "hey they shouldn't be plowing that!"  Brilliant! Her education has taken hold.

Yay!!! We are getting there with my boys as well. So excited about growing the next generation of farmers who are going to do it the right way!

This video was fabulous! I am going to email the link to my dad (Big AG) and HOPE he watches it. I would love to talk with him about what he may be thinking about for the future.