Productive Permaculture Systems

Discussion in 'Planting, growing, nurturing Plants' started by -, Aug 13, 2007.

  1. Guest

    I looked at a lot of Permaculture Systems. Most of them were designed to support the family with vegetables, fruites and sometimes poltry and meat, had an energy efficient house, clever designed water harvesting installations and so on. Yes, they are very efficient and productive horticulture installations.

    But I have not seen a single productive and profitable permaculture system (yet) which would qualify the labe PERMAnent agriCULTURE, nor a profitable Permaculture farm. Except the ones where the owner does courses and charges course fees, internship fees and the volouteers are paying for staying on and work.

    Has anyone any exapmples of a successful farm working with Permaculture principles? Or is Permaculture more or less restricted to gardening and horticulture?
     
  2. Jim Bob

    Jim Bob Junior Member

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    How about the nation of Cuba?
     
  3. pebble

    pebble Junior Member

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    Lighthouse, can you clarify what you mean by 'profitable' and 'farm'?

    Also do you mean formal permaculture i.e. people who have done a PDC? Or anyone using the general principles?
     
  4. ecodharmamark

    ecodharmamark Junior Member

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    Hello Lighthouse :)

    Energy efficient homes that harvest their own water and support their family-in-residence with fruit, vegetables and meat? I would suggest that these are examples that indeed qualify as being most profitable.

    May I suggest you keep looking. As a very wise person once said "Seek, and ye shall find". A good way of experiencing 'A Day in the Life of a Permaculturist' is to go WWOOFing: https://www.wwoof.com.au/

    Here's a selection from the very many permaculture sites/projects that I've had the pleasure (and privilege) of spending varying periods of time at:

    Woodbrook Farm (Harcourt VIC Australia)
    Hightweeters (via Rhylstone NSW Australia)
    Kev's Place (via Mullumbimby NSW Australia)
    Melliodora (Hepburn Springs VIC Australia)
    Crystal Waters (via Maleny QLD Australia)
    Sam's Place (Ocean Shores QLD Australia)
    Gravel Hill (Bendigo VIC Australia)
    Fryer's Forest (Fryerstown VIC Australia)
    Christie Walk (Adelaide SA Australia)

    Terms such as "profitable", "productive" and "successful" are highly subjective, and as such can be understood to mean many different things, to many different people. With this in mind, I hope that the above has been of some help to you.

    Cheerio, Mark.
     
  5. IntensiveGardener

    IntensiveGardener Junior Member

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    Hi lighthouse,
    Of course this does depend on exactly what you mean by profitable.
    I do know what you mean though lighthouse. I have certainly never seen a farm which would qualify as "permaculture" which is profitable from the sales of their produce alone.
    I have spoken to many people who have attempted this however not a single one has really succeded and the farms invariably fail or now opperate as nurseries, tourist destinations or training centres.
    My guess is that there probably are farms out there which have worked but they are probably selling the crops of perenial plants such as fruit, asparagus etc...


    I am currently opperating a profitable organic vegetable business Near Daylesford in Victoria. My system does not really qualify as permaculture however. I till the soil, (dig it 2 foot deep occasionally) and generally follow the bio-intensive method for growing my anual vegetables for sale.
    The beds are permanent, in that i never stand on them and they are fixed in one place. I add lots of compost.

    It is very hard to compete with tractor agriculture. Doing so with a low labour input method is virtually impossible.
    I have found that the only method which does this is
    slightly more labour input = much more yeild
    I do this by making the soil very rich, deep and fertile; putting lots of time into the growing of seedlings to an advanced stage before planting out; use copius amounts of good homemade compost and planting plants at 3/4 the recomended spacing in triangles rather than rows.

    jim bob wrote:
    I'm not sure that the system they use in cuba could properly be called permaculture either. It is certainly sustainale and ecological and in the mid 90s they did delve into permaculture so i assume elements of it still are.
    From what i understand most of the organoponicos and other food growing opperations in cuba do not use "no till" farming.
    As a better alternative to tractors they have addopted traditional tilling methods. In some cases with oxen and in others it is done by hand on smaller, very intensive areas.
    While it could be argued that this was only viable in cuba because they had a severe fuel shortage they have recently fixed this due to their alliance with oil rich venesuala. Chemical ag is not back on the agenda though and Cuba seems to be continuing with the sustainable methods.
    :) Viva Cuba!
    IG
     
  6. christopher

    christopher Junior Member

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    Well, profitable lacks a definition here.

