6 ms·

I've always been wary of the permaculture community. Firstly, a lot of the things advanced by them are simply not scalable to the entire human race. They will s

I've always been wary of the permaculture community. Firstly, a lot of the things advanced by them are simply not scalable to the entire human race. They will say stuff like "it's practically free to have all this free food I grew on my lawn", while ignoring the massive amount of labor they put in, the waste product that they managed to scavenge, and the infrastructure they pay little to no taxes for. It's not even clear to me that "Big Age" is even a bad thing, seeing that their massive economies of scale allow them to produce more for less(money, environmental impact) than smaller farmers. Failure to realize this lead to the dumb memes about how global supply chains are supposedly bad, without realizing that having many small factories around the world would actually be more environmentally harmful than shipping products to where they can best be processed. I'm sympathetic to fears about long term sustainability and skepticism about globalism, but I generally don't like the type of stuff they advocate for. I generally agree with calls for increased regulation and a reduction in waste though.

throw8383833jj 3y ago
there are many things that absolutely are scalable to the entire human race, at least outside of the city. Permaculture asks nothing of you but your effort. The "massive amount of labor put in is what's needed to produce that amount of food. It's only in rich countries where people can produce food for much less labor (by working a high paying job and buying the food at the market). there are many countries where people are much better off growing their own food, rather than working at a minimum wage job and buying the same food. You should watch John Jai on Youtube. He's in thailand a country where the GDP per capita is a fraction of the US and yet he has more land, 3 small paid off huts and enough food to raise 4 kids all with plenty of time left over to read books. "Life is easy" he says, not bragging about his riches but rather to let people know about an alternative way of living.
- zeroCalories 3y ago
  I agree that permaculture might be an option for some people, but the difference isn't gdp, it's that there are no productive things to do in many of these low income countries. If their economy advances enough they'll find that working a job provides more for them.
CapstanRoller 3y ago
>It's not even clear to me that "Big Age" is even a bad thing, seeing that their massive economies of scale allow them to produce more for less(money, environmental impact) Big Ag is extremely destructive to the environment, because it doesn't respect existing environments & ecosystems, instead seeing them as a blank canvas for terraforming and imposing industrial processes. Where are you getting the idea that Big Ag has less environmental impact than a backyard garden??? >They will say stuff like "it's practically free to have all this free food I grew on my lawn", while ignoring the massive amount of labor they put in, It doesn't require much labor. That's one of the main points — permaculture is about working with nature rather than against it. Instead of tilling and pumping soil full of mined fertilizer, you use the natural processes appropriate for your local environment to support your crops. When properly applied, permaculture is about minimal effort. >the waste product that they managed to scavenge, Yes, that's also the point of permaculture: diverting waste streams and closing loops. For example, composting is a great way to make high-quality soil while diverting food waste from the landfill where it would anaerobically rot and generate methane. Permaculture can (and should) be low effort. >and the infrastructure they pay little to no taxes for. Huh? Where are you getting the idea that permaculture encourages resource theft and tax avoidance?
- zeroCalories 3y ago
  >Where are you getting the idea that Big Ag has less environmental impact than a backyard garden??? Most studies I've seen suggest that the larger the farming operation, the more efficiently it's able to use resources. Most of those were small/organic farms instead of a backyard garden, but I don't see many reasons to think it would be better. >When properly applied, permaculture is about minimal effort. You still put in more effort than most people. Someone working a median wage job will be able to buy more food in the time it takes you to maintain your garden. The only exception are the very poor. >Yes, that's also the point of permaculture: diverting waste streams and closing loops. Diverting waste is good, but when scaled up it won't be sufficient. You won't be able to get free fertilizer from people that prune trees because everyone will want it, and that's assuming a lot of this waste would still even be produced in an environmentally conscious world. You will most likely need to produce all of it on your own. >Huh? Where are you getting the idea that permaculture encourages resource theft and tax avoidance? To be fair, this is just from the permaculture people that I know. Many of them work very little and pay nothing in taxes, use medicare, and are still well off because a lot of their labor is untaxable. They live in suburbs and the country where stuff like roads and water are provided to them at a loss to society.
vintermann 3y ago
> ignoring the massive amount of labor they put in I thought the whole point of permaculture was exploring tradeoffs between labour and space (i.e, that "yield per acre" of a small intensively managed gardening plot is surprisingly good, and conversely you can trade effort for yield with "forest garden" type stuff that requires less maintenance).
- zeroCalories 3y ago
  I don't believe them, but I'll start my own farm if it can earn me anywhere near 50$/hr in profit.
- SuoDuanDao 3y ago
  It is a fair amount of work even with forest gardens (I grew up in a permaculture project that began a few years before I was born). I think the economics are only appealing to the rational actor if the labour displaces time spent in the gym rather than the office. Which suits my lifestyle just fine, but if you don't enjoy gardening in your free time it's probably better to deliver for ubereats on a bicycle or something.
KaiserPro 3y ago
I mean yes and no. Permaculture has a much higher yeild, per unit of land compared to traditional western arible. The reasons are not really well understood. Possibly attention to pest levels, mixed crops, and much healthier soils (with a fucktonne of mushroom webs) but permaculture isn't much different to subsistence farming. But, the flip side is that industrial movement of food has stopped, limited or reduced the effect of localised famines. There is a much mire equitable medium
- zeroCalories 3y ago
  Land usage isn't a good metric, especially because land in the countryside is plentiful. This is another thing that pisses me off about permaculture people, they encourage inefficient use of land in urban environments, leading to a whole bunch of other problems, including higher land value, more need for cars, and MORE environmentally and economically draining suburbs. I don't want a community garden in my most important economic areas, I want housing and workplaces.
