Can Permaculture Disrupt America’s Farm Landscape? | Civil Eats

Can Permaculture Make a Dent in America’s Farm Landscape?

Permaculture is lesser known than organic agriculture, but it’s also growing in popularity. Can it scale up?   

Permaculture Farm and Workers

permacultureMost Americans have never heard of permaculture. And although the approach is gaining traction among U.S. urbanites (full disclosure: I teach urban permaculture), ideas differ about exactly what it is. An environmental philosophy? An approach to ecological design? A particular set of farming practices?

Some new and beginning farmers are also becoming interested, as evidenced by a recent discussion on the role of permaculture in agriculture at a gathering organized by the California-based Farmer’s Guild—a network for “the new generation of sustainable agriculture.”

But is it a viable approach for farmers? Can it scale up in the context of the larger U.S. food system?

To permaculturists, the approach is much more than a synonym for sustainable agriculture. Speaking at the California Farmers Guild event, ecological landscaper Erik Ohlsen described permaculture as a way to create a “permanent culture” generally, applying it to food systems, but also to shelter, energy, and technology. This new culture, those like Ohlsen claim, can be consciously designed to meet human needs while respecting and regenerating the non-human environment, by following a set of nature-inspired “design principles.”

Bill Mollison developed the concept of permaculture and its principles in the 1970s, based largely on his studies of the practices of indigenous peoples. The principles include tenets like “use small and slow solutions,” “use and value diversity,” “creatively use and respond to change,” and “use and value renewable energies.”

Over its 40-year history, permaculture has spread as an evolving, experimental practice. The philosophy holds “earth care,” “people care,” and “returning the surplus,” as key defining ethics. The design process and strategies are taught through “Permaculture Design Certificate” (PDC) courses—an intensive 72-hour curriculum akin to an environmental science survey course.

The techniques, though, are what most people identify as permaculture. These include “food forests”—orchard-like systems of production with multiple layers of productive plants that emulate a forest ecology, “swales”—on-contour ditches dug to encourage rainfall to slow down, spread out, and sink into the soil, and “perennial polycultures”—planting plans for farms that encourage greater diversity than the monocultures of annual crops typified by modern industrial farms.

But permaculture doesn’t mandate exact techniques and forms of farming. Rafter Sass Ferguson, a researcher with the University of Lisbon who has studied permaculture farms in the U.S. and around the world, says that the 120+ farms he has corresponded with and visited for a recent study didn’t fit a set mold.

“[They] were incredibly diverse in their livelihoods, production systems, size and scale, age of the farm, age of the farmers, and so on,” Ferguson said. Though some of these farms used the formal permaculture design process, he noted that “many used the permaculture conceptual tools in a much more on-the-fly and ad-hoc way.”

The formal design process would start with site-specific information gathering and observation, and then use this data to inform design choices that produce yields while supporting the three ethics (“Earth care,” “people care,” and “returning the surplus.”)

Ad-hoc, though, is what Paul Oscar Hamilton, of Greenhearts Family Farm, prefers. He says he was inspired to become an organic farmer when he visited permaculture farms in New Zealand. But he farms like many organic farmers do, in “straight line row crops,” rather than following full permaculture design, because he says the incredible health of him soil allows him to.

Hamilton argues that permaculture is more difficult for many farmers to integrate than organic because “permaculture is slow and round.” The focus on perennials, for example, may take more time to get a production system going. In designing according to a farm site’s topography, permaculture might prefer on-contour planting to straight lines, which might make tractor work more challenging.

Some farmers implement permaculture principles because they make sense, but have never heard of the approach. What linked the farmers Ferguson studied, he says, is that “permaculture motivated them to create and maintain highly diverse, productive, and multifunctional landscapes.”

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However, not all farmers or farmer advocates are fully convinced that permaculture is useful as currently taught and practiced. Permaculture advocates have been accused of being big on theory but unrealistic in practice—especially for farmers who rely on a consistent, marketable product and income.

