[prakruti] Preparing for Permaculture by Kelpie Wilson

[Guest guest]

At 07:29 AM 7/3/07, you wrote:

 

Dear Colleagues,

 

Interesting informative interview with robyn Francis on

Permaculture.

Permaculture, a combinaion of permanent agriculture, has been developed

by Dr Bill Mollison. Permaculture is a leading component

of sustainable agriculture from where the use of synthetic

fertilisers and pesticides, hybrid

and GM seeds and heavy agricultural

implements is withdrawn.

 

Permaculture is extensively practised in Australia, USA and

 

Europe as well as in India. The Prakruti Two Day Workshop on

Permaculture in 1989 conducted by Dr Bill Mollison became

extremely popular. Best wishes.

Kisan

Mehta

Priya Salvi

Save Bombay Committee and Prakruti

102, Mausam, Plot 285, Sector 28, Vashi

Navi Mumbai 400705

Mobile Kisan Mehta 9223448857

Priya Salvi 9324027494

website: savebombaycommittee.org

*********************************************

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Preparing for Permaculture

By Kelpie Wilson

t r u t h o u t | Environmental Editor

 

 

Monday 02 July

An interview with permaculture expert Robyn Francis in New South

Wales, Australia.

 

 

 

 

While in Australia for the

International

Agrichar Initiative conference in April, I got a chance to visit

Djanbung Gardens, a farm

and learning center founded by permaculture expert Robyn Francis in the

alternative community of Nimbin, New South Wales. After a wonderful hour

touring the garden with students from Canada, South Africa and France, I

sat down with Robyn for a chat about permaculture and the future of

Australia's and the world's agricultural systems.

KW: Robyn, please tell me - what got you

interested in permaculture?

RF: In the early 1970s, I was part of the whole

counterculture movement and not very happy with the way society was

going. I traveled overseas for five years and saw a lot of things good

and a lot of things wrong, and one of the things I found that really

fascinated me in my travels was the sustainable traditional systems of

farming and village culture. Then I lived in Europe, in southern Germany,

in a small farming hamlet, for three and a half years, just out of

Munich, where I got to see the traditional European farming systems.

There were still old farmers who were doing their crop rotations, and the

only input to the farm was diesel fuel to put into the tractor and the

Mercedes Benz. It was all mixed cropping, and they had their cows and

their pigs, and they would use the manures and compost them and put them

out in the fields. These types of farms would have a little forest that

was managed over 200-year rotations, from generation to generation, and

it was just such a stark contrast to the mono-thinking, monoculture,

broad-acre agriculture that I grew up with here in Australia.

KW: How did we end up abandoning those kinds of

systems?

RF: Post WWII; that's when society went on the

most incredibly manic fossil-fuel binge. From the end of the Second World

War you can track this corporatization of Western culture and

commoditization of land. And all the chemical weapons that they created

for war, well, those chemicals then went into chemical-based agriculture,

so they could continue manufacturing and have a new market. We really see

those major changes in agricultural systems occurring then.

KW: It hasn't been that long, really, has

it?

RF: It hasn't, and I think places that didn't have

really strong traditions, like Australia and the US, were just the

perfect breeding ground for this kind of phenomenon to take off, whereas

in Europe, people were a lot more grounded in their long-term traditions.

There have been big changes since I lived there. I felt particularly

blessed to be living there at the tail end of that old generation. I went

back ten years later, and the landscape had changed. The sons who had

gone to agricultural college and had done their agribiz science had come

back, and all these patchwork rotational fields were turned into

monocultures for feedlot cattle. So, yeah, it's amazing how things can

change in a generation, and what we need is a very big generational

change right now. Basically going back, with more intelligence, into the

future.

KW: Well, isn't that what you're doing with the

students you have here? I just asked them when we were walking around,

" Do you think more people are going to be farmers in the

future? " They looked at me and simply said,

" Yes. "

RF: You have to look at the phenomenon of Cuba.

What an amazing example that is of a country that just suddenly had its

fossil fuels, its fertilizers - all of those taps - turned off, including

its market for its exports, when the USSR collapsed. I don't know if

you've seen the video " Power of Community. " It shows how now

the farmers are the most revered and respected people in the community.

They are the ones who have the most money.