  - KaiserPro 3y ago
    > they encourage inefficient use of land in urban environments I think that depends on which country/state you are in. In the UK, I'm sure there are people who want to turn everywhere into a market garden. However the permaculture hippies that I grew up with were far more pragmatic. They used the land that was near by and not being used. But as you point out, there is a mix of opinion, and it all needs to be critically evaluated.
  - modo_mario 3y ago
    >This is another thing that pisses me off about permaculture people, they encourage inefficient use of land in urban environments, leading to a whole bunch of other problems, including higher land value, more need for cars, and MORE environmentally and economically draining suburbs. I don't want a community garden in my most important economic areas, I want housing and workplaces. I dare say the vast vast majority of land affected by such influences would probably be lawn or the like otherwise. Suburbia in the vast majority of the western world isn't exactly rife with small scale subsistence farming and the places where these practices have contributed a meaningful amount are relatively densely populated places in Europe where it used to be the norm and plots were divided accordingly in an inflexible way before the scale of modern agriculture being common. When it comes to market gardening for income you need more even if less. It is extremely rare for it to make sense in an urban environment where denser construction is an option not blocked by other factors. In many places you can get many manyfold the acreage by selling off and going outside of such urban environments.
modo_mario 3y ago
>Firstly, a lot of the things advanced by them are simply not scalable to the entire human race. It's scalable to a large proportion of it especially in the west and other such areas with a fitting climate and should probably be incentivized tbh. One could say the same about lawns. Which were initially thing of the ultra few who could signal they could both afford to leave land unproductive and employ people to maintain it. Now there's a stupid amount of it. And yes this type of agriculture requires a lot of extra labour which is often understated that I'll agree on. >It's not even clear to me that "Big Age" is even a bad thing, seeing that their massive economies of scale allow them to produce more for less(money, environmental impact) than smaller farmers. It's environmental impact is ridiculous I don't see how this is even debatable. Insect populations in many places have plummeted, topsoil is being eroded, etc. It does indeed make more sense financially and by a good amount but a large part of that is due to cheap plentiful fertilizers a big share of which comes from fossil fuels and deposits in Morocco and the like that will at some point run out and/or get a lot more expensive to get. We could stretch these resources so so much if we were more efficient about using them by dropping/adopting some practices but we do not because it does not make financial sense to do so right now. Similar for irrigation issues in many areas. The moment this inflow of fertilizer starts to end food becomes a lot more expensive, large scale tillage agriculture becomes more difficult and more labour intensive practices common in the permaculture community start making more sense imo. You can't keep going without such fertilizer inputs on soils that are ecologically near dead due to tillage, pest/herbicicides, etc We can reduce our land use, amount of packaging materials and impact on the environment. We don't need to be dogmatic about it either since there's a wide open middle ground between what we do now and some kind of 0 impact, 0 pesticides, etc vision.
lukas099 3y ago
I have long been interested in permaculture, but I have recently been coming around to your point of view. People give modern farmers a lot of crap, but overall they are very interested in taking care of their land, and using as few fertilizers and pesticides as possible, if for no other motive than the profit one. As universities discover new best practices for regenerative ag, crop rotation and the like, farmers are overall very quick to adopt them, and the ones who don't go out of business. For instance, a lot of farmers have already adopted practices like no-till farming, cover cropping, and double cropping. Another example, a soil scientist YouTuber named GardeningInCanada explained how the 'tilling' that farmers do with their giant machines is actually just slicing a cut a few mm deep in the soil with a disk, dropping in new seeds, then pushing the soil back over the cuts with another implement. I think growing your own food is certainly more valuable than just having a giant turf lawn, but if you really wish to provide the most positive ecological impact, I think you should look into things like rain gardens or bioswales that filter rainwater runoff (helping fix the 'dead zones' that high nitrogen creates in our waterways and oceans), and growing a large diversity of plants native to your region that support the greatest number of specialist pollinators, which in turn will feed other life forms. The way I see it now, there is already an overabundance of food for humans in the world, but there is too little food for insects, birds, reptiles, other mammals, etc. In other words, there are plenty of grocery stores for people around but I want my yard to be a giant grocery store full of food for pollinators. If you are in North America, you can grow some native food plants like American persimmon, paw paw, American blueberries, and wild strawberries. But most high-calorie crops are not native (even corn, beans, and squash came from Mexico iirc) and even the ones that were here before European colonization are genetically very different than the native plants that they came from and do not really support any wildlife.
- tstrimple 3y ago
  > People give modern farmers a lot of crap, but overall they are very interested in taking care of their land, and using as few fertilizers and pesticides as possible, if for no other motive than the profit one. You must be exposed to vastly different types of farmers than I have been. I've worked in the ag tech industry and have lived in Iowa most of my life. The idea that farmers are responsible stewards of the land doesn't seem to have any basis in reality. Half of the water bodies in Iowa are unusable because of pollution. Beaches at lakes are closed often due to bacterial blooms caused by farm runoff. Iowa has an advisory on limiting how much caught fish you eat due to farm pollution. In addition, farmers are destroying the top soil by not rotating crops (corn and soy is where the profit is at) and over tilling. This doesn't even touch on the hog factories that are literally overflowing with shit and all the damage that does to our environment and air quality. Where are you seeing farmers actually taking care of the land?
SuoDuanDao 3y ago
I'd really like a citation on the 'big ag has less environmental impact' claim.