Permaculture Greenhouse

Evan Wiig, director of the Farmer’s Guild, finds that permaculture theory can be quite distanced from the concerns of the farmers he interacts with regularly. He’s encountered too many “well-intentioned 20-somethings” (mostly urban) who have taken permaculture design courses, but have little real world farming experience.

The challenge, Wiig says, are the “constraints on professional farmers that exist beyond production techniques,” to which permaculture pays too little attention, like land access, food safety regulations, labor costs, global competition, and fickle markets.

Hamilton agrees that farmers practicing permaculture will likely have a harder time earning a consistent profit, especially as long as “the larger forces of corporate farming, mega landowners, and entrenched supply chains have too much momentum.” Still, he thinks permaculture could be a “reasonable niche approach” for “small-scale, urban farmers’ market gardeners.”

Aside from his misgivings, Wiig finds permaculture “full of potential” when it comes to inspiring a new generation of change agents. “If the current stewards of over two billion acres of American farmland were to adopt permaculture principles, our environment, food system, and society would experience a necessary shift towards resilience,” he says.

So what prevents permaculture’s greater adoption?

Industrial farms dominate U.S. production value, thanks in part to the federal subsidies they receive. Large farms also benefit from economies of scale. The labor intensiveness of small farm production leads to higher prices, while the low prices of products from large industrial farms exclude the costs of negative environmental and social “externalities” caused in their production.

Because of these difficult political and economic circumstances, University of Lisbon’s Ferguson says, “Trying to develop (or transition to) diversified production such as permaculture is like trying to write a sonnet”—performing the diligent, thoughtful labor required by ecological farming—“while getting sprayed in the face with a fire hose.”

This “fire hose” of challenges caused by an unequal market playing field and a lack of policy support, then, challenges the survival and spread of permaculture-inspired farms.

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Diversified and small-scale farms nonetheless persist, although their number is shrinking. According to 2012 Census data, over half of all farms (67 percent) rely on off-farm income to survive. And only 16 percent of small farms make the majority of their income from farming. Permaculture may not be proven to be economically viable in today’s farm landscape, but neither has small family farming of any sort.

Many small, farms survive by earning a diversified income. The farmers Ferguson studied earned their income from a mix of “production, value adding, material services like machinery repair or custom grazing, cultural services like education and design, and off-farm employment.”

Ferguson insists “there are great examples of permaculture farms making it work on production alone.” But, he adds, “farms like that will always be exceptional until we change policy.”

For the foreseeable future, permaculture farms will likely continue to operate on the economic margins of our food system. And until these farms face a more level playing field, they’re unlikely to scale up.

 

Photos courtesy of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center.

Antonio Roman-Alcalá is an educator, researcher, writer, and organizer based in Berkeley, California who has worked for just sustainable food systems for the past 15 years. Antonio co-founded San Francisco’s Alemany Farm, the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance, and the California Food Policy Council, and his 2010 documentary film, In Search of Good Food, can be viewed free online. He holds a BA from UC Berkeley, and an MA from ISS in The Hague. Currently, Antonio maintains the blog antidogmatist.com, conducts activist-scholar research at ISS, and leads the North American Agroecology Organizing Project. He is also in search of new land to farm – a tough prospect in the urbanized and gentrified San Francisco Bay Area! Read more >

