So what is permaculture? What makes it different from: organic gardening? organic farming? sustainable agriculture? ecological agriculture? bio-dynamic farming? regeneration farming? forest gardening? Holistic Resource Management HRM? ecosystem restoration? sustainability? or natural building?

Permaculture is unique, yet at the same time includes all of the above. Permaculture is the design of sustainable human settlement. One of the most important things about permaculture is that it’s a synthesis of agriculture, ecology, and forestry. Permaculture is inter-disciplinary as will be outlined in this article.

Permaculture doesn’t have a corner on the market when it comes to sustainable design of human settlements, but permaculture is one of the best design systems we have today. The word “permaculture” was first coined in the mid-1970s by Australians’ Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. The first book on permaculture, “Permaculture One”, was published in 1978. Today there are hundreds of books. The first permaculture design course was held in 1980. Since then tens of thousands of people have gone through design courses in countries around the world. Millions of people have been influenced by permaculture. In spite of this, permaculture remains relatively unknown in most places. The need for sustainable human settlement and local food production is growing fast. The world needs permaculture.

Let’s look at some things a well-rounded permaculturist has to know.

1. A permaculturist has to know food production. How to produce abundant harvests with low external inputs at both the garden scale and farm scale. A good permaculturist should be able to beat (or at least equal) the yields of the best farmers and gardeners in their neighborhood. And at the same time they should be able to do it sustainably, and, in fact, improve their soils and yields over time, while reducing costs.

The well-rounded permaculturist should know the full range of fruits, vegetables, and crops that can be grown in their region. They should be walking plant encyclopedias. Some permaculturists become fluent in the crops and flora of multiple climates. The extreme example is a person who has a good working knowledge of plants useful to humans from the Arctic circle to the equator. This obviously takes decades of study and travel to accomplish. “Economic botanists” are the university-trained professionals who make this their life career. So, in a sense, well-rounded permaculturists are economic botanists. A permaculturist should know the common crops and useful plants of their neighborhood and region. They would also be interested in plants from those parts of the planet with analogous climates/regions. A well-rounded permaculturists will know the native flora of their specific eco-region, e.g. Maritime Pacific Northwest, Great Basin, Intermountain Pacific, Northern Great Plains, Hawaiian Islands, etc.

2. A permaculturist also has to know how to restore ecosystems and how to stop human-accelerated erosion. They should understand native plant restoration, the restoration of native flora and fauna – plants and animals, forests, waterways, streams, rivers, and aquifers. They will understand how to restore ecosystem functions, how to fix up the damage which humans have caused and help nature get back to a state of exuberant health.

3. A well-rounded permaculturist should understand a lot about traditional agriculture and hunter-gatherer cultures, particularly the ethnobotany and ethnoecology of the native people of their region. What were the native foods, medicinal plants, fiber plants, etc.? How did indigenous people manage the game, fish and plant resources of their area? A large part of permaculture knowledge is based on traditional systems from around the world.

These three above traits combined give permaculturists a unique perspective on food production. There are good farmers and gardeners wherever you go. There are good restorationists. There still are some indigenous people practicing their traditional ways. But seldom do members of these three groups know each other’s skills. The permaculturist strives to integrate the knowledge of all three and create systems which are productive, restorative (benefit the ecosystems) and rely a lot on native plants and biota.

Permaculture doesn’t create uniform landscapes. It is the opposite of monoculture and could be called “diversiculture”. Areas close to most dwellings include intensive vegetable gardens, but as one goes further out from the dwellings the landscape becomes more wild and self-managed. Areas that look wild can actually be very productive. Permaculture is based on ecology. Working with nature rather than working against nature. When the Spaniards first came to Guatemala the Mayan home forest gardens established and maintained by the indigenous Maya could contain as many as 200 crop species and be very productive. But they looked so wild that the Spanish did not even recognize them as agriculture. That is the sine qua non of permaculture. To have a system that looks wild and takes care of itself, yet meets the needs of the people. Besides permaculture I only know of two systems which blend these three disciplines together (agriculture, restoration ecology and indigenous knowledge). These two systems are “Analog Forestry” developed in Sri Lanka by Ranil Senanayake and “Rainforestation” developed in The Philippines.

Permaculture encompasses the design of urban yards, suburbs, farmland, rangeland, forests, as well as houses, businesses, intentional communities, eco-villages, islands and whole regions.

A well-rounded permaculturist has to know natural building materials and building design for climate. Passive solar design, energy efficiency, local materials, sustainability. Building materials should be non-toxic during manufacture, use and when decommissioned. He/she should know how plants interact with the building and how to blend outdoor and indoor living spaces, with the aim of cost efficient, comfortable, affordable housing.

The well-rounded permaculturist should know energy systems and technologies.

Well-rounded permaculturists understand how to set up local economic systems, local currencies, barter and exchange systems.

The fully-rounded permaculturist would have a broad understanding of the roles of livestock in agro-ecosystems. What functions do animals have? How can they be beneficial? How do you use animals for their function as well as yield? What do the different kinds of livestock eat? The fully-founded permaculturist will know about natural medicines, breeds adapted to local conditions, grazing systems, fencing, live fences, pasture species’ composition, self-forage crops, practical aspects of raising, etc.

A permaculture student studies and learns how water works in the landscape — how to capture runoff, direct water, deflect flood waters, clean water, store water. What can be done to increase water absorption into the landscape to water the web of life which covers the land and restore springs and natural flows of streams and rivers. The human yield aspect is to study aquaculture, aquatic food chains, species interactions, creating optimal habitat, and fishing management.

Anyone who works with permaculture and other multiple-story agroforestry systems has to study understory/overstory plant relationships. Multiple layers of tall trees, medium trees, tall shrubs, low shrubs, ground covers, tubers, vines, etc. How much shade are plants adapted to? What grows well together? Permaculture is companion planting on a large scale.

Not every region has forests, but where there are forests, then permaculturists study them. What are the native species? Special attention is given to the non-native, weedy species in the region. What are the natural forest successions and which plant species predominate in each succession? What are understory plants, economic species, etc? What are the timber harvesting methods which are sustainable and lead to forest restoration? Where should the network of protected areas be expanded to encompass the full range of native habitats and plant communities in the area? Most places in the world need the active planting of trees and forests to achieve ecosystem health. Forestry is not only the active betterment of current forest acreage, it also includes the active expansion of forest areas into degraded areas, farmland, suburbs and even into the city.

A well-rounded permaculturist will be conversant in the field of mycology – fungi and mushrooms. What are the roles of fungi in the ecosystem? The role of fungi in forests and ecosystems. How to inoculate edible and medicinal mushrooms into the landscape and into the garden. How to encourage and proliferate mycorrhizal fungi which have symbiotic relationships with native plants and our garden vegetables.

Since building soils is one of the chief aims of permaculture, a permaculturist learns how to do this. Most permaculturists study how soils work, soil biology, bacteria, web of life, mycorrhizal fungi, earthworms, nitrogen-fixing azotobacters, soil cation exchange capacity, the role of arthropods, insects, minerals, etc, etc. The main thing is to know how to turn poor and mediocre soils into luscious fertile soils that grow bountiful crops.

Permaculture is based on ecology. How does the ecosystem function? What are all the parts, but more importantly how do the parts interact. How does fire affect ecology? Permaculturists study the role of wildfires in ecoystems.

These are just some of the things a well-rounded permaculturist has to know.

Permaculture involves ethics, principles, design methodologies, observation skills, analytical skills and people skills. Design always involves working with people. Design skills can be applied to social situations as well as to land design.

One person has a hard time to be an expert in all of these fields/topics. A well-rounded permaculturist will specialize in specific fields but also has to gain a general understanding of most of the topics. Permaculturists aren’t born. It takes years and decades of study and practical application to become a well-rounded permaculturalist. But it only takes one course to put people on the path. Practical experience is the most important factor in true learning. Permaculture design, principles and methodology are powerful tools for farmers, gardeners, foresters, social workers, and anyone working for social and ecological change. Permaculture is not something that can be awarded, it is something that has to be earned. It is applying common sense and ecological knowledge to obtaining human sustenance. Permaculturists don’t have a corner on the market. Most permaculturists of the world have never even heard the term. They are quietly going about using their skills to help transform their land, their village, their neighborhood. There are millions of people in every region of the world working towards similar goals and using similar methods. The value in permaculture is that we have devised curricula to help people learn faster how to succeed at creating healthy and productive agro-ecosystems. One permaculture design course sets you on the path. Permaculturists have been searching the world for useful plants, agro-forestry systems, traditional systems, economic botany, sustainable communities, local economies, etc, etc. Through permaculture trainings and books we publicize the knowledge from grass-root experimentation and traditional knowledge from throughout the world and throughout history.