    In full economics, many farms engaged in permaculture are profitable. You have:
    1. avoided cost, you produce and do not have to buy
    2. localized food production, avoided environmental cost by eliminatingg transport
    3. excess production, which can be sold off the farm or cycled back to the farm through animals
    4. production geared towards markets, either food, timber, medicinals, value added products like jams, dried fruit, vinegars, etc
    5. food sovereignty, which is a step past food security
    6. farms that perform valuable ecologic services

    These ecological services include:
    a) carbon sequestration
    b) habitat creation
    c) soil retention
    d) water retention
    e) centres of agricultural biodiversity, including heirloom varieties of plants and animals

    All of those services have economic values, but are difficult to quantify in the dominant economic model, so usually they are assigned no value.

    Many permaculture farms are highly diverse farms. We cultivate over 600 plan species here, yet only a few are marketable. We sell our cacao, for example, and our pineapples, and mangos, and our veggies, but as much as possible, we process them to value add the ultimate marketable product.

    We make jams, vinegars and chutneys. We toast and grind our cacao so we can sell cacao balls to be grated for the best hot chocolate ever tasted.

    We sell our produce in the local market. We give food to an elderly feeding program. Our farm is well established, and we get more food from less effort.

    We harvested our own trees to build our house, and have many thousands of board feet of timber growing, all with a harvest cycle of 20-30 years.

    Now, a specialized farm that grows one or two types of crops, large acreages of single cultivars of single species, is inherently biologically unstable. To sustain such a biological irregularity, that farm uses biocides and synthetic fertilizers and sells denatured food with chemical residues also passes some of the biocides and fertilizer on through the water.

    As a consequence of that:
    1. the nearby rivers are damaged by siltation and chemical residues
    2. food must be transported many miles
    3. there is local loss of biodiversity
    4. there is an increased use of chemicals
    5. there is an increased dependency on fossil fuels for the growth and transport of the resulting food
    6. the production of market based commodities results in the decreased availability of local food
    7. synthetic nutrients run off into the rivers and out to sea, creating large hypoxic "dead zones", deoxygenated water that kills marine life, resulting in damage to coastal communities in decreased fish availability and lack of access to markets
    8. the depletion of aquifers, draining of rivers, previously rich marine estuaries dead from lack of water, Etc, etc, etc

    Most of those farms are "profitable" only in the narrowest view of economics, the one where kilograms per hectar X price per kilo minus cost of production (labour and inputs) is everything, and all those other costs are dismissively referred to as "externalities". If true cost economics were observed, many of those allegedly profitable farms would be found to be oprtating at a loss, a loss subsidized by at the cost of our natural systems, and will ultimately be paid for by our childrens childrens children.

    Just my opinion...
     
  7. Guest

    Thank you for your answers.

    Please allow me to define some words (ref.: Oxford American Dictionary)

    permaculture:
    the development of agricultural ecosystems intended to be sustainable and self-sufficient.

    sustainable
    able to be maintained at a certain rate or level • Ecology (esp. of development, exploitation, or agriculture) conserving an ecological balance by avoiding depletion of natural resources.

    (My personal definition: a system, that over it's lifetime produces more than the inputs needed to install and maintain it.)

    self-sufficient
    needing no outside help in satisfying one's basic needs, esp. with regard to the production of food

    horticulture:
    the art or practice of garden cultivation and management.

    agriculture:
    the science or practice of farming, including cultivation of the soil for the growing of crops and the rearing of animals to provide food, wool, and other products.

    farming:
    make one's living by growing crops or keeping livestock • use for growing crops and rearing animals, esp. commercially.

    commercial
    making or intended to make a profit • having profit, rather than artistic or other value, as a primary aim

    productive
    producing or able to produce large amounts of goods, crops, or other commodities • achieving or producing a significant amount or result

    profitable:
    yielding profit or financial gain.

    success:
    the accomplishment of an aim or purpose • the attainment of popularity or profit • a person or thing that achieves desired aims or attains prosperity

    prosperity
    the state of being successful in material terms; flourishing financially.
     
  8. mossbackfarm

    mossbackfarm Junior Member

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    I find that establishing a sustainable, productive, profitable (in all of its definitions) permaculture farm takes a lot of time, labor, and capital. If I tilled up all my acreage when I bought it 4 years ago, my productivity and short-term profitability would be relatively large, but I'd be mining what little remained of the topsoil on the property.

    Likewise, I'd love to put ponds all over the property....but that takes money, and farming has never been a get rich quick scheme. Slow progress will have to do.

    Now, 3000 native trees, and ~100 fruit and nut trees, plus several years of rotational grazing with multiple species, we're starting to see some returns for our labors. Still not yet 'profitable', but not nearly as much in the red. If we had been born to the land we steward, it could be another story, but we work with what we have.