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  1. Matt
    It's good to see more coverage of Permaculture, but I have to disagree with the notion that it can't scale up. In fact, there are many examples of large scale Permaculture success stories if you look for them. Here's just one example with Mark Shepard - http://restorationag.com. Here are over a hundred more - http://www.permaculturevoices.com/blog-2/podcast-2/.
    • Unless I am missing something, I have read this more that once and can not find where in this article the author or those interviewed said permaculture can't scale up. I'm sure Dr. Ferguson has visited some of the farms your link points to and likely visited Mark Shepards farm. (Full disclosure: I have taught permaculture with Rafter Sass Ferguson at my farm.) They did describe the challenges and I can concur as a new farmer using permaculture design. After more than a decade teaching and practicing permaculture on a home-scale, becoming a commercial-scale farmer has lead me to similar conclusions about how permaculture is taught and experienced. Many people's permaculture education experiences are very appropriate for homes and small properties or projects but I can see how a farmer-centric permaculture course would be helpful. Regardless, I agree that even with the tools of permaculture at my disposal, my farm is also fighting against the current of national agricultural and industrial policies.
    • I have trained with Mark Sheppard on his farm and did a 28 acre woody perennial poly-crop installation. 2,500 of 13 varieties. 2 acres at a cost of $10,000 with Savannah Institute and their first client in Illinois. This is cost prohibitive even at half this cost for most corn.soy and cotton farmers. Although this has its' place in natural succession along with alley cropping, agro-forestry, silvopastures etc. these are not the first thing most of these farmers can afford nor are they willing to risk. My permaculture design for USA corn, soy and cotton farmers is covered throughout my website. https://kenafpartnersusa.com
  2. Thomas
    Well said, Antonio Roman-Alcalá. For a world civilization based on extraction beyond what can be sustained the only ends are dead ends and the only meaningful choice is to change. The playing field will be leveled sooner or later, one way or another.
  3. No mention of alleycropping and silvopasture. Essay requires lots of updates. Ongoing talk here:

    https://twitter.com/therealbiostate/status/722595018200842240
  4. RJ
    What prevents permaculture's greater adoption? That's easy. Permaculture is impractical and irrelevant to commercial food production. Too many inexperienced ideologues talking too loudly and accomplishing too little, dominating, obfuscating and bastardizing concepts that otherwise might have application to global food production. Permaculture is hypocritical, with its fanatic reliance upon plastics and free labor, meanwhile claiming to have achieved sustainability and social awareness. Permaculture is an obvious farce, one that only a handful of zealous dreamers delude themselves into believing will be the savior of the planet. It's laughable, really. "Urban permaculture", ha, that's one whopper of a non sequitur!
  5. Nick S
    The real reason permaculture (and agroforestry etc.) is being adopted on larger scales is - as is alluded in the article - government subsidies. As long as it is OK for conventional farmers to expect the taxpayer to bail them out and support them in their continued effort to poison our food, poison our water and, generally, destroy our planet to a degree rivalled only by the US military, then there will be no real incentive for them to change. The government is in bed with the companies that make the tractors, the combine harvesters, the fertilisers, the pesticides, the antibiotics and all the other essential elements of modern "farming." If farmers were left to their own devices - and forced to make agriculture sustainable - we'd soon see which techniques really make sense, we'd soon see permaculture, agroforestry and urban farming everywhere.
  6. This article does cover the actual problem and as as we say in Permaculture "the problem is the solution". As a Permaculture designer I have addressed this issue seeing the client for a design are the corn, soy and cotton farmers in the USA. The approach I have taken is from the lessons learned about how a forest is created in nature. It starts with weeds that prepare the ground for the next succession of shrubs small trees and then large trees. If food forests are the outcome of the ideal scene for the farmer, nature and mankind, what would be an entrance point to get this done. The first step would be to find what would have low enough cost for one of these farmers to consider, would produce a yield its' first year, be beneficial to the environment, increase profit, utilizing existing equipment and resources and not be affected by out of control markets? Also, could this one thing lead up to these farmers introducing food forests into their practices over time? Since these were the questions I started out with and the criteria needed by corn, soy and cotton farmers I have talked with, it is where I started several years ago. The answer to this presented another problem "the solution" had insufficient supply globally and zero supply in the USA. We are now addressing this in the USA and expect to have sufficient supply by 2023 to offer to corn, soy and cotton farmers as a rotational cash crop that starts the succession process towards food forest. The benefits of this process include soil remediation, lowering inputs costs, reducing on site pollution (fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides), lowering water usage and increasing profits for the farmer. The market potential in local communities throughout the USA could have far reaching economic and other climate change and environmental benefits as well. In addition to this "solution" introducing and integrating other proven successful actions include key-line plowing, little or no till, cover crops, proper plant spacing and anything else we discover that makes sense. I have covered this in more detail on our web site: https://kenafpartnersusa.com

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