KW: Does that amaze you?

RF: It is how it should be, because it is a

struggle in every society. I've worked a lot in the Third World too,

where this global cutthroat market is pitting country against country to

get stuff cheap. And the people who are missing out are the farmers.

They're getting screwed with their prices right across the board; farmers

just can't make ends meet operating a farm, be it Third World or First

World. The First-World farmers have got to compete with Third-World

farmers in terms of wages and try to deliver a crop at similar cost, so

farming's not worth anything, anywhere. In the Third World, you don't see

young people working on the farms. It's the old people out in the fields,

and they're dying off. None of them are encouraging their kids to become

farmers, because it doesn't pay. You can't survive as a farmer because

prices are so suppressed. David Suzuki, for years, has been saying that

we're only paying 20 percent of the true cost of our food. There are all

these hidden subsidies.

KW: Remember, it used to be that, in the US

anyway, people expected to spend about 25 percent of their income on

food, and 25 percent on housing, and 50 percent for everything else, and

now it's more like about 50 percent for housing and maybe 10 percent on

food.

RF: You know, oil has now hit peak. This is not

going to last. We've been talking about global warming since the early

'80s and sustainability for longer than that. And we haven't just been

talking about it. That's what I like about permaculture - permaculture

has actually been doing it, and it has grown rapidly, and mainly through

training, empowering people through education. That has been at the heart

of permaculture's success, training people to be trainers. I don't know

how many hundreds of thousands of trained permaculturists there are

around the planet. It's being practiced in 80, maybe, even over 100

different countries around the world.

KW: Could you just give me a quick definition of

permaculture?

RF: Well, the word itself means permanent culture,

and it's really a holistic or interdisciplinary or metadisciplinary

approach to how we sustain our environment. It looks at how human beings

can provide their needs while treading lightly on the earth, how we can

do it by still respecting the life around us and the life-supporting

systems on this planet, and, as such, it's got to embrace all aspects of

our society and how we meet our needs. Food, of course, is a primary

need. You don't live long without food, and then when we look at the

history of food production, we find that traditionally, agriculture has

been one of the most destructive enterprises. It has desertified [and]

salinated more land, destroyed more forests, and polluted more landscapes

than any other human enterprise. There are estimates that 70 percent of

CO2 emissions into the atmosphere are actually caused through food

production, because it's not just the farmer growing the food, it's all

the inputs into that. It's all those big corporations. It's all the

energy used for making these soluble fertilizers that are killing the

soil microflora and breaking down the structure of carbon in the soil.

Allen Young's book, " Priority One, " says that if we increased

the organic matter in soil by 1.6 percent in all our cropping lands, we

would sequester all the excess CO2 in the atmosphere.

KW: We've been hearing a lot about global warming,

the drying of Australia and losing the irrigation water from the major

river system in the country - the Murray-Darling. Who's going to feed

Australia in the future? How will you put bread on the table?

RF: In most bioregions, it actually takes very

little land to produce grain to feed people. Probably 90 percent of the

grain that's grown in Australia is for international trade. And it's only

a small amount that we actually need locally, so if those precious

resources are put into providing our need - if we focus on import

replacement instead of international marketing - you know, exporting rice

to Thailand and importing rice back ...

KW: Economic theory calls that comparative

advantage. It's actually kind of nuts isn't it?

RF: Yes it is. Trucking coals to Newcastle and

back again, just to generate a profit. We have to stop and look at

self-reliance on the national as well as the local level. It's got to

work all the way through, and there's just got to be a huge contraction.

There's got to be very large areas that are allowed to go back to some

kind of very, very hardy vegetation, and some of these areas that have

been growing annual grains will be much better off going into, say,

bush-food production. Acacia tree, what we call wattle, produces high

yields of a good quality grain that can be used for bread. It can be

roasted as a coffee substitute. It is things like this that can cope with

that low rainfall. We also won't need all that fossil fuel for plowing,

and harvesters and so on. We've just got to design different types of

harvesting systems to harvest the seeds of things like this.

KW: Are those ideas coming up, bubbling up to the

top of government at this time?

RF: Not yet. But I think things like this are

going to trigger that shift to where we start to look at native crops and

things that can cope with no irrigation and look very carefully at what

irrigation we do use and how we use the resources that we do have.