throw8383833jj 3y ago

there are many things that absolutely are scalable to the entire human race, at least outside of the city. Permaculture asks nothing of you but your effort. The "massive amount of labor put in is what's needed to produce that amount of food. It's only in rich countries where people can produce food for much less labor (by working a high paying job and buying the food at the market). there are many countries where people are much better off growing their own food, rather than working at a minimum wage job and buying the same food. You should watch John Jai on Youtube. He's in thailand a country where the GDP per capita is a fraction of the US and yet he has more land, 3 small paid off huts and enough food to raise 4 kids all with plenty of time left over to read books. "Life is easy" he says, not bragging about his riches but rather to let people know about an alternative way of living.

zeroCalories 3y ago
I agree that permaculture might be an option for some people, but the difference isn't gdp, it's that there are no productive things to do in many of these low income countries. If their economy advances enough they'll find that working a job provides more for them.

CapstanRoller 3y ago

>It's not even clear to me that "Big Age" is even a bad thing, seeing that their massive economies of scale allow them to produce more for less(money, environmental impact) Big Ag is extremely destructive to the environment, because it doesn't respect existing environments & ecosystems, instead seeing them as a blank canvas for terraforming and imposing industrial processes. Where are you getting the idea that Big Ag has less environmental impact than a backyard garden??? >They will say stuff like "it's practically free to have all this free food I grew on my lawn", while ignoring the massive amount of labor they put in, It doesn't require much labor. That's one of the main points — permaculture is about working with nature rather than against it. Instead of tilling and pumping soil full of mined fertilizer, you use the natural processes appropriate for your local environment to support your crops. When properly applied, permaculture is about minimal effort. >the waste product that they managed to scavenge, Yes, that's also the point of permaculture: diverting waste streams and closing loops. For example, composting is a great way to make high-quality soil while diverting food waste from the landfill where it would anaerobically rot and generate methane. Permaculture can (and should) be low effort. >and the infrastructure they pay little to no taxes for. Huh? Where are you getting the idea that permaculture encourages resource theft and tax avoidance?