    Cheers

    Rich
     
  9. Guest

    Please see above definitions. What are "the general principles"?

    I do not agree with this statement Mark. Please let me explain. We live in a world which is driven by money. I do not say that this is ok or good or bad, I only say that's the way it is.

    A sustainable or even profitable system would take care for it's needs by itself.

    What does that mean? Well, you buy a block of land, get a mortgage, build a house, buy solar panels, windows, doors, straw bails etc. You build your chicken tractor, your fences buy your tools etc. All of that costs money.

    Does the permaculture system provide this money or even create a surplus (without teaching income or income from volunteers or interns)? Or do you have to work outside to create the "surplus" needed to keep the system alive?

    You know they take your land if you can't pay you council fees.

    If it does and creates a financial surplus = profitable
    If you have to source money outside the system = not profitable

    I travelled the world looking for a sustainable profitable permaculture farm and could not find a single one. I even went to Jordan to look at the greening the desert site in Kafren. I talked to Omar, the farm manager there. He wants to bulldoze the site because it is not considered a demonstration site where local farmers could learn how to make a living from the land. He wants to build a demonstration farm for exactly that purpose. That's a shame if you ask me. Obviously they don't know or understand what they have there.

    None of the above sites are really sustainable or profitable or self-sufficient. Most of them can not even be considered as farms. Crystal Waters for example could not survive if people would not bring in outside money.

    Yes that is exactly my experience. But there must be farms out there, which are profitable and working according to permaculture principles. I was wondering if someone could point me in the right direction.

    Christopher
     
  10. nibs

    nibs Junior Member

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    from what little i understand, a permaculture system will never really be complete, redesign and constantly moving (unpredictable) elements are just as much a part of naural systems as they are in human designed systems. so we are always 'setting up' our systems and may be doing so for a very long time before we get close to abundance.

    and besides, there are always costs involved. its like saying a herd of zebra are not successful or productive because some of them keep getting eaten by lions, it is just a part of the whole system. just because someone has a mortgage so they have to work to pay that off en route to setting up their system doesn't mean that they aren't productive or wont be in 100 years when their children are working the same land (as is done in many countries) . so maybe there are alot of examples that are in deficit, but in the big picture they are more productive, especially after tripple bottom line economics. I would ask for a comparison between the deficits of a permaculture system and an industrial farm, but we all know who would be in greater debt.

    hope my rambling made sense...
     
  11. pebble

    pebble Junior Member

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    Hi Christopher,

    I do know how to use a dictionary :wink: I was wanting to know what *you* were meaning, because the dictionary definitions are very broad.

    What I was wanting to know is do you mean profit in terms of extra left over to return to the farm/land once the farming people have been fed/clothed/had their needs met? Or do you mean profit that is taken out of the system to deliver to shareholders? (which is how a lot of farming is these days).

    Which leads me to 'farming'? Do you mean monocropping to produce an externally required profit? Or do you mean people living off the land and meeting other needs by selling surplus (or doing whatever is necessary)?

    I know of pieces of land being managed sustainably. Often the people who live on that land do other things to supplement their income but I don't think that means that they're not farming or not practicing true permaculture. It's a modern anomaly that 'farming' = sole income.

    Likewise I'm not sure why you would exclude people that run PDCs etc from their land. In fact many mainstream farmers here in NZ are having to supplement their income via farmstays or tourism, that's what small, family based farming does.

    Also, you might want to define farm by size, type of activity. I have a pretty broad definition of what farming is, but I'm unclear what you are meaning.


    By general principles I mean things like designing (semi) closed systems based on site observations, learning from nature directly and applying those principles to land management, respect for the land that goes beyond what one can get out of it etc. I could name more, and I know people that work in that way that have never been trained in permaculture. So I was wanting to know if you were wanting examples of sustainable farming or if you wanted people farming who have formally studied and applied permaculture principles.


    cheers,
    pebble.
     
  12. pebble

    pebble Junior Member

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    hmm, I'm also thinking that self-sufficient farming* is not permaculture farming. Natural systems don't exist with such rigid boundaries and neither do sustainable human ones. The idea that a farm should produce all it requires without needing income from other sources doesn't really make sense to me.

    Energy flows in and out of systems all the time. Why would human skills be any different?
     
  13. christopher

    christopher Junior Member

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    Right now we are subsidizing the farm with outside work and with student groups, etc, true, but in another 10 years, I start to take out my teak treees and my samwood trees, and I am going to make every single penny I put into this farm back. What's more, by staggering harvesting, I will make that sustainable. In the meantime, I eat really well.

