Permaculture doesn't mean food forest. A food forest is one form of permaculture, but it is by no means the only form, or even the ideal one. The hype about food forests comes from how effective they are in tropical climates. But it isn't actually very efficient in temperate climates. Temperate climates do need to rely heavily on annual crops. Those crops can be grown using permaculture, we don't have to trade our potatoes for chestnuts.
>Birth rate globally is already at/below replacement rate
No it is not. Current RNI is 1.06% and projections do not suggest it getting down to replacement levels in the next 50 years unless mortality increases substantially.
>Meanwhile, in a half-century, we've doubled the population, while significantly reducing food costs and radically reducing hunger globally.
By destroying vast portions of the natural world and wiping out thousands of species and even putting the future survival of our own species at risk. The "angst" is entirely valid. Destroying the planet to prop up obscenely inflated population levels for absolutely no benefit is horrifyingly evil. The expected population growth in Africa is enough to finish destroying every last spec of natural ecosystem on the planet that is capable of being used for food production. Yes, we absolutely need to address this problem.
"Future survival of our own species"? Nah. The last human being will eat the last cockroach. We have made technology to adapt to living on the moon. We might make things painful for humanity in general, might even break civilization (although I think that's unlikely). But survival of the species? We haven't yet invented technology that can wipe out humans.
As for our "evil", "obscenely inflated population levels"... well, what do you think we should do about it? Because the only "solution" I can see to this thing that horrifies you is what the Nazis called a Final Solution. The global population is what it is, whether you like it or not. If you had Thanos' infinity glove, would you use it? Would you use it, knowing you're just knocking the population back to 1965 levels?
>Because the only "solution" I can see to this thing that horrifies you is what the Nazis called a Final Solution.
Uh, the solution to do what the article suggests. Grow more food on less land so that population growth doesn't come at the expense of the last shreds of wilderness on the planet. How does one get to the point where you think "growing more food is hitler!!1" is a reasonable response?
We're already growing more calories per acre than any time in history, by a large margin. Mostly doing the very agricultural practices you decry, the ones that are "destroying the planet". That's one reason the population has grown so rapidly - famine is no longer keeping it in check.
"The last shreds of wilderness" is an absurd hyperbole. There's still a lot of wilderness left, and I think we're approaching maximum land under cultivation. (checks google) As a matter of fact... in 1970, 4.48B hectares were cultivated. in 2008, it was 4.83B, a <10% increase over almost 40 years and a near-doubling of the population. What happened? Incredible increases in yield starting post-WWII, greatly increasing the amount of food per acre.
So where does this leave the original study? Does it assume there will be no improvement in yield? Is farming more land the only solution being tried? Obviously not. What they're breathlessly recommending is exactly what we've been doing for over half a century now (really, about two centuries) - improving yield.
>Mostly doing the very agricultural practices you decry, the ones that are "destroying the planet".
What are you talking about? We're doing it using the increased atmospheric CO2. Slash and burn is what is destroying the planet, and it has terrible long term productivity. That's why they have to keep slashing and burning.
>There's still a lot of wilderness left, and I think we're approaching maximum land under cultivation.
The acres currently under cultivation is entirely irrelevant. If I burn down 100 acres of rainforest every year and cultivate it, its always 100 acres of cultivated land. But I am destroying 100 acres of wilderness every year. The land that is now a barren wasteland still matters, even though I am no longer cultivating it.
>What they're breathlessly recommending is exactly what we've been doing for over half a century now (really, about two centuries) - improving yield.
Except we're not doing that, which is the point. We accidentally did that with CO2 emissions, but we're reaching the limits of what increased atmospheric CO2 can do. Once CO2 is no longer the limiting factor for growth, no amount of extra CO2 will help. Agricultural science is not interested in producing more food with less, it is interested in producing more profit.
