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Do these alternatives scale at a cost that people can afford? I tried googling for permaculture information (like cost per unit of food) and I only found absur
by creato 6y ago
Do these alternatives scale at a cost that people can afford?
I tried googling for permaculture information (like cost per unit of food) and I only found absurd cult-like propaganda or people complaining about the myths of permaculture.
- NegativeLatency 6y agoIt doesn’t take permaculture levels of agriculture to make it better than it is now. For example insurance companies dictate how and when farmers apply chemicals, the insurers are influenced by petrochemical companies and are also risk adverse. So while we could do better with more careful and targeted application of chemicals there’s not a huge incentive to at a systemic level. The risk is too high for farmers to try and do something different, because the insurers dictate the terms
- danielheath 6y agoIt’s confusing because you have so many dimensions of scale - labor input, land use, water consumption, etc - that you can point out advantages to almost any approach. The last century has seen massive farms using high tech kit, in part because they can lobby for grants and subsidies more effectively. They are not water efficient as a rule, and they tend to suffer inefficiencies because the people managing the land have no skin in the game, but they are profitable because they can move large volumes of produce and get their machinery paid for by the government.
- tarsinge 6y agoIntensive organic farming seems to work, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biointensive_agriculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biointensive_agriculture, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Martin_Fortier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Martin_Fortier for an example with numbers.