The new squash bed where the pigs wintered.

In addition to Reed Canary Grass, the pigs have also knocked back Japanese Knotweed, and Canadian Thistle.

Multiple Functions for a Single Element, as originally described in my Permaculture training, means that every element in the system has at least three functions.  In Holmgren's list of principles it's also called Integrate Rather Than Segregate).  These ideas relate to ecological science through the phenomena of diversity, stability, resilience, interdependence, competition, cooperation, mutualism, symbiosis, and emergent properties. 

So, what do I mean by elements?  Any part of my farm!  My farm is made up of the interactions and relationships between chickens, pigs, me, my dog, apple trees, earthworms, owls, weasels, Spotted Winged Drosophila.....  If you are designing your own farm, the list could go on forever.  As I have lived in this place for several decades, I have had more time to observe that unexpected elements are the connectors of so much else.

The more each element is interconnected in my system, the easier the needs of various parts of my farm are met, and the easier my work is.

Here are some obvious examples of elements in my system, and the multiple functions they provide:

Chickens provide eggs, scratch soil for aeration, provide fertilizer, feed us when they are done laying, and eat bugs;

Windbreaks reduce wind, provide firewood, fodder, nitrogen fixation, pollen & nectar for bees;

Ponds provide an irrigation source, water for livestock, aquaculture, fire control, and light reflection;

All this seems a little basic and philosophical until you think about the difference between an integrated system and one that is not.  Every time I have a broken link in my system, it will cost me money for more inputs, and time.  For example, over the years as I have observed my pigs in action, the farm has slowly become reoriented so that I can take advantage of their work.  In a linear system, they'd be in a pen, probably getting scraps from around the farm, but still totally dependent on grain feed I ship in, and requiring a lot of work on my end to do something with all their manure. 

In a more integrated web of a system, they rotate around under my fruit trees until midsummer, fertilizing and nosing around the understory.  This disrupts insect pest cycles and means I don't have to spend money on sprays to kill apple pests.  I never mow my orchards any more because the pigs do it before they move to their summer pastures and again when they move back after the fruit is picked in late summer or fall.  This saves DAYS of work, and no capital expenses for mowing equipment.  And no fossil fuels.  Since I am not mowing out there, I have more ground-nesting birds, making my farm a bird sanctuary.  Since the pigs are grazing, I need way less grain in the summer for them.  (And yes, I know, they are not ruminants.  But they eat an awful lot of grass all the same.)

My pigs are American Guinea Hogs, a threatened breed of pigs that don't root.  They peacefully co-exist with my fruiting shrubs and trees, which also means I can really diversify those because I don't need more weed management time every moment I add more complexity to my system.  Last spring we had a great deal of rain that kept my clay ground soft for much longer than usual, and the pigs did root more.... they dug up and ate all the roots from a patch of Canadian Thistle I hadn't gotten to yet.  This is the third invasive species on my farm that I've used pigs to manage (accidentally, by finding out that they'd fixed a problem without me deliberately planning for it).  When the elements in your system start improving things without your direct involvement, that's when you know you are starting to have enough interconnectedness and right relationship.

In the last couple of years, I have also realized that instead of moving all their winter bedding to mulch market gardens the following year, I should plant the gardens where the pigs were.  Bam!  With a little extra fencing and some careful timing, I just saved a week's worth of work and my back besides.  The potatoes, squash, and cabbage get planted rotationally into the winter pig areas.  Snow can last under that bedding until July which means, as we've gone through four years of drought, that I don't have to start irrigating until mid summer.

So here's the design take-away: I started with pigs because I wanted an animal component in my system, but I didn't really know where that would lead me.  Over the roughly ten years I've had my herd, I have slowly observed more and more benefits --way more than three -- and adapted my management system to take advantage of those functions.  This means I had to have a flexible system to start with: moveable fencing, portable housing, the time to observe, and the markets to support the learning curve.  That element of emergence is the best part of managing a complex system.  It requires me to have the humility to know that I am not really in charge... but nature will eagerly embroider on anything I start.

When I was training to be a farmer, I studied Permaculture design.  Permaculture has a fraught history full of neo-colonial impulses (taking traditional knowledge without credit or recompense or request), and I eventually walked away from the movement, frustrated by the sexism, the racism, the cult mentality, the commodification, and the bunker mindset that I often encountered.  I was going to be an Organic farmer!  I was going to have a cool tractor with all the attachments! 



Fast forward a decade, and I was staring at my flooded organic market garden after a hundred year rain event, and realizing that conventional organic production methods were not going to work for my land as climate change got worse.

In Permaculture, you start with what you have and leverage your strengths in a design.  "The problem is the solution."

So I went back to my resources and asked, how do people farm in monsoon cultures around the world?  I looked into the Chinampas system in Mexico and traditional agriculture in India and China.  It turns out that the people farming the region of the land that I had settled had a system they'd used to farm in floodplains for generations (duh).  There are the outlines of raised beds throughout the South Shore where the Anishenabe have gardened over the centuries.

So I made raised beds in my market garden, with sunken aisles in between.  These capture otherwise catastrophic rain events and let the water soak in for the droughts to come.  They also capture spring snow melt and hold the moisture for the summer.

Little did I know how quickly the climate would change and that I would need that design within a decade.

What I did know is that this design committed me to hand cultivation: raised beds with sunken aisles in an intensive pattern don't work with a tractor.  Today, though, I raise veggies for fifty families (35+ in the summer and 10-15 in the winter) on a quarter of an acre, mostly by hand.

And I dug back into the principles of Permaculture design.  For all its flaws, what I value about my training was the synergy between the Western science of ecology, and traditional ecological knowledge.  And if that sits in a framework of decolonizing and critical thinking (meaning always questioning, and always asking what justice looks like) then it works much better.

I have not found many examples of production Permaculture.  Most Permaculture writing is aimed at homesteaders, while only a few books in the regenerative agriculture sphere incorporate Permaculture design.  So over the next set of blogs, I will delve into how I apply Permaculture/ecological design theory to my farm.