Production Permaculture

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.

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