But I’d like to be clear, permaculture is not a religion. True permaculture cannot be dogmatic. There are no cookie-cutter designs. Every permaculture site will look different. Every site and every client is unique. People select what is appropriate and acceptable within their cultural context. Permaculture design methodology can be useful anywhere. However, this does not mean that individual permaculturists are infallible. Like every other profession there are members with lots of practical experience and others that are just beginning and those in between. Permaculturists include the usual wide range of personalities. There are saints, there are jerks, and everything in between. Don’t judge permaculture by your impression of the first person you meet who is espousing it. I encourage everyone who is interested in growing their own food and/or sustainability to look into permaculture. If you are already into permaculture I encourage you to deepen your journey.

Towards a greener and happier world.

Michael Pilarski

I am using the new tumblr iPhone app and it is not working out, it corrupted the posting an halfway through editing the post and then decoded to switch to a post or cancel screen and would not return to editing. It wont let me edit the top of the post so the credit is at the bottom. Tumblr wont even work with regular Safari on the iPhone and keeps returning me to the log in page so I will have to wait until I can get to a desktop to fix this horribly broken post. The on screen keyboard is half displayed on the tumblr app screen and is also broken, sigh the post should not have gone out and I will have to delete the tumblr app as it won’t let me update or post the articles without corrupting everything.

Mother nature has taken control of my schedule as I rush to get all the spring planting and work in before the summer. More posts to follow :)

Michael Hart, a conventional livestock family farmer, has been farming in Cornwall for nearly thirty years and has actively campaigned on behalf of family farmers for over fifteen years, travelling extensively in Europe, India, Canada and the USA.

In this short documentary he investigates the reality of farming genetically modified crops in the USA ten years after their introduction. He travels across the US interviewing farmers and other specialists about their experiences of growing GM.

During the making of the film he heard problems of the ever increasing costs of seeds and chemicals to weeds becoming resistant to herbicides.

US farmers told him that a single pass (one herbicide application) is a fallacy and concurred that three or more passes are the norm for GM crops.

As weeds have become more resistant to glyphosate there has been a sharp increase in the use of herbicide tank mixes (most of them patented and owned by the biotech companies). Astonishingly some farmers were now having to resort to hand labour to remove weeds.

Farmers have seen the costs spiral, for example, the price of seed has gone from $40 to over $100 per acre over the last few years.
Farmers referred to co-existence (the ability to grow GM crops next to non-GM and organic crops) as “unsolvable” and say that it does not work.

In summary:

1. A huge “weed” problem.
2. The myth of co-existence.
3. Farmers trapped into the genetically modified biotech system.
4. Huge price increases for seeds and sprays- well beyond the price increases farmers have received for their crops.

In short, the film shows US farmers urging great caution to be exercised by UK and European farmers in adopting this technology.

Part I

Part II

Find out more about Ruth and her mulched gardens here.

After several decades of rapid rise in world grain yields, it is now becoming more difficult to raise land productivity fast enough to keep up with the demands of a growing, increasingly affluent, population. From 1950 to 1990, world grainland productivity increased by 2.2 percent per year, but from 1990 until 2009 it went up by only 1.3 percent annually. Despite some impressive local advances, the global loss of momentum in expanding food production is forcing us to think more seriously about reducing demand by stabilizing population, moving down the food chain, and reducing the use of grain to fuel cars.

One of the key components of Plan B, the Earth Policy Institute’s ambitious strategy to save civilization, is to halt world population growth at no more than 8 billion by 2040. This will require an all-out population education effort to help people everywhere understand how fast the relationship between us and our natural support systems is deteriorating. It also means that we need a crash program to get reproductive health care and birth control services to the more than 200 million women today who want to plan their families but lack access to the means to do so.

While the effect of population growth on the demand for grain is rather clear, that of rising affluence is much less so. One of the questions I am often asked is, “How many people can the earth support?” I answer with another question: “At what level of food consumption?” Using round numbers, at the U.S. level of 800 kilograms of grain per person annually for food and feed, the 2-billion-ton annual world harvest of grain would support 2.5 billion people. At the Italian level of consumption of close to 400 kilograms, the current harvest would support 5 billion people. At the 200 kilograms of grain consumed by the average Indian, it would support 10 billion.

Of the roughly 800 kilograms of grain consumed per person each year in the United States, about 100 kilograms is eaten directly as bread, pasta, and breakfast cereals, while the bulk of the grain is consumed indirectly in the form of livestock and poultry products. By contrast, in India, where people consume just under 200 kilograms of grain per year, or roughly a pound per day, nearly all grain is eaten directly to satisfy basic food energy needs. Little is available for conversion into livestock products.

Among the United States, Italy, and India, life expectancy is highest in Italy even though U.S. medical expenditures per person are much higher. People who live very low or very high on the food chain do not live as long as those at an intermediate level. People consuming a Mediterranean-type diet that includes meat, cheese, and seafood, but all in moderation, are healthier and live longer. People living high on the food chain can improve their health by moving down the food chain. For those who live in low-income countries like India, where a starchy staple such as rice can supply 60 percent or more of total caloric intake, eating more protein-rich foods can improve health and raise life expectancy.

Although we seldom consider the climate effect of various dietary options, they are substantial, to say the least. Gidon Eshel and Pamela A. Martin of the University of Chicago have studied this issue. They begin by noting that for Americans the energy used to provide the typical diet and that used for personal transportation are roughly the same. They calculate that the range between the more and less carbon-intensive transportation options and dietary options is each about four to one. The Toyota Prius, for instance, uses roughly one fourth as much fuel as a Chevrolet Suburban SUV. Similarly with diets, a plant-based diet requires roughly one fourth as much energy as a diet rich in red meat. Shifting from the latter to a plant-based diet cuts greenhouse gas emissions almost as much as shifting from a Suburban to a Prius would.

Shifting from the more grain-intensive to the less grain-intensive forms of animal protein can also reduce pressure on the earth’s land and water resources. For example, shifting from grain-fed beef that requires roughly 7 pounds of grain concentrate for each additional pound of live weight to poultry or catfish, which require roughly 2 pounds of grain per pound of live weight, substantially reduces grain use.

When considering how much animal protein to consume, it is useful to distinguish between grass-fed and grain-fed products. For example, most of the world’s beef is produced with grass. Even in the United States, with an abundance of feedlots, over half of all beef cattle weight gain comes from grass rather than grain. The global area of grasslands, which is easily double the world cropland area and which is usually too steeply sloping or too arid to plow, can contribute to the food supply only if it is used for grazing to produce meat, milk, and cheese.

Beyond the role of grass in providing high-quality protein in our diets, it is sometimes assumed that we can increase the efficiency of land and water use by shifting from animal protein to high-quality plant protein, such as that from soybeans. It turns out, however, that since corn yields in the U.S. Midwest are three to four times those of soybeans, it may be more resource-efficient to produce corn and convert it into poultry or catfish at a ratio of two to one than to have everyone heavily reliant on soy.

Although population growth has been a source of growing demand ever since agriculture began, the large-scale conversion of grain into animal protein emerged only after World War II. The massive conversion of grain into fuel for cars began just a few years ago. If we are to reverse the spread of hunger, we will almost certainly have to reduce the latter use of grain. For perspective, the estimated 114 million tons of grain used to produce ethanol in 2009 in the United States is the food supply for 370 million people at average world grain consumption levels.

Quickly shifting to smaller families, moving down the food chain either by consuming less animal protein or by turning to more grain-efficient animal protein sources, and removing the incentives for converting food into fuel will help ensure that everyone has enough to eat. It will also lessen the pressures that lead to overpumping of groundwater and the clearing of tropical rainforests, two additional trends that threaten the viability of our global civilization.

An interview conducted by Richard Alan Miller in 1986, submitted by Judith Goldsmith

About two months ago, Charles Walters, editor forAcres, USA, asked if I might not get interviews with Bill Mollison and Masanobu Fukuoka for future use in his paper. Both were to be speakers at The 2nd International Permaculture Conference, August 8-10 at the Evergreen State College, in Olympia.

This turned out to be a working conference, with more than 60 other presenters from all corners of the world.  Masanobu Fukuoka is the author of The One-Straw Revolution (Rodale Press) and several other texts on natural farming.  Many in the world now consider him the Master Farmer of Japan. I will share this interview with you in a later issue of HMR.  Both these interviews, and the conference as a whole were “events,” and well worth the time.