There's going to be a shift on all levels of society.

KW: There just is. There's no way around

it.

RF: Yes. Exactly.

KW: I want to ask you one more question, but I

think ...

(A man walks up to us here)

Man: We've got a calf in the garden. Anyway,

answer the question, and then....

RF: In the garden? In the actual vegetable

garden?

Man: No.

RF: Oh, okay.

KW: Do you need to go?

RF: That's alright.

KW: The neighbor's cow ...

RF: He probably came through from the eco-village

land. There's a gate that's on the corner down there. One of these guys

should know where it is. Anyway, it'll still be there in five minutes.

Last question.

KW: The perils of being on a farm - calves on the

loose! Well, I wanted to ask you about biochar, the Amazonian black

earth, and what kind of potential you think that has. Do you think it has

a great potential here in this part of the country for revitalizing

soils? You were talking earlier about getting carbon back into soils, and

I see a lot of interest in this idea.

RF: I think it's a multi-pronged approach that we

need to take, and no one system is going to be the ultimate solution,

because every system we use will have a cost in terms of where we're

getting resources. So, I think it's a matter of looking strategically at

the individual soil types and production systems. What is actually wrong

with the soil? What does it need? For some soils and some situations,

things like black soil ... charcoal ... may be the answer. For other

situations, it may be a matter of just getting the beneficial organisms

back with the right kind of bacteria-based or fungal-based compost teas.

In other situations, biodynamic preparations may be the best tool. In

many ways, I really like these, sort of, homeopathic approaches, because

they don't require huge resources to revitalize the land.

KW: So, you like the compost teas and things like

that?

RF: Yes, and the results are pretty

amazing.

KW: So when you bring the health back to the soil,

does that automatically start the process of incorporating carbon into it

then?

RF: Yes. Once you've got the soil biota working,

you are healing the land and the organic matter in the soil can hold

together and not break apart. And, of course, that needs to be combined

with cover crops and returning crop residues and so on back to the soil

and building up the organic matter. You don't just put compost tea on and

....

KW: Walk away ...

RF: Right. It's got to be a fully strategic

approach. Every farm needs a redesign, because you have to integrate the

tree crops in with it, and the wildlife areas need to be restored. You

have the windbreaks and the hedgerows and so on that need to be restored.

There are the water-management systems like swales and ponds that need to

be put in. It's got to be a multi-pronged approach. It's not just some

new additive you put into the soil and business as usual. What I think is

important is that, when these things are done, that they are done very

carefully, in terms of where is the charcoal going to come from, because

there is a great potential to be very irresponsible about getting the

sources of timber to turn into charcoal.

KW: Well, in a lot of cases, they're using

ag-waste, like rice hulls and things like that. It's not all

timber.

RF: Yeah, but, even looking at the ag-wastes, on

every resource we've got to look at what is the best way to use this, and

how can we maximize everything that we get out of each resource along the

process. So, in the process of actually turning a crop residue or

something or other into charcoal, is there some other product that we can

harness from this, or is there a byproduct that can become an input for

something else, and we've got to get away from these linear

systems.

KW: Right.

RF: Because that's when we screw up, every time.

It's when we only think in linear systems and we miss all of the

opportunities along the way. See, when we maximize every resource, we

look at every byproduct, every waste is a new resource for something

else, so that everything is recycled within the system. It is only

through a very radical slowdown of entropy that we can design systems

that are going to be sustainable.

KW: It seems like exciting work. Don't you feel

now is the time where you're finally being called upon to share all this

wonderful knowledge and experience you've been accumulating?

RF: Yes.

KW: Well, congratulations for all you've done, and

for seeing the fruits of your work.

RF: Yep, and more to come.

 

Kelpie

Wilson is Truthout's environment editor. Trained as a mechanical

engineer, she embarked on a career as a forest protection activist, then

returned to engineering as a technical writer for the solar power

industry. She is the author of

Primal Tears, an

eco-thriller about a hybrid human-bonobo girl. Greg Bear, author of

Darwin's Radio, says: " Primal Tears is primal storytelling,

thoughtful and passionate. Kelpie Wilson wonderfully expands our

definitions of human and family. "

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© : t r u t h o u t 2007

 

 

 

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