zeroCalories 3y ago
>Where are you getting the idea that Big Ag has less environmental impact than a backyard garden??? Most studies I've seen suggest that the larger the farming operation, the more efficiently it's able to use resources. Most of those were small/organic farms instead of a backyard garden, but I don't see many reasons to think it would be better. >When properly applied, permaculture is about minimal effort. You still put in more effort than most people. Someone working a median wage job will be able to buy more food in the time it takes you to maintain your garden. The only exception are the very poor. >Yes, that's also the point of permaculture: diverting waste streams and closing loops. Diverting waste is good, but when scaled up it won't be sufficient. You won't be able to get free fertilizer from people that prune trees because everyone will want it, and that's assuming a lot of this waste would still even be produced in an environmentally conscious world. You will most likely need to produce all of it on your own. >Huh? Where are you getting the idea that permaculture encourages resource theft and tax avoidance? To be fair, this is just from the permaculture people that I know. Many of them work very little and pay nothing in taxes, use medicare, and are still well off because a lot of their labor is untaxable. They live in suburbs and the country where stuff like roads and water are provided to them at a loss to society.

vintermann 3y ago

> ignoring the massive amount of labor they put in I thought the whole point of permaculture was exploring tradeoffs between labour and space (i.e, that "yield per acre" of a small intensively managed gardening plot is surprisingly good, and conversely you can trade effort for yield with "forest garden" type stuff that requires less maintenance).

zeroCalories 3y ago
I don't believe them, but I'll start my own farm if it can earn me anywhere near 50$/hr in profit.
SuoDuanDao 3y ago
It is a fair amount of work even with forest gardens (I grew up in a permaculture project that began a few years before I was born). I think the economics are only appealing to the rational actor if the labour displaces time spent in the gym rather than the office. Which suits my lifestyle just fine, but if you don't enjoy gardening in your free time it's probably better to deliver for ubereats on a bicycle or something.

KaiserPro 3y ago

I mean yes and no. Permaculture has a much higher yeild, per unit of land compared to traditional western arible. The reasons are not really well understood. Possibly attention to pest levels, mixed crops, and much healthier soils (with a fucktonne of mushroom webs) but permaculture isn't much different to subsistence farming. But, the flip side is that industrial movement of food has stopped, limited or reduced the effect of localised famines. There is a much mire equitable medium

zeroCalories 3y ago
Land usage isn't a good metric, especially because land in the countryside is plentiful. This is another thing that pisses me off about permaculture people, they encourage inefficient use of land in urban environments, leading to a whole bunch of other problems, including higher land value, more need for cars, and MORE environmentally and economically draining suburbs. I don't want a community garden in my most important economic areas, I want housing and workplaces.
- KaiserPro 3y ago
  > they encourage inefficient use of land in urban environments I think that depends on which country/state you are in. In the UK, I'm sure there are people who want to turn everywhere into a market garden. However the permaculture hippies that I grew up with were far more pragmatic. They used the land that was near by and not being used. But as you point out, there is a mix of opinion, and it all needs to be critically evaluated.
- modo_mario 3y ago
  >This is another thing that pisses me off about permaculture people, they encourage inefficient use of land in urban environments, leading to a whole bunch of other problems, including higher land value, more need for cars, and MORE environmentally and economically draining suburbs. I don't want a community garden in my most important economic areas, I want housing and workplaces. I dare say the vast vast majority of land affected by such influences would probably be lawn or the like otherwise. Suburbia in the vast majority of the western world isn't exactly rife with small scale subsistence farming and the places where these practices have contributed a meaningful amount are relatively densely populated places in Europe where it used to be the norm and plots were divided accordingly in an inflexible way before the scale of modern agriculture being common. When it comes to market gardening for income you need more even if less. It is extremely rare for it to make sense in an urban environment where denser construction is an option not blocked by other factors. In many places you can get many manyfold the acreage by selling off and going outside of such urban environments.