Bill Mollison is an Australian ecologist who writes, lectures and demonstrates his concept of “permaculture” as a self-sustaining, consciously-designed ecosystem for the farm.  Permaculture has been described as an integrated system of design, encompassing not only agriculture, horticulture, architecture, and ecology, but also money management, land access strategies, and legal systems for communities and businesses.

Through his consultant work, Mollison is instrumental in the actualization of his vision of regions containing integrated self-perpetuating plant and animal species. These ecosystems operated themselves as low maintenance-high yield areas because of such principles as stable diversity and energy efficiency.  If it sounds complex, the theory is carefully described in his two books Permaculture One and Permaculture Two, and its practice is outlined in his forthcoming title, Permaculture: A Designer’s Handbook (1987).

Mollison has worked for both governmental agencies and private individuals.  He is often the keynote speaker at worldwide conferences on the environment.  His background includes teaching environmental psychology as well and environmental design. In 1981, he received the Right Livelihood Award, which is considered by some as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” for his visionary designs.  

His current thrust includes the training of amateur permaculture designers, the preservation of historical farms in “land trusts,” and promoting ethical investments and community economics.  Mr. Mollison is President of the Permaculture Institute of North America.

Permaculture and Ecosystems for the Future

Richard Alan Miller:  I’d like to begin by asking how you arrived at your theory of permaculture or perennial agriculture?

Bill Mollison:  In the early 50’s, ‘53-’59, I was working in forest ecology for the CSIRO, (Commonwealth Scientific Industrial Research Organization), in Australia, and I was dealing with a complex of about 26 plants and 5 animal species.  I jotted in my diary, I think about ‘59, and that I thought we could construct durable ecologies, and there it rested.  

By the ’70s, I think we were all aware of the need for sustainable agricultures.  In ‘72 I retired from the world for two years.  By ‘74 I had developed the permaculture ideas, which were consciously-designed agricultural ecologies.

Richard Alan Miller:  I understand that at one time you had gone into the wilds and had some personal experiences that lead you toward your theories?

Bill Mollison:  Well, I think that’s true.  I spent about 25 years working in the field, mostly in very thick forests, or in remote areas.  And I kind of withdrew from society in ‘72 into the wilds. I did the usual thing: I cleared a couple of acres of garden and mulched it down, built a barn and a house, and sat there.  

I hadn’t been sitting there longer than three weeks and I realized I wasn’t going to change society.  So when I came out of that hole in the bush, I came out with the intention of making a difference.

It wasn’t long before I published Permaculture One.  Then I gave up my work at the University [of Tasmania], I was lecturing there in post-graduate work in environmental science.  I set up the Permaculture Institute, because by ‘75-’76 I’d started to design systems for people from urban to rural situations. My first design was a conglomeration of backyards in the city of Melbourne.

And right after that was a design for a guy that ran horses for the Olympics. So, I did about 500-600 of those designs, got a lot of feedback from people on them, and decided I had enough skill to teach design.  I started in ‘81.  It’s now ‘86 and we’ve taught a thousand designers worldwide.

Richard Alan Miller:  I’m really impressed, by the way, with your work….it’s most interesting.  Just what is your theory about, what is the basis for your theory of permaculture?

Bill Mollison:  OK.  It’s conscious design.  It’s strange, in fact it’s eerie that since a few centuries B.C. when the Chinese developed a landscape planning service called fung-shui*, we have never in modern times developed a similar design service based on aspects of shelter, sun absorption on slopes, etc.* [According to John Mitchell, fung-shui was “a kind of town and country planning measure attempting to preserve the harmony of the countryside…. It was based on a sublime metaphysical system in which scientific and poetic truth harmoniously united.” [-ed].

All of that is in there.  So, I’d say Permaculture One is the first book on conscious design of agriculture.  And that is very eerie, considering we’ve been agriculturalists for centuries, and we haven’t written a book on design.

So, by design, we mean how do you manage the winds, and the light and the sun on a property to get a high productivity.  Now, in 1942, your Forestry Department put out a little booklet called Trees, and to a large extent it dealt partly with trees on the farm, and it showed net gains of 16-30%, particularly in lambing and cattle losses, a tremendous gain.  

It showed crop gains of an average 20%, if the area was well wind-breaked. Now well wind-breaked means windbreaks designed not to reduce the crop’s yield, but actually to increase it, because there are several possible interactions between a windbreak and a crop.  What we look for is a “plus-plus” reaction; there the windbreak benefits the crop, and the crop the windbreak.  So, these all have to be highly specified trees and materials.

Back to the domestic situation – your need to have to earn – that is what makes a lot of farmers have to walk off the farm. They just can’t sustain the domestic costs and pay loans, and so on.  A lot of farmers I know have managed to hang on to farms simply because they’ve paid a lot of attention to the fact that they can eat off the farm and the domestic energy supplied off the farm. Now you can hang on through some hard times if that’s the case.  If it’s not, you have to have an income.

We started doing whole-farm designs in Australia because we’re a dry country, and so are the Great Basin and Midwest, and California in the summertime.  [see Mollison’s forthcoming booklet Arid Land Permaculture, 1988].  Water was our central design factor, and I don’t mean pumping water up from 2,000 feet down at $2,000 a month.  I mean we very carefully designed methods of rainwater harvesting on property, tried to regard the property and what was on it as to what we had to deal with, and to get the least inputs into production that we could.

Richard Alan Miller:  So, bringing this more into a focus, if you could summarize in one paragraph, could you explain the basis of permaculture?

Bill Mollison:  I’ll try and do it for you.  Permaculture is a consciously designed landscape system, which deals with the management of crops, water and animals on the land and which also puts that in context with the correct legal, financial, and land-access strategies, and marketing, and trade.

Richard Alan Miller:  That leads to my next question.  You have indicated that your theory is not technically oriented, but depends on intuition …

Bill Mollison:  That’s true.  We’re not looking for expertise in agriculture and forestry. We’re looking for the expertise to know where forestry and agriculture fit together, the connection between disciplines is where we look.

Richard Alan Miller:  It has been indicated by a group in Southern Oregon [part of Tilth], that your plan was too detailed and technically oriented for commercial farm use.  Perhaps you would like to make some comments on that?

Bill Mollison:  I’d love to.  It’s certainly not so.  A lot of our stuff is commercial.  It’s carefully designed to be commercial.  I must say, in the first place, our greatest demand is still plotting for self-reliance, in and around, the households, and always will be. That’s society’s single greatest cost.  46% of our income goes toward food.  29% is energy.  That’s 75% of the income on those two items.  

So you can see the huge benefit to society if we can cope with those to the amount of capital we’re freeing in effect. We always did have inquiries from farmers. However, as they are a minority of the population, it’s a minority of inquiries.  Still, we’ve designed all kinds of farms from range-land, wildlife farms to very detailed one-acre farms supporting people with specialty crops.

Richard Alan Miller:  You speak of interacting relationships between species.  Perhaps you could explain that a bit….

Bill Mollison:  I’ll go a little further and call it “guilds.”  You can’t put a successful orchard in without having some nitrogen fixation.  Some of the best of those things are trees.  If you have a frost problem, you need a frost defense.  We can get a frost defense with a small legume called tagasaste (Chamaecytisus palmensis), or Tree Lucerne and grow avocado in areas which frost is quite hard.  

So you have physical protection of the other crop as part of the guild and you have an underground root association, releasing nitrogen, as part of the guild. Then if we set through that keyaha, which is an insect-attracting plant for predatory wasps, some of the Unbellularia crops, like a few fennels scattered through, we then bring in the predators of small insects feeding on the fruit system.

Next we put under that a foraging system to pick up all the wind-drops and all the cast-off fruit.  There’s a special pig bred for that [it’s called a Glauster old spot], and it’s bred not to root, but to effectively forage orchards.  It’s always been bred for that purpose.  Another alternative is in your old agricultural journals. They say if you run successful apple orchards with 70-90 chickens per acre, you get all your fertilizer and effective pest control.  So, put in a good program of foragers, insect free plants, physical defense of the trees, and a very good windbreak specifically designed to be of benefit to apples.

Tamarack, as a windbreak, will reduce an apple crop and eliminate a citrus crop! But, if we put as a windbreak hadioliacus with an understory of Siberian pea tree, we’ll get more apples, and more health in the crop.  So we pick the windbreak for the crop.  Then we do the physical layout.  If we need more heat, we’ll put in high-radiation trees, the darkest side on the off-sun side of the crop, and we’ll radiate heat into the crop.  If we have a desert situation, we’ll put a deep windbreak, and allow the temperature of the incoming winds, 30-40°F, and so on.