    I would say that my farm is profitable, but I am still building capital.

    Further, I think you are missing a critical point: the farms that you define as being profitable are subsidized by cheap petroleum, the mining of available nutrients and the wholesale transfer of systems that provide ecological services into "profitable" farming.

    If you take money out of the bank, that is not income, that is depleting your capital, in this case the planet we live on. Most farming, in terms of whole systems accounting (or even calory based accounting) is built up on a series of no renewable resources. Any "income" based on that is merely a withdrawal from the bank, it is not "profitable".

    Actually, we live in a world driven by extremely complex natural processes. By ignoring that and atempting to pigeon hole the world into that model, we arrive at faulty conclusions.

    With the cosmology you espouse, the dominant economic model is woefully incomplete. Even using such a limited and simplistic economic model, by looking a bit further than cost of labour and inputs, versus kilograms per hectare times price per kilo, with either calorie based accounting, or with true cost accounting (all of those pesky externalities economists hate to look at, since they fuck their model right up), most of the farms that you identify as being "profitable" simply are not.
     
  14. Jim Bob

    Jim Bob Junior Member

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    lighthouse, another point is that most modern farming isn't profitable. Take most farms, and pay the owner a farm labourer's wage - the farm is now operating at a loss. Of all farming income, 80% is generated by farms on 0.8% of the land in Australia. The other 99.2% of the land accounts for the other 20% of the income. There are a large number of farmers who can only operate their place because a spouse has a job off the land, or they have a second job, or they receive some sort of government relief and tax breaks, subsidised workers, or they're subdividing their land, and so on.

    So, if 99.2% of modern farms make not much money, why would we expect permaculture places to be any different?

    If we have 1 permaculture farm, there is a base 0.8% chance that it'll be profitable. If we have 3, there's a 1-(0.992*0.992*0.992) = 2.38% chance it'll be profitable, and so on - we need to have at least 86 permaculture farms running only on their food sales before we have a 50% chance that at least one of them is really profitable.

    Are there even 86 permaculture places in Australia which try to exist just on food sales? I doubt it. So the lack of permaculture places making a decent money profit doesn't really tell us anything about permaculture as a business, compared to modern farming. There just aren't that many. It's like asking how many people are making money from having wind turbines in their backyard and selling the power to the grid, or how many people are profiting from sending tourists to space. Permaculture as a business is new, and not many people have tried it.

    You're holding permaculture places to higher standards than we hold modern farms to, unless you expect 99.2% of them to be flops without income from something other than food sales.

    Most new businesses flop. Farming has a higher rate than normal because we've so much competition, and the market is driven by price, not quality.
     
  15. ecodharmamark

    ecodharmamark Junior Member

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    Hello Christopher (Lighthouse) :)

    May well you quote from a dictionary in order to define your understanding of the terminology connected with this topic, however please understand that not everyone is going to share that particular view. Your understanding of the term 'profit' appears to be be rooted in the anthropocentric realm of laissez-faire capitalism. My understanding of the term encompasses a more biocentric view. Different strokes for different folks. You see profit from a economic perspective, I see it from this perspective too, but only after it has been viewed through a lense that includes such concepts as embodied energy, ecological services, etc.

    In your original post you asked for:
    I responded by providing you with a list (from the top of my head) where I believe the practice of permaculture has been highly 'successful'. Once again it appears that your understanding of the term successful and my understanding of the term are two very different things. And once again, I don't have a problem with this. For I now realise that we were trying to compare apples with oranges.

    (For the record: one of the permaculture 'farms' in my list is extremely profitable in economic terms, and what's more, it has achieved this position in a very sustainable manner in terms of social and environmental investment.)

    No longer do any of the world's leading economists simply view 'profit' from a single bottom line perspective. All (that I'm aware of) have adopted a triple bottom line position - that is, they understand that profit must be viewed from not only the point of capital growth, but also with the understanding that social and environmental 'wealth' are equally important. In fact, many have come to the conclusion that you can not possibly have the former without the latter.

    Good luck on your quest to find a 'profitable' permaculture enterprise. I'll ask my friends if they would be interested in having you visit them so you can see that a correctly planned, designed, developed and managed property (read: 'farm') can in accordance with the principles of permaculture indeed be most profitable, in every sense of the word. However, considering that money is usually the last thing on their minds - after happiness, spiritual contentment, ecological harmony, etc. - I doubt whether they would be interested in meeting you.

    Once again, good luck on your journey, and may you find great peace and happiness at the end of your travels.

    Mark :D
     
  16. ecodharmamark

    ecodharmamark Junior Member

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    Oh, and another thing...

