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Message: <blockquote data-quote="citrinella" data-source="post: 1416234" data-attributes="member: 15241">As a farmer and committed conservationist I watched this programme with fascination, and found it truly inspirational. I am considering how to implement some of the ideas, initially on small areas, eventually extending as we find out how to make it work.I didn't buy into the "real oil crunch in five years" timescale. Sorry, but I am extremely cynical of "experts" with their alarmist talk - to get resources diverted in their direction. However, that real oil crunch seems inevitable ... we may or may not have developed alternative sources of energy by the time it comes. I hope we do, but don't believe in burying our heads in the sand and assuming everything will be OK. The biggest reason for pressing ahead now is that it will take 20 years under ideal conditions to get a permaculture system established and working properly. Conditions in my part of the world are far from ideal, and we have a huge amount of learning (read trial and error !) to go through so 30 or 40 years is more likely. It is tempting to say, "what is the point ? - I'm unlikely to live that long !" but this is for the future of our people, not us as individuals.Picking one message to respond to as the thinking is sharp :Lots of folk have questioned the supply for population. This is a very valid point, and one the programme did not address. I don't think it needed to - the point was that if there is no input, how do we get the best output ? Maybe permaculture offers that best output. The consequences may be frightening - but the consequences of not trying to maximize output from no input might be one hell of a sight worse.The programme argued that permaculture requires less effort than existing alternatives. Once established, I can see how this might be true. The big effort in farming is in moving soil - ploughing moves approximately 5000 tonnes per hectare, and that is only a start ! Moving inputs requires a vast amount of effort too. I grew up in an environment where much of the work was done by hand - one week the fertilizer for the year arrived ... I had 130 tons to carry from the lorries into the store and stack in 50kg bags, more or less by myself. During the winter I had 200 cattle to feed. 10-15 tonnes of silage were handled mechanically by then, but it wasn't many years since that had been done partly by hand. I still had a few tonnes of silage to shift every day, together with several tonnes of barley feed and waste potatoes, and then there was the straw for bedding. Fortunately all the dung handling was mechanised.I can believe that permaculture eliminates much of that by keeping an established system in place. It needs to, as the pre-mechanized ways were killers. I saw the results - "older" farm workers were often not in good shape and it was a good job they enjoyed farm life because they had no energy for much else. Indeed I am probably suffering some after effects though mechanization improved the job immensely while I was still young. No more 50kg bags for starters !Tillage on farms is not entirely reliant on the plough either. "Non-inversion tillage" is used to describe systems that do not use a plough. Varying degrees of tillage are practised from "no-till" or "direct drilling" - scratching a groove and placing seed into it; through "minimum tillage" or "min-till" - cultivating to create a shallow seedbed to seed into; through to deep tillage systems, some of which are perhaps equivalent to ploughing. Not all are suitable for all soils for all crops. Root crops tend to require deep cultivation, heavy soils tend to be better for min-till (for cereals), and sandy soils for direct drilling (cereals). Certain weed problems (grass species including self-seeding cereals, aka "volunteers") are best controlled with inversion (ploughing). Wet conditions favour deeper tillage to improve drainage away from the rooting zone. We have been practising min-till for several years. My first efforts in the 1980's came unstuck when wet conditions produced a pan just below cultivation depth and very poor rooting and crops. We have much better equipment now, but last autumn were forced to revert to the plough by the very wet conditions. Non-plough is certainly our approach of choice, as for many cereal farmers up and down the country, but if global warming leads to wet conditions at sowing times, we will either have to shift sowing times or non-inversion tillage will become impractical.I think the programme treated organic farming entirely appropriately. Organic farming avoids certain selected inputs. It is questionable whether output per unit of energy input is very much better than conventional farming. Certainly in the scheme of and energy supply hiatus as proposed on the programme, organic farming would also be in serious trouble.As noted above, fertilizing organic ground is a serious problem, indeed it is impossible from the ground itself. Returning all the human waste resulting from the food produced as biosolids would still not make the system truly sustainable as there would be too many losses.Permaculture does not truly fix this problem. There is off-take. Biosolids could be returned to reduce the net off-take. The argument in the programme was that nutrient off-take was derived from very deep in the soil. That increases the size of the reservoir available, but like abstracting from ground-water, the evil day will arrive when you run out. This can be seen in tropical soils which have suffered off-take for much longer than our newer, post-glacial soils. These tropical soils are much less fertile than ours. If permaculture works as described, that evil day may be long delayed, allowing us to optimize our systems to return nutrients as efficiently as possible.Yes, I thought this programme was wonderful, truly inspirational, and with lovely wildlife. Would I eat nuts instead of cereals ? I was laughing over this with my wife, but we knew if push comes to shove, it will have to be. No way am I going back to the killer ways of pre-mechnized conventional farming.Mike.</blockquote>

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