I wouldn't consider the market gardener to be in the same area as grow biointensive. Jeavons has a strong focus on self-sufficiency and sustainability in his system and goals. Fortier does not, he's only interested in organic as gimmick to make money. Also his book is pretty deceptive compared to what he really does on his "farm", which wasn't actually profitable until after he released the book and got "famous", which is what sell the overpriced lettuce that finally got him profitable.
I think the biointensive system Jeavons promotes gives you a pretty good starting place, but it does promote a bit of needless work. Skip the composting and just use the compost crops as a mulch. There's no need to build piles and turn them and then spread the compost, you can just let it compost in place on the garden where it will end up. You can skip growing the compost crops too if you have trees to collect leaves from in the fall. And save your back and skip the double digging, or any digging at all for that matter. All it does is set you back in your first couple of years for no reason.
The average US family had an annual income of $956 in 1940. That is $17,268.43 in todays dollars, far more than $3k. And that was almost entirely earned by a single individual rather than both adults in the household working like now. Also, someone earning that little paid no income tax. The average house price in 1940 was $2938, which is $53k in today's money. Now the average family income is $70k, but that's mostly two people's income, they only get to keep $60k because of income tax, and houses are $200k. So we earn about twice as much, but houses cost about 4 times as much. It isn't nearly as clear cut a win for modern life as you make it out to be.
It’s my fault. Hundred years ago refers to previous turn of century, circa 1900, then went to 1940 about indoor plumbing for toilets. We were poor, not much above Mexican or Finnish standards (better, but hardly by much). It was anascrnt industrislization as well as WWi and WWii that catapulted us into a powerhouse.
That doesn't actually change much. Average income in 1900 was $438, which is $13,186.15 in 2018 dollars. And 1900 was a low point historically more so than now is a high point. The worst of the gilded age exploitation was happening then, causing huge poverty.
>The reason why food is grown by large industrial farming companies is because they can grow it ~100 times cheaper than you could.
No, it is because people don't want to grow food. My tomatoes cost me 2 minutes of time. I don't know how much you want to value my time at, but lets say I am pretty awesome and deserve $100/hour. That's $3.33 cents for all the tomatoes I can eat. Where are the industrial farming companies producing tomatoes for 3.3 cents per 100 pounds?
>If everyone had to grow their own food, then everyone would starve to death.
If that were true, we wouldn't exist. People did grow their own food for thousands of years. If everyone had to grow their own food, we'd be fine. All mechanization did was free up people from agricultural labor to do other jobs, humans predate tractors.
>The idea of locally grown food in everyone's backyard is a fairy tale that just sounds nice, but would actually be horrible.
It is a reality for lots of people, and we're pretty happy about it.
> If that were true, we wouldn't exist. People did grow their own food for thousands of years. If everyone had to grow their own food, we'd be fine. All mechanization did was free up people from agricultural labor to do other jobs, humans predate tractors.
This works when everyone owns many acres of land per person, and is spending their entire life working the fields, doing hard labor, and doing very little else with their life yes. We don't live in that world anymore, though.
I suspect there isn't even enough physical land on the earth to support this inefficient method of farming.
We have significant evidence of how this worked out for people. That world that you are describing, where everyone spent their entire life just trying to barely feed themselves, was a horrible place, for everyone.
This period of time was called "the history of the world before the industrial era". And lots and lots of people died. So no, they were not fine.
> It is a reality for lots of people, and we're pretty happy about it.
By "a lot" do you mean a very small percentage of the total population?
> My tomatoes cost me 2 minutes of time.
What you do with your tiny backyard garden is irrelevant. It is mathmatically impossible for you to be feeding yourself entirely on that, unless you have multiple acres of land, which I doubt is what you are describing. Your anecdote does not overrule physics.
Not really. The Netherlands has a high dollar value of "agricultural exports" which includes flowers at 10% of that value and equipment and machinery at another 10%. Of the 80% that is actually food, a lot of it is high value low calorie food. And the methods used to produce that food are horribly destructive, not sustainable, and will cost future generations untold hardship to deal with: https://www.dutchnews.nl/features/2018/03/dutch-agriculture-...
