Thank you for your comments! Permies is such an amazing resource for public discussion. Let's dive right on in:
I am currently reading your articles and the responses (counter articles) and enjoying them. I do have a question. Could you please elaborate on this? "I can grow a significant portion of my food in a window that takes four square feet of space."? The reason I ask is because these are the exact type statements that, in my mind, set the permaculture movement backwards. I obviously don't need to be convinced that permaculture is a good thing. It is the over-blown claims made by permaculturists that turn many people away, and I can't see how that statement can be anywhere near true.
Todd,
I've given a lot of thought to that sentence in light of your comment:
1) I'm thinking it would be helpful for me to write a stand-alone article which analyzes in a rigorous way what the potential yields are that can be achieved with permaculture at various land scales. I'll get started documenting that immediately, so if anyone has a property on which they have been measuring their yields, please get in touch with me. I have some good data points from my own experiments since my primary focus until now has been pushing how intensive I can get my urban production going.
2) I agree that the sentence came off as unnecessarily hyperbolic. I have updated the paragraph to the following:
The basic argument here is that it’s hard to measure the agricultural efficiency of a dense food forest compared to a mono-cropped field. Do we honestly think this is a problem at all? I can grow a noticeable portion of my food in a window. We have previously documented an
Urban Food Wall concept that takes 11 square feet of growing space. We then open-sourced our design, free to everyone, in our article
“How to Grow Your Own Food When You Have Limited Space”. We are actively pushing ourselves to develop more and more advanced urban agricultural technologies. Also, I think it’s helpful to note that in these examples, all of these spaces had zero agricultural productivity before. With permaculture we have access to far more land because we can use small bits which are considered unusable via conventional thinking.
3) To directly answer your question, when I originally made the statement I was thinking of our bookshelf garden. It's a book-shelf with 4 growing areas, each of which are just under four feet wide by one feet in depth. So the trick is using the vertical space with the small square footage. In light of your comment, though, I remeasured and had forgotten that the water reservoir at the bottom was more than 1 foot in depth (let's call it two feet by four feet). As such, the proper dimensions are closer to eight square feet in total, which is still a very efficient use of space. Here is a video of 1/8 of that garden - the back half of one of the four shelves:
From this garden, we were able to produce enough micro greens for two people to eat 1/2 a bowl of micro greens in a salad every single day. We got continuous production by rotating where we were harvesting inside the garden and from replanting when we harvested. We are in the middle of rebuilding the system to increase efficiencies in our version 2. We theorize that adding climbers, runners, and tubers would be possible with zero additional space. I'm looking forward to reporting the results of that experiment in about a month when the results are evident.
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Marcus,
Your story about your grandparents really resonated with me. Maybe it would be helpful to begin assembling a series of vignettes that studies individual example families / sites like this so we can smash permaculture stereotypes.
I also agree with your second point that even if permaculture doesn't save the world, it's still incremental progress in a good direction. I do personally think it can save the world, though
On the "hippie connection"... I'm conflicted because I want to network together the hippies and the more typical people into an effective coalition. However, I'm repeatedly observing that permaculture is perceived as a hippie movement when first encountered and that this is causing friction for more mainstream people to take it seriously. I would welcome any thoughts as to how we pro-actively deal with that branding issue as permaculture expands.
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Duane,
I'm looking forward to exploring these links in detail!
forest gardens, like everything else, depends upon where
just because they "work" in Atlanta doesn't mean they will
be useful other places
I agree and disagree. Clearly food forests won't work north of the arctic circle and on the South Pole. Aside from that, though, my understanding is that a food forest can effectively grow anywhere on earth that has land or non-saline water from the equator into the subtropics and throughout the temperate zones. I don't know what percentage that is of earth's landmass, but I would guess it would be about 85% or more. We also know from greening the desert that with a lot of planning we could establish food forests in the desert regions. Rather than saying food forests don't work everywhere, I would think it would be more accurate to say that the specific plants in each bioregion would be totally different. Yes, I totally agree with that. Am I understanding what you meant correctly?
butnot everyone wants to drop everything and move to the woods with a composting toilet
I would agree and actually rephrase as "Most people do not want to go live in the middle of nowhere." The people who do want to do that are the pioneer species (following Paul's analogy). However, I do think the average person would be interested in a turn-key, established permaculture property if it was located in a city, a suburb, or a well established large ecovillage that maybe wasn't called an ecovillage. At Aspire, our mission is to develop all of these sorts of properties. I think an interesting hybrid idea is to pair a collection of sub-urban lots with a larger tract of land outside of the city so that residents can get the benefit of both urban and rural. I'm still flushing out the specific details as to how that would work.
one of permaculture's problems is this bi-polar vision of wanting to change the world by making
everyone "off grid homesteaders"
I agree and I specifically don't want to do this. I want to get permaculture to reach critical mass in the cultural consciousness by demonstrating that it can deliver on what people actually want, rather than convincing them that they want something else than they think they want. My intuition is that the average person would love a permaculture property, already developed and established, with automation to handle the upkeep, located in suburbia. However, the average person does not want to have to build that property for themselves. To me, this is the market opportunity where hopefully we can determine a cost efficient way to deliver that sort of turn-key permaculture experience.
If you or others ... want to actually make a difference, you have to take permaculture mainstream.
I agree and I WOULD LOVE PEOPLE'S THOUGHTS ABOUT WHAT SPECIFICALLY WOULD BE REQUIRED TO TAKE PERMACULTURE MAINSTREAM.
This requires accepting criticism as a way to get better,
rejecting any information that is either oversold or not true
AND separating actual functional practices from woowoo
I love this idea. Does anyone have any thoughts as to a formal process we could use to start separating actual functional practices from the woowoo? I think a rigorous testing process for permaculture's claims would be huge in terms of establishing credibility more generally.