Now, this is a guild we’ve set up, and the guild all centers around the apple.  Now under the apple, apples will not stand in grass.  They stop infiltration of light and they put out specific chemicals to inhibit root growth of apples.  So under the apple we put a small apple garden, and specifically the spring bulbs which lie all around the cultivation and yielding system.

Richard Alan Miller:  Washington State now uses mints.

Bill Mollison:  Yeah, mint, spring bulbs, nasturtium; anything that is not grass.  We allow a very small proportion of grass; clover covers, and we’ve got a very fine situation. If we have any pests in, we might actually have to add a few frog ponds.

Richard Alan Miller:  Would you define your use of the word “stewardship?”

Bill Mollison:  Yes, I think every good farmer, in fact, everybody I’ve considered to be a patriotic farmer, in that they have a love of country in the deepest sense, (and a lot of farmers have that), everyone of them would rather leave the land and soil improved after their tenure of the land.  And so what the good farmer regards himself as, is a temporary “steward” of the land to hand it on in trust to the future.  Not specifically to their children, but to the future people of their area.  And they can achieve that in a lifetime by putting the land into a farm trust, and by laying out a very long-term development plan for it. And the trust can insure that the plan continues beyond their lifetime.

We’ve lost some fantastic farms in the United States.  Smith’s Tree Farm, Luther Burbank’s Nursery Farm, I could mention another six, all should have been land-trusted. Professor Meador’s little farm in Vermont should be land-trusted.  This is where your crops came from, your new species came from, where your new ideas were thought up and demonstrated.  

And they don’t belong even to the United States; they belong to the world! I’d like some American who feels really patriotic about land to set a trust to purchase those key farms that demonstrate principles, forever.  They should be run as farms and run for their purposes, but they should be set up as land-trusts, which I believe to be more valuable than many of the trusts that we’ve set up for our buildings.

Richard Alan Miller:  Moving forward, I have picked up a quote where you ask yourself, “What does this land have to give me?”  Can you explain …

Bill Mollison:  Yes, well sometimes you walk on the land and you have the crop.  People say, “I’ve just bought some land I want to develop a crop.”   I’ll give you and example.  I had a young bulldozer operator in Australia.  He’d just bought some really run-down cattle land.  He had a bulldozer and he put some dams in.  Then he said, “Will you come onto my farm and tell me what I ought to do here?”  He had nice dams there which he had stocked with trout.  ”How are they going?,” I asked him.  ”Fine,” he said.  ”I got some eight pounders out of them.”  ”When did you put them in?,” I inquired.  ”Last year,” he replied.  And the place was swarming with grasshoppers; it was overgrazed.

I said, “You’ve got your crop; your crop is grasshoppers!”  On a 1.8 to 1 conversion ratio you can get a pound of trout for every pound and a bit of grasshoppers. You can trawl those grasshoppers just like you trawl fish.  So, the other thing is, grasshoppers go for yellow, so if you float yellow balloons on the dams, you get a rain of grasshoppers into the water.  So that’s what he did, and he had his crop.  The land might already have its crop on it, and yet you might want to change that crop, and you will come out worse off.

For instance, we have a pasture grub that runs at 20 ton to the acre living in the first four inches of the soil.  If you covert it into turkey, you’re talking 5 ton of turkey to the acre, just for a small soil-skimming operation daily.  But they’re still trying to get rid of the pasture grub! And yet that land can barely sustain a sheep on four or five acres.  So where’s the trade off between a 120 tons of protein and 40 pounds of protein as sheep?  So, wherever we see that the crop is already there we’ve come out on top.  And we have nothing to do..

Richard Alan Miller:  Next question, in your second book Permaculture Two, you have referred to Fukuoka’s principles of “non-violent cultivation and natural farming” [seeThe One Straw Revolution and The Natural Way of Farming]. What are your views on this?

Bill Mollison:  I think Fukuoka is a genius! What he did (and nobody’s quite realized it, as such) is that he stacked, or folded time.  Instead of waiting until you’ve harvested your crop, then appear for cultivation and sowing, he sowed the next crop into the standing crop.  At the right time, so that when you hit it off, your second succession is well under way.  And that was genius!  So what’s more, it meant you didn’t cultivate, and you went from soybeans into barley, or in his case, rice, rye, rice, rye. So he gathered extra time, and that is also extra capital.

Richard Alan Miller:  Considering your theory of cooperation, or the “no-force” theory, are there then no plants that are out of place and therefore considered weeds?

Bill Mollison:  Plants are innocent.  They are all doing a job, and expressing that job to the best of their abilities.  To see a patch of thistle is to see a disturbance, and it’s being mended fast.  If you put a thistle under an apple tree, you can call it a glove artichoke, right?  You see, the soil under that artichoke will be twice as good and thick with worms compared to soil without the artichoke.  So, it’s a soil mender.  

We don’t see it as that; we don’t see a weed or invasion species warning us that there is some collapse starting.  For instance, we work with gorst in the Pacific Northwest. With gorst we can get to rain forest in four years.  Without gorst it takes 20 years.  In wet climates it grows great.  Burn it and you get more of it.  So we roll a tractor roller through it, then put in a first succession tree crop (like acacia or alder), and a second or third succession tree down the alley that was rolled down.  The gorst nurtures and nurses the crop.

Richard Alan Miller:  What about a place like the Midwest where there’s been considerable erosion of topsoil, and the soil blows from one field to another?

Bill Mollison:  Yes, I’ve been forced down twice by severe dust storms in wheat areas.  The land is in collapse.  You need to pick up the dust origins which are always downwind and in between the crop you start “pitting.” You use a large wheel and you pit the ground. The minute you pit the ground the dust storms stop, because you’ve roughened the surface. Don’t pit in the crop, but all around it.

We’ve pitted 600 square miles around Ellis Springs, Australia and we get no more dust storms, whatever.  They used to close the airport every fortnight.  After we’ve pitted we work our windbreak sequence:  talk to the farmers, talk to the government, get our support for the windbreaks, and make the windbreaks a highly productive pile of fun. We start from the downwind area with strategy.  

We have to work with government and finance to make sure that windbreak is  going to be highly productive for the farms downwind.  We advance from the downstream and, upstream.  And we create a highly stable situation.  The other thing you have to do is leave a record for the future – to say why you did all this.

Richard Alan Miller:  How do you go about planning a permaculture farm?  What are your first steps? 

Bill Mollison:  Well, the first step is to look at the farm, and the skills and wishes of its occupant.  If they’re in steel we can do something about that.  If they’re lawyers we can run a bit of legal system on the farm. We use the skills of the occupant and let them define what they want to do.  On top of what they have defined, we also suggest what is very wise to do.  Then we set about the ground detail planning.  But that always with us involves the social factor.

For instance, recently we’ve been linking urban people in need of some energy source, like firewood or diesel, to individual farmers who grow the plantation. They pre-purchase the product.  Basically, we don’t any longer look at a primary product as being the main potential income of farmland.  There are three products.  Social products are very high.  80% of the product of our farmers is from social product (offering facilities to people in towns, etc.).  

The second income is in the production of an energy crop.  We have a travel-able diesel system we take around. You put sunflower seeds in one end, it presses it, puts the oil through a catalyst, gives you methyl-esters, and then regenerates the catalyst. Its a small unit about as big as a dinner table, on a trailer.  So, it takes 1/100th of your crop to provide the fuel.  You can provide off-farm fuel.

Solid wood is the best income per acre, for abroad.  Unless you process it fairly high on the roadside, it runs $80 a ton, or $800 a ton in smaller 5 lb.. packages.  That means an average acre produces $5-6,000 in firewood year in and year out.  Any person in the city would like to have a piece of that.  That means two rented acres give him a small income and all their fuel.  So fuel is an eternal crop and there is never enough fuel.

Clean water is another crop.  Some farms you’ll purchase every quarter of an hour, if you have a spring that tests out as potable.  That’s your problem in the United States – to get any water that tests out as drinkable.  In some farms the whole value of the farm is coming out of the hill every ten minutes.  You’ve got an endless trade in clean water.

Richard Alan Miller:  Can you explain your use of such terms as “Zones,” “Sectors,” and “Interfaces?”

Bill Mollison:  Real easy.  When you zone a property from where you start in the morning with the tractor, you zone it in terms of the number of times you can afford to visit that area.  For instance, move your household garden a hundred feet from the house and you’ve lost if  You’ll never harvest it efficiently and you can’t guard it.  Move it within 20 feet of the house boundary and you’ll feed yourself forever with hardly any effort.

