Permie Challenge

Discussion in 'General chat' started by purecajn, Oct 4, 2011.

  1. Pakanohida

    Pakanohida Junior Member

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    This person in Wisconsin, where they get snow, and it freezes, etc. can grow 1,000,000 pounds of food on 3 acres with an additional 10,000 fish.

    So, as I have said in a similar thread elsewhere, I am going with the Mother Earth News claim of 1 acre will do 1 family of 4 if done right with no additional materials incoming.
     
  2. purecajn

    purecajn Junior Member

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    yer, but there not using permie techniques. That's hydroponics
     
  3. Yukkuri_Kame

    Yukkuri_Kame Junior Member

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    I would argue that aquaponics definitely uses permaculture design principles - using waste from fish to feed plants. But those folks in Wisconsin are using major inputs in terms of fish feed, and some power inputs for pumps and such. Many folks are working on much lower input versions of aquaponics, that are closer to permaculture ideals, resulting in lower yield. Regardless, aquaculture is high on the list of productivity per sq. foot, especially if you start stacking ducks, fish, prawns & aquatic vegetables.
     
  4. mischief

    mischief Senior Member

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    pppprawns!!!
    I love prawns.
    Something else I have to google.
     
  5. Matt_95

    Matt_95 Junior Member

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    Some of our Native macro prawns would be perfect, the saltwater ones would not work very well.
     
  6. Pakanohida

    Pakanohida Junior Member

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    Actually, it's aquaponics, which is part of permaculture. His fish give waste that feed the plants. What can be more simple.

    I view it as inspiration for what more I can do here. Why not have my greywater be polished and move to an aquaponic tank that does the same? I can grow cattail and other things in the wetland portion, and so on.
     
  7. purecajn

    purecajn Junior Member

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    Yes, but it is high maitenance thereby not sustaining. I was under the impression that the ideal of permaculture is a self-sustaining,non-maitenance system? I realise this is extremely effecient, but if the pumps don't pump everything dies. It's just like in Monoculture with the farmer having to supply artificial fertilizer to feed the plants due to stressing the land. only in hydro there is no land to stress (far from immatating nature). Then there's the material list for creating the sysem. What is the footprint from its creation? Toxins from the PVC processing?
    Great, you can grow effeciently in an "artificial environment" using natural fertilizer instead of artificial fertilizer. Yet your still having to rely on artificial technology/slave enabeling companies for its existance. Even electricity. This whole environment dies in a month with no electricity, a pump going out,etc.... Try walking away from this system for a year and see if it can maintain.
    Don't get me wrong, it is a great system, but it ain't Permie. If it is then the use of artificial fertalizer can be called Permie as well.
     
  8. Pakanohida

    Pakanohida Junior Member

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    OK, I understand where you are coming from, but isn't it possible through grey water outlet from the inside of the home, to go through a small wetland for polishing, then through a pond for the fish, with over flow going to downhill plants without a pump?

    You do give me food for thought.
     
  9. purecajn

    purecajn Junior Member

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    As long as nature is duplicated with material as local as possible (preferably recycled) with the ability to maintain (preferably flourish) without our presence. Thats all as from what I understand. That way we repair rather than destroy, or even worse encourage others to continue in their negative ways by following our own incorrect interpretations of nature. Hence this sites purpose -to allow ourselves, through the assistance of others insites/experiences too shed past misconceptions/interpretations in our current belief system. At least that's what I see this site for.
    But if this is my very own misconception then please etc....
    As your theoretical system is a perfect model of nature with a reliable free energy source, I sure don't see a problem with it, but then again I'm not there.
     
  10. Pakanohida

    Pakanohida Junior Member

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    Well, I am thinking about this problem with you, and in regards to my own property. I honestly think that one day I will want to pump water from the bottom of my property on the NW side back up to the main house area and let it go down through the system again kind of like Sepp Holzer does, but then again, he has a lot of pumps and that requires a lot of input to run them from some where.

    Then again, I also keep looking for excuses to work with flow forms on my property, something perhaps I should not do. If the climate models for you and I are even remotely accurate for 10,20, 30 years from now perhaps I should not look at pump driven system to get water up on my property, but rather more catchment, and minimize overflow. Good mapping / design will work in both our favors here.



    Your comments and this thread have given me much to think about since I am in the middle of working on my property design.
     
  11. springtide

    springtide Junior Member

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    With fish food you need about very high protein which normally means fishmeal (ground up fish from the ocean) or casein (doesn't suit many species - comes from dairy by products) both of which are not sustainable. On the question of land i would try at least 3 acres of wood lot, half acre food forrest, half acre gains (chicken, guinea pig food, flour,etc) and the acre for general veggie patch - then squeeze in a house and big shed (mostly for water catchment) somewhere. The main problem with the island is that you need nearly double the land to provide wind breaks to stop some of the salt and provide shelter for the cropping land, and that the soil on a small island is normally rocky.

    Then if you want to buy an island they are vrey expensive so you would be talking about Tassie or somewhere else cold and remote so you would need more wood lot for warmth, glass houses for better food production and better wind breaks/sun traps, etc.
     
