A persistent feature of conversations about perennial agriculture is that for most people outside the agroforestry or perennial grain worlds, their primary reference point is permaculture. Historic and indigenous perennial systems are often referred to as a form of permaculture (or permaculture is said to be a contemporary incarnation of these traditional methods of farming), or alternative perennialization efforts are either described through the language and priorities of permaculture, or permaculture is used as a sort of benchmark from which to judge system success.
I find the fact that permaculture has assumed the position as the archetypal model of perennial agriculture to impede the long-term prospects of the wider movement. While I’m not dismissing permaculture, as it can be a valuable framework, the field embodies a very specific worldview and utilizes a particular method of design that isn’t universal to other models of perennialization. Farmers, gardeners, and communities employ a diverse set of worldviews and production goals; viewing these through a strict permacultural lens consumes a disproportionate amount of oxygen and threatens to marginalize or diminish peer models of perennial agriculture in the public discourse.1
First, a bit of history. Permaculture, a portmanteau of permanent agriculture, was developed by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. In the movement’s founding text, they define the concept as “an integrated, evolving system of perennial or self-perpetuating plant and animal species useful to man . . . in essence, a complete agricultural ecosystem, modeled on existing but simpler examples” (Mollison & Holmgren, 1978). Permaculture was heavily influenced by ideas of systems ecology, keyline planning (an Australian agrarian movement focusing on retaining water and building soil in drylands), and J. Russell Smith’s concept of permanent agriculture (which inspired the term permaculture, but whose ideas were distinct in some ways from Mollison’s and Holmgren’s).
While permaculture carries the vanguard of perennial agriculture in the popular imagination, the movement’s worldview is rather narrowly focused in its approach to production that goes beyond its centering of perennial plants. Permaculture has a very precise idea of what it means to design a farm, emphasizing a small-scale, labor-intensive approach. From Ferguson and Lovell’s (2014) assessment of the permaculture literature:
“From the perspective of permaculture design, crops and land uses should be selected and placed to reflect a fine-grained analysis of in-site heterogeneity, including topography, microclimate, and existing vegetation. Microclimate effects, driven by local and regional topography and vegetation, can be leveraged to maximize energy efficiency and identify sites for otherwise marginal crops.”
Overall, the goals of permaculture are to optimize small-scale farming, taking into account every minor variation in a landscape to maximize the use of sunlight, water, and other available resources. Permaculture is also highly integrative, ambitiously attempting to loop in energy production, building construction, and community organization into their design ethos (Scott, 2010).
As you can see, permaculture isn’t just focused on the perennials — its doctrines prioritize specific ideas regarding the role of labor, energy, and people in how systems of farming are designed and operated. This quite specific worldview influences the movement’s relationships with other models of perennial agriculture.
Probably the biggest divergence from other modes of perennial farming is permaculture’s ethos surrounding labor. Aside from using machinery for earthworks projects, permaculturalists tend to prefer using human, plant, or animal labor to construct and maintain production systems. These priorities are revealed across common permaculture practices. The zones of use concept, for instance, involves placing production systems requiring daily attention closer to the “center of human activity” (home, workshop, office, etc.), with low attention systems being placed further away from the center (with some variation depending on how cooperative the landscape is) to minimize travel time for high-traffic activities (Ferguson & Lovell, 2014). Polycultures are valued for similar reasons, as increasing the functional diversity of a field can reduce the need for human labor.
While this is an admirable way to farm, this ethos conflicts with the preferences of many perennial farmers. Most perennial grain farmers and alley croppers operate at a scale that exceeds human labor, instead using modern machinery to plant and harvest their crops. These types of farmers still often integrate plant-labor in their systems, employing diverse crop mixtures to boost soil fertility and fight insect pests. Still, many perennial farmers focus on producing food for a large off-farm population, not on self-sufficiency.2
The specific role of perennial plants on the landscape can also differ between permaculture and other perennial-farming orientations. Various forms of conservation buffers, such as river buffers, windbreaks, or prairie strips, are not designed to fully perennialize a given farm, but to ameliorate the erosion and pollution inherent to annual crops by selectively integrating strips of perennials on the land. Judged by a permaculture rubric, these practices would be considered deficient, as only a small percentage of the system is strictly permanent. But, if designed well, large ecological improvements can be realized through these harm-reduction style practices, even though they don’t hold close to permaculture design principles.
Turning away from scale and role, matters of species selection and nativeness can also be a source of distinction separating permaculturalists from other perennial practitioners. Historically speaking, permaculture favors having access to as many species as possible to maximize available options when constructing production systems (Ferguson and Lovell). While these positions have moderated a bit since the 1970s, perennial farmers who prioritize the use of native plants may find permaculture to be out of step with their ethical preferences.