Out time is 20-40 minutes a week.  That’s less time for us to grow our food than to actually walk to the shop and back, providing we have it right outside the kitchen door which is Zone 1.  Zone 2 is domestic species.  The chicken house is on the edge of Zone 2, and they range in Zone 2, then bring all the manure to the edge of Zone 1, where we use it on the garden.  So the chickens do the work; try to be smarter than your chickens.

Sectors define against incoming energy, designed to survive the onslaught energy – too hot or too cold winds, sun sector.  Put up the defenses in sectors to guard the energy or deflect it to benefit you.  With those two things, zoning and sectoring the soil, you also pay attention to any benefits of slope and carefully orientate all your units to the sun or wind.  You’ve got a rational, ideally efficient lair.

An interface is like edge harmonics. All crop scientists tell you that you can’t sample a crop at the edges, you’ve got to
walk into the crop.  At the edges the yield is abnormally high (sometimes anonymously low).  The goal is to try to plant a field that is nothing but this high-yielding edge. For example, if the edge is four feet deep, then we plant solid eight foot deep sections. What is next to that edge?  If it is bare ground we get a pretty good yield, but if it is alfalfa, that yield is higher.  So put strips of 8 feet of grain, 8 feet alfalfa. A double edged section gives superior yield.

Richard Alan Miller:  How do you envision the restructuring of our current mono-cropping industrialized farms, like the San Joaquin Valley of California, and do you see a timeframe for this?

Bill Mollison:  Yeah, I do.  The modern industrial scientist is causing famine all around the world, and malnutrition locally.  That’s the two main products of mono-culture and you can add to that a  chronic poisoning everywhere.  That is, agriculture has floated free from its roots.  Its purpose was to feed people “good food.”  It no longer does that.  It doesn’t relate to people’s needs in any way.

What we’re doing is re-relating the farm directly to people who need those good products.  So we’re setting up farm link networks with farmers and urban dwellers, pre-farming the farm so there is no risk to the farmer.  And there are thousands of those.  It takes 18-40 households, depending on the culture, to keep a family very wealthy on the land.  This assumes that person is providing the needs of the household and not cheating or marketeering.

Richard Alan Miller:  So pro-funding from urban dwellers is what you’re suggesting?

Bill Mollison:  Very definitely.  The timeframe is yesterday for many farmers.  We are de-populating our farmland of highly experienced people at an alarming rate.  You can’t beat them at farm management.  But, we’re replacing them with farm machinery which causes unemployment which puts a charge on society to pay unemployment to farmers in the form of taxation.  Wouldn’t it be better if they were unemployed happily on the land and with their families?  

We could have intercepted that through a farm-link office where any person could subscribe for say two acres of firewood planted by a farmer for $200 plus $50 for fire control.  At the end of four years you get an average $4,000 income per acre and what you pay him is what he would get out of it in sheep which is $70 per acre a year (in Australia).  Pay up front so he can afford to get that timber in there.

Richard Alan Miller:  That’s great.  Let’s move on, now.  As an example, how would you deal with raccoons that are systematically destroying a farmer’s crop of sweet corn?  Would you stop raising the corn, would you feed the raccoons, have dogs to chase the coons out, and now you’re feeding dogs?  How would you handle those raccoons?

Bill Mollison:  I eat them.  I get more protein out of the coons than I could ever get out of the corn.  On one patch of my friend’s in Vermont, we got 5 opossums, 2 coons, etc.. We worked it out and the protein yield was far higher than the corn could ever be.

Richard Alan Miller:  Can you realistically give a workable plan to a large mechanized farm?

Bill Mollison:  Yes.  But it would be really extraordinary, nothing that has ever been done with mechanization.  I’ve been doing some large style drilling of tagasaste with large mechanized materials.  And I can lay down a crop that you can pellet into feed at the highest yield of any unrelated crop in the world.  

In between the tagasaste strips are tree-alfalfa strips.  Mainly, I want to let thousand of amateurs loose on the world.  I’m no longer interested in sitting somewhere and making a buck.  To become competent it takes young people two to three years of working on these permaculture concepts.

Richard Alan Miller:  Do you recommend a legal structure that lends itself to families or people pooling resources?  I ask this because in Permaculture Two you mention the idea of gathering together with a few friends to build the alternatives you mention.  This sounds like the original communal efforts of the 60’s, trying to find a blending of egos and spiritual philosophies.

Bill Mollison:  It grew out of those inadequate attempts to form communities that were part of the 60’s, most of which have broken apart. But, taking a very rational approach to community ownership for private use – that’s the ideal.  [Like a profit-sharing cooperative] you’ve got all the advantages of private usage, but you don’t have the right-to-ruin given by private ownership.

The ideal way to work land is like a thing in England called common work right. A trust owns the land, and it only has three directors who can then appoint others.  Nobody votes; it’s not democratic.  The only consensus we need is that we never come to consensus.  Now, the trust governs its directors.  Any person who can see a way to make a living on that land applies to the trust.  

The land lets (rents) a living to them, including if necessary a residential unit, but often they would like to live elsewhere.  They then pay 10% of the net to a common work fund which goes on developing other livings.  In this way a small 200-acre farm in Kent employs 36 people full time on site and 95 off-site from the products produced on the site, and it’s hardly developed at all!

One farm can employ hundreds of people. A beekeeper is essential to your small fruit grower. The milker can supply manure for energy for may people (methane, hot water and can-fuel).  We run all tractors and cars on those systems.  You have an energy man, a bee man, small tree man, worm man all working on the wastes from the digester. Worms go to the fish ponds and triple their value.  The casings go back in the glass house attached to perhaps a brick-making works, digging clay from the silage pits on the farm.  You can think of other projects.

Richard Alan Miller:  What are the alliances you speak of with similar groups?

Bill Mollison:  A large group of Sufis are using Permaculture, likewise in the U.S. those interested in Biodynamics, the New Alchemy Institute, etc..  We would like to lie within every organization and still maintain our own teachings, so we are distinct in design.

Richard Alan Miller:  So you are supporting regional networking, then?

Bill Mollison:  Yes, and we also have regional and independent design consultants.  Nobody owns permaculture; it’s a common copyright of our trainees.  And all of them are independent.  It’s not franchised.  All our systems are independent legally structured. So, what you’ve got is a very large global cooperative of tiny businesses.

Richard Alan Miller:  What forms of alternative property ownership do you prefer?

Bill Mollison:  I myself prefer to live on land in trust with a long-term purpose.  I personally am allowed to lease (earned the right) for life, inheritable, transferable, a half-acre for a house and other land on an economic level that I am  fit to use.

Richard Alan Miller:  What is your main current of thought now, sort of your “hot” item?

Bill Mollison:  My real hot thing right now is that it’s five minutes to midnight.  We face a meltdown of icepacks and consequent sea-rises.  It’s time to open the great debate: Can we survive?  Nobody’s sure we can. Start to turn the whole society toward structured 3% fewer trees and we all asphyxiate.  It is five minutes to midnight. What is the use of choking with a million in your pocket?  Why didn’t we have that million in survival, and survival means “trees.”

Now, why didn’t we turn our mainstream agriculture into mainstream tree cropping?  We’re supporting it a $28-30 billion a year and that will just ruin America.  If you don’t green it, we’re all dead! So the main thing now is let’s take over the investment income of this country and turn it into ethical ends.  We have $60 billion turned over here now in ethical investments and we can turn the rest over if we put it to the people.

Richard Alan Miller:  Is it possible to reverse the damage done from original agricultural practices, like erosion…?

Bill Mollison:  Take dihedron.  As far as erosion, we can build soil.  There’s no doubt about that.  We have the techniques where there’s enough of anything left to work from. We can hoe and create soils by the right trees.  But, we can’t unpoison the soil. We’ve found that years ago copper was used in Australia and it’s still killing sheep, from before World War II.  It’s in the top .2 inches of the soil and we can’t raise sheep for years, or eat an egg from that land for the next 200 years.  

What we’ve put on in the past we can’t take off, but we need never put that stuff on.  Those farms should be locked up as toxic or put into non-food production, namely forestry, perhaps for centuries.

Richard Alan Miller:  What questions have I not asked that I should have asked you?

Bill Mollison:  What’s the priority for young people who are going to be designers today? The real priority is to set up a money-handling system that services people, to set up investment trusts, development trusts, and commonly revolving funds that help people who believe in the future.  If people can do that well, (and our entire people do that well), they have endless capital and cease to become employees subject to client wishes and they become purchasers and developers of land.  

And that’s what we must become to create the future.  We can’t passively leave it to someone else who knows nothing about land to determine the future. We must borrow the land and create the future.  We can’t afford the warehouses, the headless dinosaurs of yesterday.  It’s critical we take them out.

