The Regenerative Omnivore & Permaculture #NoBareSoil #Regenivore

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In the video below Rick responds to Curtis Stone’s myths about permaculture.

While watching Rick talk, I had a few thoughts:

The *first* principle of permaculture is observe and interact in any given context, *second* to obtain resources relevant to that context, *third* obtain a yield with those resources. Curtis’ beef is with the yield because he believes a permaculture zone 3-4 food forest should compete with zone 0 because “experts” somewhere said so.

Permaculture_Zones.svg.png

Maybe Curtis is right or maybe he doesn’t really comprehend zones, and the frequency and duration of work in those zones for the output. All his cropping is high intensity and long duration that I’ll call zone 0 (greenhouse) because it’s basically his home, & zone one-quarter because most of what he grows is young milti-annual crops that he harvests and transplants multiple times per season in his and the neighbours backyards. These are high turnover nitrate driven crops that he culls often in the middle of the vegetative growth stage of the sigmoid curve, only letting the most valuable annuals flower and fruit over the season like tomatoes.

sigmoid growth curve

The high nitrate crops then require external inputs (high nitrate turkey compost) for new seedling transplants to keep them in that vegetative growth stage. In doing so anytime he harvests or tilthers (shallow till) he disturbs the soil-plant ecosystem, even in no dig systems this happens between crops. It’s how most people garden and farm, so much so it can be considered the norm. So in Curtis and most of the world’s commercial minds eye they see it as the done thing because it yields results and order and is easier to harvest.

The one thing these commercial systems all do well is harvesting and removing life. Harvesting the pests, plants, nutrients, the ecosystems. On the other hand rarely do they perform well when it comes to  sequestering and adding life or regenerating ecosystems to support diversity.

On the other hand Rick’s example of a guild above where he’s stacking the harvest time of two perennial crops in the same place does a similar thing to Curtis’ multi-annual cropping but uses nitrifying soil microbes to produce ammonium for the perennials, including soil carbon sequestering mycorrhizae that need plant hosts. All while keeping the soil shaded, and fed and getting two crop harvests a season. Permaculture needs more people like Rick performing these guild experiments, recording and sharing yield results.

A recent favourite of mine that combines a bit of both is alley cropping in syntropic agriculture.

However permaculture really could better be showing producers and consumers actual yields and practices that produce them. With real metrics, examples.

I also think that Regenerative cropping really needs a movement behind it like vegetables have with vegans, but one for plant and animals foods that are soil and planet positive. There’s probably already a name for that?

For me, regenerative farming came to mind, so I came up with the name Regenivore, but when I googled I was greeted with no results.

Are there any consumer supported agriculture (CSA) initiatives that are regenerative focused? Standards bodies for Certified Regenerative produce?

#NoBareSoil

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Permaculture’s Yield Problem

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Curtis really chews into Permaculture with this one, and the sheep in the comments follow into the long grass to fertilise the field.

In his first myth he talks about context when it comes to commercial agriculture.

On that, the first principle in Permaculture is to observe and interact with nature and design solutions that suit your particular situation.
If that situation happens to be market driven then your highest priority will likely be a return on your yield from that market.

And commercial cropping farmers like Curtis want instant plants, so they grow instant plants like Curtis does, out of a packet. A packet of seeds, a packet of compost, a packet of water. Water makes up most of the plants he grows, and studies show proteins need water to fold as Richard Perkins at Ridgedale is finding out this year. So Curtis gets results, and sells courses and spreads his practises.

Here’s the breakdown I did of the elements needed in the 68 building blocks of life. The nucleic acids (DNA, RNA), proteins, glycans, and lipids:

Carbon 28.4% Hydrogen 48.78% Nitrogen 4.57% Oxygen 18.07% Sulfur 0.113% Phosphorus 0.056%

Air, it all comes from the atmosphere. Hydrogen, Oxygen & Carbon. Acid rain? Sulfur. Mushroom spores in the air? Phosphorus. With deposition rates calculated to be ~320 ×1010g yr−1 of P onto the continents from the atmosphere. Just add mycorrhizae.

This brings me to the second principle that is all about collecting & storing the energy needed to obtain a yield in the first place. This means sequestering those elements and more, by building the soil carbon sponge, or by collecting resources, or a team of resources. In Curtis’ case it’s compost and greenhouses to keep plants in the goldilocks zone between 26C and 30C. According to a plant in a bag experiment with a CO2 sensor, between 18C and 26C photosynthesis increases exponentially.

That brings me to the third principle which is to obtain a yield. How do you do that thoough? The principles don’t specify; it’s up to you and your context. And this is where I feel Permaculture leads some people astray.
Some patterns and practices might be fit for obtaining high yields, others aren’t, and yield is always the bone that commercial farmers pick with Permaculture, and like Curtis they always point at food forests because everyone else points at food forests.

Permaculture has a third principle problem because Permaculture just don’t care, it doesn’t care about being stung by a beeless commercial cropping environment, or care to collect the yield data to provide an alternative.