Finally, the movement has a strong orientation towards individuals’ capacity to affect change on their own. This ethos can be summed up through permaculturalist Geoff Lawton’s slogan, “all the world’s problems can be solved in a garden.” Policy or institution-building theories of change aren’t particularly compatible with this approach, and those that favor forms of collective and broad-based action, especially those past the farmgate, to improve the agriculture and food system, can find it difficult to identify allies among permaculturalists.
Beyond these divergences in practice and doctrine, the movement retains various organizational structures and tendencies that isolate permaculture from the wider perennial movement. For example, training and education are often rendered through Permaculture Design Certificate programs led by “itinerant teachers” (Ferguson & Lovell, 2014). These specialized schools tend to focus on propagating the worldviews outlined above, which act to silo permaculture practices and ideas from the wider perennial agriculture movement, which instead gathers in university, nonprofit, and informal network spaces. These workshops and conferences attract a fairly diverse audience in terms of farm size and producer worldview, but anecdotally, I rarely come across permaculturalists at perennial agriculture conferences, which I view as a result of this seclusion. Relatedly, the movement maintains a strong suspicion of scientific institutions, erecting additional barriers between it and other practices, such as agroforestry or perennial grains. A lot of plant breeding, agronomic research, and even policy advocacy (in the form of securing NRCS funding for perennial practices) have resulted from farmer-university partnerships and built strong perennial farm networks, and permaculture’s absence has left them out of this capacity building.3
Permaculture still has a lot to offer, particularly for home and community gardens. I, for one, am eager to implement the herb spiral concept once I get my hands on a more appropriate space for it. The movement does occasionally flirt with unscientific claims or overstates the ecological or productivity advantages of their systems (Ferguson & Lovell, 2014), but all things considered, permaculture is a useful member of the perennial family.
However, I think it’s important that we broaden our horizons and broadcast that permaculture doesn’t own the idea of perennial agriculture. They were early on the scene and were able to effectively make their particular ideas, frameworks, and ideologies synonymous with perennial agriculture. This has resulted in some people calling other forms of perennial agriculture permaculture, assessing them by the benchmarks of Holmgren and Mollison. The preoccupations and shortcomings of permaculture should not weigh on other perennial agriculture practitioners as we attempt to promote a variety of visions for what perennial farming can be like. Yes, there are common threads that unite all forms of perennial farming — emulating natural processes, minimizing the energy intensity of food production, rejuvenating our soils, cleaning our waters — but there are also spaces where legitimate differences exist. Relationships with academic institutions, methods of training, the importance of scalability, tolerances for machinery and input use, and theories of change all distinguish other schools of perennial agriculture from permaculture. Creating and maintaining space for alternative branches to breathe on their own is critical for developing models of production that can pursue different avenues of change.
Ultimately, a multi-modal approach will yield stronger outcomes, with diverse models of perennial agriculture working side-by-side to restore our lands and feed our people. The collection Living Roots, co-edited by one of my former colleagues at The Land Institute, profiles many of the different versions and visions of perenniality being experimented with across the world. Different methods tailored to different problem sets and goals. We can use regenerative grazing and silvopasture to improve the diversity in our grasslands, perennial cereals to anchor the soils on row crop farms, scaled agroforestry to remediate landscapes that resist full perennialization, and permaculture to transform homesteads, gardens, and urban food systems. A diverse portfolio of perennial agriculture, each with a place in the landscapes of the future.
What I’m Reading, Watching, and Listening to
I’m kind of over the whole “Anti-monopoly” movement: While I don’t agree with everything in this article (Spirit Airlines’ collapse plainly wasn’t the fault of it’s rejected merger, and the people he focuses on are not really ‘standard bearers’), there are some important critiques of the movement’s factionalism, empirical laziness, and over-focus on concentration as a silver bullet solution to all social issues. Given Matt Stoller’s recent screed about “Dem HR lady politics,” perhaps it’s time to search for more level-headed leaders.
More Egrets, More Energy… More Housing?: Apparently the National Audubon Society has broken the trend among legacy environmental organizations and has championed green infrastructure and dense housing. More of this please!
References
Ferguson, R. S., & Lovell, S. T. (2014). Permaculture for agroecology: Design, movement, practice, and worldview. A review. Agronomy for Sustainable Development, 34(2), 251–274. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13593-013-0181-6
Mollison, B., & Holmgren, D. (1978). Permaculture One: A Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements. Melliodora Publishing.
Scott, R. (2010). A Critical Review of Permaculture in the United States [Working Paper]. robscott.net.
As a note, most of my claims about permaculture are derived from the field’s literature as assessed by Ferguson and Lovell (2014); individual practitioners may differ quite a bit from this orthopraxis.
Critically, many of these farmers are interested in furthering the sustainability of their operations through pursuing electrically powered equipment and low-carbon organic or renewably produced fertilizer. While these technologies are still in the R&D phase, their eventual commercialization will solidify the long-term sustainability of scaled perennial grain agriculture.
To the detriment of permaculture, in my opinion, as that has only corroborated a lack of research trials exploring permaculture’s ideas and possible avenues for experimentation and broadening the potential impact of the movement