Richard Alan Miller:  Thank you for a great interview.

From: THE HERB MARKET REPORT for the herb farmer and forager
(Vol. 2 No. 8 August, 1986 and Vol. 2 No. 9 September, 1986)
by Richard Alan Miller [interviewer and editor]

by Thomas Fischbacher

Two issues keep on puzzling me about economics. On the one hand, it undoubtedly is an incredibly important subject. At present, my life pretty much depends on being able to buy certain things from a functioning economy and the same holds for just about everybody else. On the other hand, there seem to be a number of serious problems with deeply rooted beliefs about economics held my many professional economists. (This, then, also is one of the most important reasons why we are in a precarious situation in the first place – if people want “to save the planet”, I like to ask “from what?”. The answer seems to be: “from the consequences of an untenable economic ideology”.)

So, developing a sane perspective on economics and in particular one’s own economic role certainly is an important goal. And no, I do not think management professionals who tell their students in their lectures that spending money on french brand name cosmetics is smarter than spending it on other cosmetics have anything to offer that I’d personally be interested in, thank you.

There are, of course, a number of quite useful perspectives. Fritz Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered certainly contains a number of important ideas one should know about. The same holds for the writings of another “maverick” professional economist — Scott Nearing. Bill Mollison also has a lot to say about economics — but the problem with Mollison in particular is that some of his economic approaches are simultaneously powerful and radical (“Some of the things you are going to do will be charitable, and it would be stupid not to do them through a charity and get the corresponding tax benefits, so for heaven’s sake set up a charity — that will be useful for a thousand other reasons as well”), but difficult to implement without an experienced mentor. All in all, economics is a confusing puzzle, and neither the picture assembled from all the pieces by professional economists, nor the “self-sufficiency” picture assembled by John Seymour seem to be without serious flaws.

Recently, I have come across another puzzle piece which seems to play a fairly important role. It comes in the form of a small book written this year by a clever guy who incidentally happens to be a theoretical physicist (amongst other things). Now, one thing that usually comes with an education in theoretical physics is that one develops the ability to make up one’s own mind about things (rather than having to parrot somebody else’s ideas, which most people do), by studying the underlying structures. Physicists develop the skill to see through illusions.

First, he did not buy the commonly accepted model of how one should behave as a model consumer citizen. Then, he analyzed the rules of the game. Then, he developed a fairly robust and straightforward strategy. Next, he implemented it in his own life. Then, after five years (he now is at the age of 34), he had achieved the level of 100% financial independence and effectively retired — which means that he has time to spend on things that matter to him. Some of these may bring in money, but strictly speaking, he does not depend on that.

So what is the trick then? By and large, people in western societies are financially mostly illiterate. When first confronted with the issue of buying a house on a mortgage and hence paying it off more than twice, some people might have a “hang on a second” moment — but eventually just mimic what is generally considered the socially expected behaviour. Many, however, use money much more widely in similarly inefficient ways by buying all sorts of stuff on credit. Banks of course like that, and even try to seduce customers into borrowing money to finance luxuries such as vacation trips. Conspicuously, schools by and large do not seem to try to educate young people about doing a few simple but extremely revealing financial calculations (the same actually also holds for energetic calculations, for that matter). Cynics might well consider this to be part of a big plot to educate them to become model customers.

So, this theoretical physicist, when starting to save for a small house, started to actually think the whole thing through at a more fundamental level, mostly ignoring culturally established behaviour and asking “what if” — a question which normally no one seems to ask.

Retirement plans usually involve setting aside 10% – 20% of one’s income as savings to be put into a retirement account with some 6% interest or so. A saving rate of 30% generally would be considered as exceptionally high. This physicist pondered the question: “Assuming a realistic interest rate, what would actually happen for saving rates in a range no one ever seems to think about, say e.g., around 75% or so?” Arriving at the answer “one would pretty much invariably end up with total financial independence in well under 10 years”, he set out to implement this plan — and afterwards wrote a book about it[1].

A key insight is that, assuming one starts to work at 20, dies at 100, and invests a certain share of one’s income at a given effective interest rate, then for very high saving rates of more than 70%, one is pretty much bound to become financially independent in well under 10 years as long as the interest rate is anywhere above 4%. For low saving rates of less than 30%, the outcome very strongly depends on the interest rate, but for high saving rates this is a robust result. At a saving rate of 70%, the difference between an investment with a 4% interest rate and a 6% interest rate is that the former will take 9 years till financial independence, while the latter about 2.5 years less. Here, one must note that this analysis does not depend on absolute income – as long as one can maintain a saving rate of above 70% and invest at a seemingly moderate guaranteed effective interest rate, this strategy will work. (For a saving rate of 80%, the figures are just over 5.5 years vs. just over 3 years.)

So, regardless of any motivation with respect to how one should invest these savings (earth repair, anyone?), this makes a clear statement about very tangible immense rewards of eliminating inefficiencies and costly bad habits. A saving rate of over 70% is possible, but requires a lot of discipline and essentially a design approach. (Perhaps he did it because physicists tend to like “impossible” challenges?) How about interest rates with a potentially major (peak energy related) economic crash around the corner? Apart from the fact that whoever managed to reduce one’s need to earn money to a level that allows a 70% saving rate will be in a strategically very strong position in comparison to others, it can be expected that, as some part of the economy that was based on untenable beliefs tanks (perhaps quite a large one), that part that was based on more appropriate beliefs may be expected to do fairly well. Nature abhors a vacuum, and when businesses that provided inappropriate solutions fail, other businesses with more appropriate ideas will grow to occupy the void. (Bicycle ambulances, anyone?) Being aware of the relevant issues that actually drive the economic reconfiguration should then be a major advantage.

Having systematically reduced his expenses to a minimum, he writes:

Figuratively speaking it is quite possible to match up the relative sizes of the cash flows between two people. For example, I spend about as much on my total living expenses as an upper-middle-class family spends on their mortgage interest alone. Effectively speaking, I’ve lent them my money so they can have a house with five bedrooms, three bathrooms, a vaulted foyer, and a two-car garage. In return, they pay all my expenses. Hopefully, we both consider this a good deal; I know I do.

Personally, I find it brilliant if someone who grew up in western culture mastered the art of reducing personal expenses to such a degree, but of course there are more appealing investment strategies in terms of redistribution of surplus than letting somebody else live a wasteful lifestyle.

Even if one has no own plans to do something similarly extreme, his book offers a number of very useful insights. In particular, it offers a perspective on the true price of things that seems to be missed by many. Quantitatively speaking, for example, if we assume a mere 3% rate of return, then kicking a habit that costs $1/month amounts to reducing the size of the fund that is needed to reach financial independence by about $400. (So, $20/month means $8000 in funds.) Given that the vast majority of people have a strong tendency to spend money on bad habits, rather than trying to develop discipline and a strong character, and that there actually is a trend towards not educating people about possible ways to cultivate personal self-discipline (as much of the economy depends on the misidentification of wants as needs), there is considerable potential for most people to go much further on the road to a high degree of financial independence than they ever contemplated.

The book itself to some readers might seem a bit too abstract; it deliberately is not a recipe book for frugality, but instead discusses fundamental principles. As the author says, there is little point in giving someone a list of directions if they would do much better with a map — but in order to use a map, one needs some navigation skills. It tries to be an eye-opener by pointing out a few fairly simple relations which actually are overlooked by most and help the reader to develop navigation skills.

Permaculture is a lot about increasing resilience. This particular book has a lot to offer in terms of personal economic resilience and certainly is relevant not only to people with a plan to retire extremely early, but just as well to people who intend to set up their own company (say), or just want more time for those things that really matter to them. Personally, I was amazed to discover that many of the things I already had implemented in my own life — such as not owning a car and building a productive asset base that provides separate income streams (based on actually useful products) straightaway, rather than being locked away until retirement age — are also considered as crucial strategies by this author, even though we arrived at these conclusions for almost completely independent reasons.

While the book is not directly about Permaculture and in particular considers debt-backed fiat money as the given rules of the (present) game (still with a strong emphasis on the importance of alternative arrangements such as barter systems), it occasionally refers to probable scenarios in relation to resource scarcity and pollution problems and discusses ways in which our economies will necessarily have to change (essentially, by changing from a producer-consumer system to a more complete system including decomposers that do the recycling and upcycling of resources). The strategy presented uses the present rules of the game in a creative and quite unconventional way, but it is pretty clear that even if there were a major change in the way money works that is unexpected to the author, he would be in a much better strategic position than most others, due to systematically having worked on becoming conscious of and eliminating his costly bad habits. This book hence seems to be especially relevant as it means that combining such financial strategies with value-increasing earth repair strategies should make a very powerful combination. Above everything else, it very clearly shows the power of systematically reducing one’s recurrent expenses, in permaculture more widely known as the “need to earn”.