modo_mario 3y ago

>Firstly, a lot of the things advanced by them are simply not scalable to the entire human race. It's scalable to a large proportion of it especially in the west and other such areas with a fitting climate and should probably be incentivized tbh. One could say the same about lawns. Which were initially thing of the ultra few who could signal they could both afford to leave land unproductive and employ people to maintain it. Now there's a stupid amount of it. And yes this type of agriculture requires a lot of extra labour which is often understated that I'll agree on. >It's not even clear to me that "Big Age" is even a bad thing, seeing that their massive economies of scale allow them to produce more for less(money, environmental impact) than smaller farmers. It's environmental impact is ridiculous I don't see how this is even debatable. Insect populations in many places have plummeted, topsoil is being eroded, etc. It does indeed make more sense financially and by a good amount but a large part of that is due to cheap plentiful fertilizers a big share of which comes from fossil fuels and deposits in Morocco and the like that will at some point run out and/or get a lot more expensive to get. We could stretch these resources so so much if we were more efficient about using them by dropping/adopting some practices but we do not because it does not make financial sense to do so right now. Similar for irrigation issues in many areas. The moment this inflow of fertilizer starts to end food becomes a lot more expensive, large scale tillage agriculture becomes more difficult and more labour intensive practices common in the permaculture community start making more sense imo. You can't keep going without such fertilizer inputs on soils that are ecologically near dead due to tillage, pest/herbicicides, etc We can reduce our land use, amount of packaging materials and impact on the environment. We don't need to be dogmatic about it either since there's a wide open middle ground between what we do now and some kind of 0 impact, 0 pesticides, etc vision.

lukas099 3y ago

I have long been interested in permaculture, but I have recently been coming around to your point of view. People give modern farmers a lot of crap, but overall they are very interested in taking care of their land, and using as few fertilizers and pesticides as possible, if for no other motive than the profit one. As universities discover new best practices for regenerative ag, crop rotation and the like, farmers are overall very quick to adopt them, and the ones who don't go out of business. For instance, a lot of farmers have already adopted practices like no-till farming, cover cropping, and double cropping. Another example, a soil scientist YouTuber named GardeningInCanada explained how the 'tilling' that farmers do with their giant machines is actually just slicing a cut a few mm deep in the soil with a disk, dropping in new seeds, then pushing the soil back over the cuts with another implement. I think growing your own food is certainly more valuable than just having a giant turf lawn, but if you really wish to provide the most positive ecological impact, I think you should look into things like rain gardens or bioswales that filter rainwater runoff (helping fix the 'dead zones' that high nitrogen creates in our waterways and oceans), and growing a large diversity of plants native to your region that support the greatest number of specialist pollinators, which in turn will feed other life forms. The way I see it now, there is already an overabundance of food for humans in the world, but there is too little food for insects, birds, reptiles, other mammals, etc. In other words, there are plenty of grocery stores for people around but I want my yard to be a giant grocery store full of food for pollinators. If you are in North America, you can grow some native food plants like American persimmon, paw paw, American blueberries, and wild strawberries. But most high-calorie crops are not native (even corn, beans, and squash came from Mexico iirc) and even the ones that were here before European colonization are genetically very different than the native plants that they came from and do not really support any wildlife.

tstrimple 3y ago
> People give modern farmers a lot of crap, but overall they are very interested in taking care of their land, and using as few fertilizers and pesticides as possible, if for no other motive than the profit one. You must be exposed to vastly different types of farmers than I have been. I've worked in the ag tech industry and have lived in Iowa most of my life. The idea that farmers are responsible stewards of the land doesn't seem to have any basis in reality. Half of the water bodies in Iowa are unusable because of pollution. Beaches at lakes are closed often due to bacterial blooms caused by farm runoff. Iowa has an advisory on limiting how much caught fish you eat due to farm pollution. In addition, farmers are destroying the top soil by not rotating crops (corn and soy is where the profit is at) and over tilling. This doesn't even touch on the hog factories that are literally overflowing with shit and all the damage that does to our environment and air quality. Where are you seeing farmers actually taking care of the land?

SuoDuanDao 3y ago

I'd really like a citation on the 'big ag has less environmental impact' claim.