>What would it take to make beef production more efficient?
Nothing. Large animals that live long lives are inefficient by their very nature. The bigger an animal is, the more of its energy consumption goes to maintenance rather than growth. And the longer it lives before reaching slaughter weight, the more that inefficiency compounds. If you somehow turned cattle into 5 pound animals that mature in 6 weeks, they would be efficient, but they also wouldn't really qualify as cattle any more and their meat would likely be noticeably different than beef.
Most of it doesn't go to any single use. Only 36% of US corn production goes to livestock feed. 40% to ethanol production. And while people like to complain about the caloric inefficiency of animals vs plants, the reality is that chicken being fed corn produces 5 million calories per acre, the same calories per acre as wheat. Almost all plant crops produce fewer calories per acre than that. For some reason nobody seems to be demanding that we stop eating wheat, nevermind things like lettuce, spinach, broccoli, onions, tomatoes, etc, that produce far fewer calories per acre.
>Really you want a variety of plants pulling up nutrients out of the ground (because different varieties have different abilities to break down and convert the nutrients in the soil)
That doesn't appear to be needed. The plants don't have the ability at all, the microorganisms they attract and feed do it. You can build fertility while growing a single crop year after year, Fukuoka did rice and wheat every year for decades on the same land just fine. As long as you keep the microorganisms fed and don't insist on a program of routinely killing them, they'll break down the minerals that the plants need and make them available.
>Finally, you often want some of that happening in an anaerobic environment, so you don't bind oxygen to it.
No you don't. When it happens in an anaerobic environment you get end products that hinder plant growth instead of helping it. This is the main reason soil compaction is a problem, you get pooled water in the ground creating anaerobic conditions which kill off all the good bacteria and fungi.
> Fukuoka did rice and wheat every year for decades on the same land just fine.
Fukuoka also used wild carrots and daikon to bring up nutrients from lower down (source: My friend studied with him). Also white clover to fix nitrogen (and even went so far as to say, "Don't bother experimenting with anything else. I've tried everything and white clover is the best."). Rice is a summer crop and in most places in Japan you can have a winter crop as well, which you use for nutrient migration. Fukuoka's techniques work very well around where I like (my friend's fields are fantastic), but apparently don't work very well in more temperate climes (just from what I've heard).
>Fukuoka also used wild carrots and daikon to bring up nutrients from lower down (source: My friend studied with him).
Not according to him he didn't. Read his books, he was very clear about everything he did. He grew vegetables to eat, in a completely different area, it had nothing to do with the grain field.
>Also white clover to fix nitrogen
Nitrogen is a non-issue precisely because you can pull it out of the air for free. You said you want a variety of plants to pull nutrients from the ground. Clover pulling nitrogen from the air is not support for that idea.
>Rice is a summer crop and in most places in Japan you can have a winter crop as well, which you use for nutrient migration.
But he didn't do that, he used it for a crop. He did rice and wheat, like I said. Both were crops, he sold the harvests. He did it for decades without any decline in yields. The idea that you need a "diverse polyculture" of plants as the current fad calls it is completely unsupported by evidence. They just need a healthy ecosystem to grow in, not necessarily different plants.
>Fukuoka's techniques work very well around where I like (my friend's fields are fantastic), but apparently don't work very well in more temperate climes
The techniques and ideas work fine, but you can't blindly copy his setup as it was. You don't have the season for two crops, so you don't do rice and wheat. You just do wheat. Marc Bonfils has grown winter wheat every year in the same field for over a decade with no inputs, no rotation, and yields increased each year as the soil was restored. If you are in a cold enough climate it might even make sense to compost your straw in the spring in order to warm your soil up earlier, but I am not sure about that yet, I'll be testing it this spring.