References:

1. http://www.amazon.com/Early-Retirement-Extreme-philosophical-independence/dp/145360121X

by Judith Goldsmith

Richard Alan Miller likes to tell the classic story of one of the first farmers who came to him for help.

He had 400 acres in Iowa in corn, which was infested with burdock. He had tried everything — spraying, everything — and he couldn’t get rid of the stuff. The bank was threatening him with foreclosure.

He came to a workshop I’d given at Charlie Walter’s Acres U.S.A. conference in Kansas City, and got in touch with me. When the bank heard I’d been hired to consult, the banker gave him a one-year stay of execution. I advised him to: sell half his land; sell half of his capital equipment; and then I had him get rid of his noxious weed — which was the corn! — and grow what nature wanted him to grow, which was the burdock!

I helped him sell all his burdock crop to Asian markets in Chicago, at two dollars a pound fresh (I advised him that he’d only get 60 cents a pound dried), where they couldn’t get enough of it for kim chee and fresh vegetables. After the first year, he was out of foreclosure. After three years, he owned his own land outright … and he started buying back his old land, and putting it into timber for his grandchildren!

Miller’s consulting does not always result in such dramatic conversion, but it has brought financial stability to many other small- to mid-size farmers and would-be farmers throughout the U.S.

His game plan: replace the twenty billion dollars of botanicals imported into the United States for use in pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and food production with locally produced products grown, processed, or manufactured in the US.

I’d seen Miller’s book, The Potential of Herbs as a Cash Crop, and copies of his one-time monthly journal, The Herb Market Report. But my impression of herbs was the fresh bunches sold in the grocery for 89 cents; or little cottage industry potpourris and dried herbs sold at crafts fairs. But that’s not what Miller’s work is about.

I believe Miller’s ideas could provide a solution for how to live in the cash economy for permaculturists, as well as all small farmers. An abundance of food from food forests is fabulous (well, I love mine), but for the moment, we still have to live in the cash economy and come up with funds for annoying things like building repairs and taxes, not to mention putting the kids through college. Once your food forest is well-established, a small amount of acreage put into botanicals and herbals as a cash crop could turn out to be the key to survival in the cash economy that lets the great permaculture experiment continue. But doing this still holds to the permaculture principle of growing and eating locally, and growing what’s appropriate for the land and climate. And as a consumer, it would mean getting fresher, less-transported ingredients in any medicinals and other products I might buy in the market. I would guess that many of these crops are already grown by permaculturists, but the critical key is how much and which varieties to grow, how to prepare them for market, and who to market them to. And Miller is an encyclopedia when it comes to those questions. He started out running an herbal tea company in Washington, and got to know the business from the inside.

So bear with me for a moment, while I introduce his ideas. I hope they help permaculturists who might be struggling with how to survive and be viable in the cash economy we are still in for now.

New Crops, Old Markets

Another farmer with whom Miller consulted is Bill Hicks of Yakima, Washington. An insurance salesman and urbanite, he’d never been a farmer; interested, he came to a Miller workshop. On ten leased acres, he started with a crop of catnip. The first year was a failure, though since he’d only invested seeds and his own labor, it wasn’t too much of a loss. The next year, he raised a successful crop and got a contract from Yakima pet food manufacturer which had previously imported all its catnip dried from Germany. The three succeeding years all produced excellent crops, pre-sold, and the main work is in the summer months.

What’s most amazing about these crops is that many of them are common weeds, like chickweed (Stellaria media), of which forty tons a year are used for the iron in multi-vitamin tablets, again mostly imported from Germany. “Chickweed,” Miller notes, “could be a winter crop on fallow ground, even in snow areas, especially strawberry fields where pesticides are now sprayed to get rid of it.”

Or take comfrey, though comfrey is a bit of a bad first example, since it had a bad name as a crop. Much talk had been going around for awhile about how easy comfrey is to grow (it gives a higher yield per acre than alfalfa) and how valuable it is as a cattle feed (it has two amino acids that are missing in alfalfa, making them a “whole food” when combined). But for ten or so years, while rumors ran wild, nobody knew how to dry it. It has a very high mucilage, containing some 87% of its weight as water. Miller, however, discovered that a kiln (hop kiln or cone kiln or plywood kiln) does the job quite well, and was able to market around a thousand tons of comfrey pellets a month to a feedlot in Osaka, Japan.

Comfrey is also a bad first example because about 200 acres of crop is needed to make the processing machinery worth purchasing. Miller would like smaller farmers to get together to deal with such economies of scale, but he’s got plenty of ideas for smaller farmers.

I asked Miller to pretend that I was a “small farmer” coming to him for help. “That can mean anywhere from two to 200 acres,” noted Miller. (Miller terms one-quarter to six to ten acres “gardening”, for which he agrees there is a growing place in the economy, although he has preferred not to work on that scale.) “One crop almost any small farmer could make a living off of is sage, largely imported from Mexico, Turkey, and Greece as an antioxidant for meat-packing,” Miller advised. “For California farmers, I might recommend growing licorice root, used in lozenges and cough syrups as an anti-bacterial, and as a sugar substitute for hot chocolate mixes, and currently grown mostly in the Mediterranean area; Californians could also do well with lemon verbena, used in potpourris and perfumes, also mostly grown around the Mediterranean.

“For a South Dakota farm, I might recommend garden-variety marigolds, fed to poultry in vast quantities for coloring chicken eggs and meat, and imported almost totally from Mexico and Peru. In Nebraska, besides burdock, borage would be a good crop: the Omega-3 fatty acids found in its oils are in great demand for the medicine doctors have you take when your cholesterol level is too high, and it still comes mostly from Germany. (Sunflower seed, safflower seed, flax seed, and pumpkin seed are also in great demand for their Omega-3 fatty acids.)

“How about New York?” (Stop laughing. New York state is still the largest exporter of apples in the country. Yes, there are farms in New York, even though most of the rest of the produce sold in Manhattan comes from California’s Central Valley.) “Valerian root, used in vast amounts for valium tablets, still comes mostly from Bulgaria; bergamot (Monarda fistulosa or M. didyma – bee balm, another common ornamental) is imported from Europe for anti-fungal agents used in medicines, as well as a flavoring agent. Ginseng is another idea for New York.”

What about more problematic areas of the country? For cold Alaska, white and black spruce cones used in potpourri sell well; “one manufacturer bought 20,000 pounds one year at about a dollar a pound – they had not been previously available at all.” For dry Arizona, good crops include sesame seeds (“one candy manufacturer alone buys twelve truckloads a year; bakers also use vast amounts”) currently imported from Central and South American countries; and psyllium, which will be discussed later. For problematic Hawaii, with its variable weather and hordes of pests, Miller might recommend lemon grass, which is available in anti-rust cultivars. “Its fresh shoots are immensely popular in Thai cuisine, its leaves are used in herbal teas, it’s used dry as a flavoring agent, it’s distilled for oil, and in California, two hundred acres of it are being put up like a hay crop and sold for $1000 a ton, ten times the price for alfalfa hay.” Lemon grass is raised almost totally outside the U.S., in Guatemala, Ecuador, India, China, Mexico. Hawaiian farmers could also do well with gingers (the less well-known varieties like kha ginger are popular wherever they’re available) and with cinnamon, not Cinnamomum eylanicum from Ceylon, known as korintji, the traditional crop, but Chinese Cinnamon, C. cassia, also called tung hing, whose bark is sweeter and has a higher oil content and better flavor.”

“There are probably two hundred possible herb crops in any given region of the U.S.,” notes Miller. Some of them have well-established markets. Dried flowers are sold to the U.S. in vast quantities by the Dutch, all from seeds grown here. Miller was called on to consult in the flower seed growing area of Idaho, between Boise and Twin Falls. “A Dutch company had put up for bid a 4000-acre wildflower seed-growing contract and it was breaking up the community. I helped organize some sixty growers to fulfill the contract on two to fifty acre plots.” Then he helped them move into processing and selling the flowers themselves right here. Dried flowers (statice, baby’s breath, etc) are big business, and are a good crop in many areas. “A client had 4000 acres in turf seed in Hubbard, Oregon, including rocket larkspur which she was growing for the seeds. The rocket they grew for flowers the first year was so superior to what the market had been importing that one warehouse in Buffalo that had bought three cargo containers from Holland is now buying twenty acres from them.”

