piet vastie

maybe you can buy land close to existing communities? i know that for example in portugal there are regions with a lot of alternative lifestyle people.
visit communities, if you like them buy some land close by, you get the social contacxt/help but you're still your own boss.

i visited quiet some biological farm, and some of them are practicing permaculture without calling it permaculture and make a living that way.

I don't see the benefits of round veggie beds or curvy beds, except for being pretty. or if it's on a hillside and you follow the contourlines.
square chickentractor with square bed and different species planted on the same bed works as well IMHO.

I grow also bio intensive, i never dig my beds, except when i dig up a path and throw that on the bed.
i started from grassland, killed that by covering it with plastic that a neighbour farmer wanted to throw away, i did put pumpkinplants in bags on the plastic in such a way that their roots could grow into the soil underneath the plastic. in october after the harvest of the pumpkins i move the plastic to the next part and i seed rye, after the rye harvest in july i seeded a last harvest and in spring i have nice clean place to grow veggies.

some beds are 1m20 (4 feet?) wide and covered with nylon, some are 2m (6 feet) wide. the paths are 50 cm. i think that : "you shouldn't walk on your beds" is bullshit, i do walk on them (not when they're really wet).
mostly i seed/plant with the gertrud frank system (worth looking up). sometimes i do broadcasting, and my greenhouse is total chaos because i really want to fill every spot so i seed quiet a lot and everywhere.

i have a lot of work with weeding because i want to change the balance of the amount of weedseeds and amount of vegetableseeds in favor of the vegetableseeds.
i let a lot of vegetable plants go to seed, to get more vegetable seeds in the soil and to get organic matter to throw on the paths.

you can get some pictures on my blog www.hetvlierveld.blogspot.com to get an idea, the text is in dutch but i think pictures say more than text.

I,'ve been looking up some stuff about energy efficiency in agriculture and i found some remarkable things.
this is just about the production, not the packaging, distribution,... .
industrial agriculture focusing gets an energy efficiency of 1/8 for corn till 1/1,3 for potatoes. 1 kcal spent for 1 kcal harvested. i'm focusing here on crops with high energy in them, tomatoes for example give a total different picture.
organic agriculture has an efficiency which is about 25% higher (depending on the crop), mainly because they don't use synthetic fertilizers. and without reaching the same yield.
traditional corn production has an energy efficiency of 1/250, no synthetic fertilizer, no machinery, fuel. but a yield which is half of the industrial one.

Theoretically permaculture would get a higher energy efficiency than traditional, but if i look at my garden, and at projects close by or further away (hail internet), i'm doubting if i, the other projects get at the energy efficiency of industrial agriculture.
offcourse there are other factors, like biodiversity, carbon sequestration,... that speak in our advantage but it's something to think about.

for example: i get a lot of horsemanure on woodshavings from a neigbour, which is great to improve my soil fertility but i go and get them with a tractor of another neighbour( which is great that i can use it) and just this 1 day of driving back and forth with a tractor uses so much energy that it totally outcompetes my handwork in the garden for the "364" other days.
and i can see all these kind of things also in other projects.