    I love this maxim:

    We live courtesy of an ecology, not an economy.

    Hooroo, Mark :lol:
     
  17. mossbackfarm

    mossbackfarm Junior Member

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    Toby Hemenway had a great article related to this discussion. Unfortunately, it's buried in a file for me somewhere, and I can't find it online, but its in the Permaculture Activist, #38 (Feb 1998). (Top feeders, bottom feeders, but no middle class)

    His upshot was that in the permaculture world, there's 'rich people' who spend there way to sustainability with off-property capital, and there's 'dirt farmers' who are scrape by with some knowledge and ingenuity, but little capital. Lacking in the modern movement is a 'middle-class' of people making a living from the tangible outputs (food, fiber, value-added goods) of permaculture.

    Some of that can be attributed to what I said earlier....it takes a lot of time to get a system up and running, even if you have capital. Plus, permie systems are rarely designed to take advantage of economies of scale...they opt for diversity and resilience. So once things are rolling, there'll always be a yield, but rarely a bumper crop that produces a huge surplus for sale.

    Even though our farm isn't profitable from the view of the world bank, the social capital that we generate is an important aspect of it...a surprising number of local people will show up if I put out the call for a work party planting trees, building a barn, or many other tasks that many hands make lighter. The farm has become a community of people who are all interested in food, sustainability, restoration, and hanging out with good folks. I refuse to call that unprofitable.

    Cheers

    Rich
     
  18. Guest

    Thank your for your answers. Please let me explain the essence of my point, because I did not and I will not compare conventional farming with permaculture.

    Profit in the bare naked meaning of the word is unsustainable. No matter how you define "profitable", unlimited growth is mathematical impossible. Unfortunately the majority of the population in western societies don't understand that. And even more unfortunate is that the so called "third world" try to imitate our stupidity.

    Permaculture on the other hand aims for self sufficiency and sustainable developments. According to the permaculture ethics — Care for the earth, care for the people, return the surplus — Permaculture systems should be profitable, otherwise you can not return the surplus.

    The permaculture movement has placed itself on the rim of society, and that is good so. New social structures, new ways of co-operation and ideas of community building (well they are not really new, but this is a different subject) outside the square of the well established thinking structures of society.

    Permaculture itself creates a new culture, detached from the unsustainable way of living we experience around us. Reading your answers it even creates a new language, where the meaning of words is completely different as it is understood in the world around us.

    I think it is time the permaculture movement moves from the rim into the mainstream if we really want to change the world. First attempts are already visible and that is good so. But we have to be careful not to blow it.

    I'll give you an example. Geoff and Sindhu Lawton did a tremendous job greening the desert in Jordan. The design is sustainable, self sufficient, and even now, after the project in Kafren was abandoned three years ago you will find a thriving eco-system there. In my book this is the work of a genius, a total success, no questions asked. The little video showing what was done and how it was done and giving evidence that there were results is visionary and inspiring.

    I am sure we all agree that this project is a success even in the bare dictionary definition of the little word success.

    However JOHUD, the NGO who initiated and owns of the project, thinks it is a total failure. They have the evidence directly in front of them but they came to the conclusion that this project did not fulfil the parameters of the briefing.

    JOHUD wanted an education centre/demonstration site to teach local small farmers how to make living by farming their land. You know even the farmers in the Jordan Valley want to have Colour TVs, Playstations, Mobile Phones, Cars and other luxuries usually costing lots of money. JOHUD wanted to demonstrate profitable sustainable developments to be adapted by local farmers.

    According to JOHUD a failure and permaculture is not a solution, even the site is productive with little input because it can not be considered profitable.

    I strongly believe that organic farming according to permaculture principles could provide for a reasonable income for local farmers. It would be definitely a better long term solution.

    But JOHUD thinks the project never will generate any profit and wants to cut all the trees down and bulldoze the site.

    C
     
  19. christopher

    christopher Junior Member

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    Ouch. I understand the context of the question now.

    What a shame. Gifted with excellent design, and they can't see what they have...
     
  20. paradisi

    paradisi Junior Member

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    nothing is permanent

    No agricutural system is permanent. With permaculture or permaculture designs or just someone who likes the idea of a little bit of self sufficiency nothing is permanent.

    All require a lot of work to set up and establish and they require almost as much work to keep things going. It's nice for lettuce to self seed, or fruit to keep cropping year after year, but both need some input and some commitment from the gardener (which after all is what permaculturists are).

    One thing all permaculturist should take into the consideration - you have to feed the soul as well as the stomach and pretty plants, or smelly plants or plants that create some sort emotional memory or attachment are essential to any permaculture environment.
     

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