Some of the herb crops are relatively new. Psyllium (plantain seed hulls), for example, is in enormous demand by U.S. cereal manufacturers for inclusion in high fiber cereals, yet it is mainly imported only from one small section of India, whose farmers grow it only as a sideline. Farmers in Arizona and New Mexico as well as wetter places, could grow vast amounts of psyllium to meet the 50,000 plus acre demand. “A 50 to 200 acre site would work fine – simple grinding is the only processing required.”

Starting a New U.S. Tradition

Why aren’t farmers growing these things? “We’re the only country in the world that’s not growing its own psyllium – England and France grow it,” Miller shakes his head in amazement. He attributes this in part to habit, since the pharmaceutical manufacturers and other users of botanicals had become used to getting their ingredients from out of the country, even with higher transportation costs and poorer quality; and to the European herbal tradition. “The botanicals market in Europe is more than ten times that of U.S markets. Population is denser there, and more people use herbal products, and individuals tend to use higher amounts. For example, herbal tea drinking is quite common, unlike among coffee-crazed Americans; homeopathic medicine is more known. Four hundred tons of peppermint goes into teas sold in the U.S. in a year; in Germany, in the same year, one of five buyers alone buys 5000 tons of peppermint, imported from Bulgaria.” (Germany, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Thailand, Indonesia, and India are the main sources for European botanicals, most of it traded through Germany.)

Miller has offered his services to farmers as a consultant and broker. He advises what crop might be right for your area and your problems, which variety of the crop to grow (very important!), and how to process the crop; then he matches you up with the markets he’s hearing from. His fee is 10% of the sale value of the crop. Foragers too use his services, selling mushrooms, cones, dried leaves, moss, and other wild commodities to a whole new array of markets.

For land with special problems, unfit for standard crops, botanicals can also be a boon. “Salty soils can grow a range of new grains, from plants such as saltbush, saltwort, Palmer’s grass, and pickleweed, as well as certain sages.” Farmers who have grown a crop too long in one spot in their clay soils and now have verticillium wilt which prohibits growing of tomatoes and other vegetables might do well with fenugreek, a new crop which fixes nitrogen, has a seed which can be used to make a maple-type syrup, and may even be marketable for produce (as it’s used in India). Watery soils may be right for kelp or nori (seaweed) farms. Rocky soils (especially the otherwise problem serpentine soils) may be great for flowers, accenting colors.

Even successful farmers may benefit from looking into botanical crops, says Miller. As permaculturists know well, intercropping, planting an additional crop in with another, can draw additional value from the same piece of land, and sometimes add pesticide or other benefits at the same time. Miller has advised macademia farmers in Hawaii to intercrop with thyme or pyrethrum, both with insecticidal properties. “Where nematodes are a problem, pyrethrum or marigolds might be a good intercrop. Red clover and corn is another good combination. For deep shade areas, say under almond or walnut trees, how about pennyroyal? Vineyards might benefit from interplanting with spearmint, which raises the sugar content of the grapes.”

Pyrethrum is an especially hot crop, since there have been world shortages for the newer natural insecticides. “Even 40 acres would be a good size for a pyrethrum crop; Safer and Johnson Wax import all they can get from Kenya.”

Another grower, Tom Johnson of South Dakota, was getting by raising animal feeds on his alkaline soils, when he came to Miller’s workshop. Gradually he started to add several new crops, basil, marigolds, comfrey, and others. Then, in a partnership with Miller and the governor of South Dakota, a prototype flower head harvester was designed and built, that can be used with red clover heads, chamomile (used for teas, sedatives, potpourris, and hair conditioners, and generally imported from Egypt, Bulgaria, Argentina, and other parts of the former USSR), and pyrethrum. “A typical Kenya hand-picker can harvest fifty pounds of pyrethrum a day; the Flower Head Harvester, which is about to be produced by a major tractor manufacturer and fits on the front end of a header bar, harvests 10,000 pounds a day.”

Even waste products are being put to use by Miller’s clients. Smokey Lake Seed Repository, one of Canada’s larger seed repository, that raise seed for reforestation projects, was more than happy to have him take away the cone “waste product”. The douglas fir, lodgepole pine, and ponderosa pine cones are now sold by Miller to companies who use them in potpourris and wreathing products.

Miller peppers his conversation with much discussion of small growers taking on the big conglomerates, building unions of growers, providing locally-grown commodities to markets, agreed-upon ethics, decentralization, the high transportation costs that go into food costs, and keeping money in the community. “I want to be, you know, like Don Genero, not teaching like Don Juan, but provoking, raising questions …” He still sees a strong market for growers of: dried flowers and pods, sesame seed, flax (for the oil), comfrey, new mint varieties, all kinds of crops for “ethnic” markets, and a host of other products.

Got an extra couple acres (or spaces for an inter-crop)? If you have any questions, maybe we could get him on here to answer them.

Richard Alan Miller Northwest Botanicals
Grants Pass, Oregon 
www.nwbotanicals.org/oak/altagri/a_a_index.html
www.herbfarminfo.com/

This morning women activists - including one mum - put a stop to the controversial genetically modified (GM) wheat trial outside Canberra.

They felt they had no choice. The government is failing to protect Australia’s most important food crop and our health, environment and economy are under threat. 

Greenpeace’s recent report revealed that Australians will be in the world’s first GM human feeding experiment and it’ll take place without adequate safety testing. It also exposed the CSIRO’s links to  foreign biotech companies, like Monsanto, who want to patent and control Australia’s wheat. 

All the other major wheat producing nations, such as the US, Canada and Russia, have rejected GM wheat due to the risks involved. Yet Australia’s $4.7million wheat industry is up for grabs.

This GM wheat should never have left the lab. Once GM crops are released into the field, they are nearly impossible to contain. This means traditional wheat and other crops are at risk of becoming GM contaminated. 

So the women activists did the government’s job and unplanted the GM wheat crops this morning.Click here for news articles and photos.

We know it’s a strong action and will get a divided response. But we can’t shy away from this serious issue. Please join me on Monday 18 July 7pm (AEST) for a live online chat where you can ask all your questions about our campaign. Click this link to join the chat on Monday.

You can also send your thoughts or questions now by emailing us here - your feedback is always valued.

Thank you for helping keep Australian wheat safe and healthy.

Laura Kelly
Food Campaigner
Greenpeace Australia Pacific

PS Already written to the government? Thank you! Please forward this on to your friends too.

Today Greenpeace released their report outlining the controversy surrounding the GM wheat trials across Australia. Their investigations reveal the biotech takeover of our daily bread.

Australia’s national science body, CSIRO, has approved the world’s first human feeding trials of GM wheat. This is despite serious health, economic and environmental risks. We’ve detailed our findings in a new report titled ‘Australia’s wheat scandal: The biotech takeover of our daily bread.’

Our findings reveal that CSIRO is in partnership with GM biotech companies to commercialise Australia’s daily bread. It is these companies that stand to benefit – and it is Australian farmers and consumers that stand to lose – if Australia pursues GM wheat. The involvement of biotech companies in the field trials represents a clear conflict of interest. It also corrupts the kind of thorough risk analysis that would have prevented the release of GM wheat across Australia.

Health Risk

Australia is the first country in the world to test GM wheat on humans. GM wheat will only be tested on Australians in short-term and superficial trials that run for just 1 day. There is no stated intention to test for long-term effects or other negative health effects such as allergic or toxic reactions. Read the open letter from scientists and doctors around the world regarding human feeding trials of genetically modified wheat in Australia

Economic risk

GM wheat has been rejected by all the other major wheat producing countries in the world – including the US and Canada – due to the risks involved. Evidence shows that it is inevitable that GM wheat will contaminate traditional wheat crops. Australia is putting at risk its $4.7 million wheat industry, as our buyers refuse to accept GM wheat.

Environmental risk

Once released into the environment, GM crops cannot be recalled. They can reproduce indefinitely and unpredictably. Releasing GM wheat threatens our natural biodiversity and it also increases reliance on chemical pesticide use.

CSIRO has rejected Greenpeace’s Freedom of Information (FOI) request for documents outlining the health, safety and ethical parameters of its human trials. It is outrageous that CSIRO is testing potentially unstable GM organisms on Australians in secret, with absolutely no public knowledge or oversight of the risks involved.

With Australia’s most important crop under threat, it’s time the federal government stands up to the foreign biotech companies. We won’t sit idly by while Australians become the global guinea pigs for GM wheat.

TAKE ACTION: Write to the government and demand an end to the GM wheat trials

READ DOWNLOAD AND SHARE THE REPORT:Australia’s Wheat Scandal