Permaculture covers such a wide range of practices and people and design views, and most of them are purple as Paul Wheaton puts it, while others, the minority, are the black textbook driven types that record everything they do. Richard I’m looking at you.

Most mainstream and many permies seem to view “Permaculture” as the common practices we often see applied. The swales, chicken tractors, holistic grazing, food forests. This gives Permaculture a bad rep to commercial cropping people like Curtis when “Permaculture” projects fail to deliver. To them it gives Permaculture a bad name with some developing an outright pitchfork opposition to it.

Permaculture hasn’t helped itself with examples of designs that focus on cattle & chicken tractors, when what most people really need is a better understanding of the intensive zones, how to obtain early yields that don’t get eaten by bugs, what yields to expect, not to mention the frequency and duration of time spent working in the different zones to achieve them. Maybe we should GPS tag permies.
Thing is, you simply can’t expect a huge commercial yield soon after throwing down a food forest of seeds on soil with poor nutrient cycling. Soil restoration can take time and inputs, let alone the time it takes for a forest to produce at scale, and soil restoration and maintenance is probably the most important lesson permies can teach about obtaining yield. Permaculture needs more yield data, more trials, more success stories.
Maybe it needs a principle or resource for collaborative data collection to show what really works. Maybe a distributed ledger to see who produced what and how, where and when. Blockchain’s are all the buzz. Collective data we can all search like the Matrix for patterns in.

matrix earth

Here’s a video with Rachel in the UK from 2013 showing her visual data over 9 years of succession from 2004. How much produce does each of those stages produce?

If you want to see her 2018 update, sign up to Geoff Lawton’s website for the free content to see it here: Geoff Lawton Permaculture

Curtis also mentions the lazy garden. What zone this is that in, what climate? It’s so easy to take different practices out of context and then wonder why they don’t work for you. Straw is also up at something like a C:N of 80:1 and takes a different amount of time in different climates to decompose and mineralise into plant food.

Immutable records may help. Perhaps OpenTimestamps for record keeping, maybe a Professional Permie Guild of nerds is needed?

An example might be group trials of things like compost teas. I feel like there’s a misunderstanding of what compost teas are, and how often they need applying to different soils or plants. Really they’re just a liquid fertiliser mixture that is proven under microscope to grow microbes from compost. All this does is give you an idea of what elements are not in your compost. Often the Soil Food Web process seems backwards to me. After all aren’t you trying to amend your soil to grow microbes and plants in it, so shouldn’t your soil be the primary ingredient to your soil tea such that you add nutrients to it in an attempt to grow microbes under the microscope and plants in pots, and the field? That way you know what and how much your soil needs to be amended with to get growing and nutrient cycling. And this data could be recorded and shared with people with the same or similar soil. Sure, you can also add mycorrhizae collected at the roots of plants if your soil has no plants or mycorrhizae, but you may just need to build soil carbon for the mycorrhizae to want to live there.

soil-microbial-diversity-nutrient-cycling

microbialsoc

You might have plenty of organic matter and just need some inorganic sulfur to lower the pH of your soil to increase the formation of organic acids to improve nutrient cycling:

Curtis’ second myth is about layers, nowhere does Permaculture say they have to be in a food forest. Perhaps Curtis should learn the practices used in Syntropic agriculture with layers and row cropping succession where there’s no reason you couldn’t develop and send in the backpackers to fix the robots. Maybe permaculture needs a simulator? A game, a clone world? All based on real world data that people can experiment in.

Again Curtis mentions maintenance and food forest productivity, again I harp on about zones. An unmaintained food forest may as well be a zone 5 wild zone where human intervention is essentially zero. You can see that with the difficulty getting into Rachel’s garden at the 9 year mark.

Curtis goes on to give an example of an orchard needing maintenance. The Permaculture Orchardist from Canada has already shown they need maintenance. Here he is maintaining his.

Compare with commercial growers here in Australia talking about ground covers for mid row.

They’re contrasting pictures, but which produces higher yield?
Interestingly Stefan had to get rid of his bees because the pollination rate were so high his trees were breaking under the strain of fruit.

I could go on and cover crop over his other myths if someone wants me to, but no one actually reads this thing do they? I know I don’t, I just listen to the all the animal life in them food forests and pretend I’m a Honey Badger.

Adaptive Keyline Swales and Erosion Control with Vetiver grass and Pinto Peanut, Ecuador

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If you look closely you can see a saddle dam at the top of the ridge where the grass is very green. A stark illustration of how storing and sinking water can change a landscape. If you look VERY closely you can see where the excess water from the saddle dam is travelling down into the valley towards the pond where the grass is greener and vetiver grasses have been planted.

To the left of the saddle dam in the valley you can see a line of trees leading to a pond. Where those trees begin at the top of picture is an ideal water collection point for another dam, and is known as a keypoint between ridges. Using swales, ditches or deep ripping from that point can distribute excess water to other areas of the hillside, thereby slowing the travel of the water down the hillside.
Swales or ditches don’t always have to be on contour. Often you want to distribute excess water where land naturally funnels it to other places. So the higher in the hillside you can slow, store and distribute water from, the better.
Let gravity distribute it for you.