>Are current permaculture techniques a viable method for replacing industrial agriculture? Note that industrial agriculture isn't a viable replacement for itse

>Are current permaculture techniques a viable method for replacing industrial agriculture? Note that industrial agriculture isn't a viable replacement for itself (that's what being unsustainable means). So if you're expecting any drop-in replacement for industrial agriculture to be sustainable, you'll be disappointed. Permaculture is a process for designing systems. You can use it to design food systems, financial systems, energy systems, etc. And like most processes, you can fuck it up and do a bad job. :) >Can they produce enough calories per acre to feed the projected world population on the projected amount of arable land? An underlying assumption here is that food has to be produced on "arable" (read: cleared) land. This is tremendously inefficient, since most sunlight strikes bare soil and therefore isn't photosynthesized. Forests yield an order of magnitude more biomass per hectare without any human inputs, so it's definitely possible. The trick is to design the forest so it yields useful outputs while minimizing inputs.[1] This is all pretty abstract, so here's a simple example. Human labor is an input, and one technique to minimize it is zone analysis[2]. During zone analysis you minimize labor and energy by consciously placing the most frequently visited elements closest, followed by the next, and so on. This sounds obvious, but it avoids many common mistakes. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixx1c3RSw_8#t=28m25s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixx1c3RSw_8#t=28m25s [2] http://deepgreenpermaculture.com/permaculture/permaculture-design-principles/4-zones-and-sectors-efficient-energy-planning/ http://deepgreenpermaculture.com/permaculture/permaculture-d...