  12. purecajn

    purecajn Junior Member

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    Before giving up on the idea of looping your energy source is it possible to use a wind powered centrificial pump? If so you can make the whole thing from scrap.Water gets pumped at the winds convience. Or, if your feeling adventurous someone on here recently turned me onto the work of Viktor Schauberger. OMG, this guy is another of my favorites for his work in liquid flow. Using design to both increase flow and create reverse flow currents. the book i'm on is "Living Water. You may find what you are looking for within its pages.
     
  13. springtide

    springtide Junior Member

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    If you were able to get the aquaculture tank and the hydroponic tank to the same height (+/- an inch) you could use an air pump to circulae the water - air lift into the veggies and bubbler with the fish for 5-10 watts of power for 100 gal or so of fish tank.
     
  14. mischief

    mischief Senior Member

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    What if you lived by a lake tho?
    Or on the coast.

    Why do we insist on looking at potential problems with the current type of mind set-commercial aquaponics for example.
     
  15. springtide

    springtide Junior Member

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    Mischeif - its because aquaponics as it generally stands is a process where by we take wild fish as a finite resource from the ocean, process it into fish food, then process it back into fish the byproduct of this process is nitrate/nitrite from the re-produced fish which then gets used to grow plants. I did this at university in 1994 and for leafy greens - silverbeet, cress, etc it worked really well, but we were using the byproducts of 20 000 rainbow trout so we found a use for the already existing waste.
    To create waste so you can recycle it doesn't seem that clever.
     
  16. ppp

    ppp Junior Member

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    Spring tide I like your land sizes for living well but I think a full acre of veggies is above necessary. We have about 20x20m under veg and find we have more than we need, always working on evening out gluts and keeping up the diversity though. That is 400 m2 pure vegetables which is 1/10 An acre
     
  17. Yukkuri_Kame

    Yukkuri_Kame Junior Member

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    Just re-reading the designer's manual, Mollison:

    "What is perhaps of greatest importance, and cannot be too highly stressed, is the need to develop very compact systems. In the Philipines, people are encouraged to plant 4sqm of vegetables - a tiny plot - and from this garden they get 40-60% of their food! We can all make a very good four meters square garden, where we may fail to do so in 40 square meters.

    Similarly, we plant and care for ten critical trees (for oils, citrus, nuts, and storable fruit). We can take good care of these, whereas if we plant one hundred or one thousand, we can loose up to 60% of the trees from lack of site preparation and care. Thus, ten trees and four meters square, well protected, manured, and watered, will start the zone 1 system."
     
  18. Pakanohida

    Pakanohida Junior Member

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    Yep, Schauberger IMO, is needed study for anyone dealing with water.
     
  19. macousin

    macousin Junior Member

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    Hi Grahame,

    Yes, that would be great. You might be interested in reading this: https://www.quarterlyessay.com/issue/no-fixed-address-nomads-and-fate-planet Robyn Devidson makes the case that nomadic lifestyles impose a lighter burden on the land whilst providing for more people. It reminds me of this story regarding how Aboriginese travel all over the land during their life and have only one location-specific obligation, to attempt to return to their birth place to die. Not sure if that's correct or not but it makes much sense in a dry land where resources are scare.

    I wonder how the economics of this would work? May be they don't, LOL.

    If I may bother you with a youth story, which I think could be somehow relevant. When I was in my early 20's I thought, with a friend, of training for the pilgrimage of Santiago de Compostella. From the early middle-age and still today, people walk for 1500 - 2000 km from the Mount Saint Michel or the Puy-de-Dome, or just 900 km from the Pyrenees to Santiago. They have little money and rely on the hospitality of the villagers who live on the route. So my friend and I tried to do this for 2 weeks, along the river Loire. We walked all day, asked for hospitality in barns for the night and asked for food. The story was that we were training for a pilgrimage, which was true. We always received shelter and often received food. We washed every morning in the river. Had we not had some money to buy fruit, cheese and bread along the way, we probably would have starved. We managed to stay clean and although lost some weight did always look presentable enough at the time of asking for a place to sleep. Nevertheless, it was hard and after 10 days, we gave up and bought ourselves a night in a hotel room and a nice shower.

    The bottom line is that we were really amazed by the hospitality of the people we met. Why did they do it? To this date, I am not sure: was it the sense that we were bringing them an opportunity to serve Christ (he said that if you feed the poor you feed him), was it that we talked about the pilgrimage and its meanings with them and they found fulfilment, is it just because people are naturally good-hearted? Honestly I don't know.

    Maybe we could have lived more sustainably if we had also offered our services to farmers. Although I am not sure what kind of services a mechanised farm needs and harvesting (fruit, vines, etc.) is very seasonal. Maybe a nomadic lifestyle only works if a large chunk of the agriculture converts back to labour intensive practices.

    Anyway, this is interesting. The question that comes to mind is: how can sedentary and nomadic populations coexist harmoniously and share the same land for mutual benefit?
     

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