DVDs/Books

Permaculture or Industrial Agriculture? An Excerpt from the New Permaculture Soils DVD

In this excerpt from the new Permaculture Soils DVD, Geoff Lawton explains how we’re eeking out an existence on increasingly lifeless soils — where industrial agriculture takes rich fertile soils and steadily converts it into nothing but an inert medium for placing plants. This is not a process that can continue for much longer. In contrast, permaculture systems take dead soils, and steadily transforms them into a nutrient- and life-rich environment that plants, and people, can thrive in.

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7 Comments

  1. One of the important lessons that we have to learn about differing agricultural techniques and how they are applied in the world today, has to be to remember that different agricultural methods that are developed in the soil and water rich ‘Northern temperate clmate zones’ do not always apply so readily to the arid soil and water poor Southern climate zones, where sub-tropical climates readily desertify when exposed to intensive farming practices that are not appropriate and exported from climate zones where the ecological systems are different.

    Using mass intensive agriculture developed and exported from European climates has been seen to lead to environmental disasters across the planet, already within the last century as a result of mass industrialisation of the farming industry. The threat of environmental disaster, and food-shortages is not something that we face ‘in an unknown and undefined future’ we don’t readily know about or understand. It has already happened.

    Examples of the dust-bowl phenomena in the arid flat-lands of North America already happened in the 30s, leading to extensive famines across the Southern United States, as agricultural farming practices exported from England, were applied in a climatic region that was totally different and far more fragile. Top-soil erosion occured and whole regions of the Southern U.S. States experienced famines as a result of crop failure as top-soils disappeared and the farm-lands created from the flat American plains became transformed to dust and desert. This phenomena became known historically as the dust-bowl phenomena.

    https://www.angelfire.com/weird2/swoc/Dustbowl.html

    Western agricultural techniques exported to climates that can not tolerate the intense land use of large scale mass farming practices have already led to famines across Africa, with Ethiopia, Sudan and Zimbabwe as classic examples of countries that have been affected by a colonialist past that included mass agricultural practices which affected the wider populations of those countries even to the degree of destabilising the political and social infrastructures of those countries. Mass intensive agricultural practices at the expense of the people who lived on the land, has been seen as a practice which has affected the environment and social systems of whole societies across the planet for centuries. As those at the top exploit the resources of the territories that they control, the mass industrialisation process of the modern age has simply added to the opportunity for that exploitation process of both societies and the environment to occur.

    The land clearances of the 1600s in England, leading to the mass population transfer to the Americas; the process of revolutionary communism leading to mass population transfers in both Russia and China, was also about transfering populations who traditionally had led self-sufficient subsistence existences and life-styles, being transfered into city-dwellers dependent on those who claimed control of the mass land areas that had been affected – i.e. those who were in control of the mass agricultural processing industries.

    For more information about the way in which organic farming practices and philosophies were already part of the defensive discourse of traditional farming cultures internationally against the mass intensive agricultural models being developed since the turn of the 20th century, please see this important anthology of organic writing, decades before people in the modern age today, dependent on supermarkets, even knew what ‘organic’ actually meant.

    https://www.amazon.co.uk/Organic-Tradition-Anthology-Writings-Farming/dp/1870098099

  2. Olivier – thanks – the book I reccomended is an important book because it shows that being ‘organic’ is not new – and it shows that there were people who were fighting against the use of chemicals and intensive farming on the land even a century ago and that the ‘land’ was already being destroyed as a result of inappropriate agricultural practices even back then.

  3. Lilia, I thought the point made in the book so profound I highlighted parts as I read it, I read some of those parts out during an PC introduction talk this week, really useful, thanks again.

  4. Pete – sorry – I said ‘Olivier’ but I got confused by the way the comments were written. I’m glad the book was useful for you. I remember finding the book really inspiring when I read it. It’s a great collection of different historical case studies that are particularly useful for any serious permaculture or organic practitioner in the modern day so I’m glad you found it so useful for you and that you were able to use quotes from the book for your talk. Apologies for the extremely late reply!

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