Permaculture, A Story
I have been hearing good things about permaculture but I'm less inclined to agree that animal husbandry can be integrated in any such endeavor...
Ken sayz…
To me permaculture is not just about making it in the current economy, it’s about planning for a future economy after unsustainable practices fail and leave us with nothing but the more sustainable ones, which is something that I think young adults today will see as they grow old.
Which made me come up this story, or
parable, or fable, of our times:
Once upon a time... there was a city boy in his early
thirties who moved to the hills to farm with his young wife. They started small
and that all went well for a while. They wanted to farm in a sustainable way
that was good for their own health and for Planet Earth. They talked long and
late at night about organic farming and permaculture. They made love, a lot. Money, well, that was not
talked about so much, at least not in the beginning. The wife started to take pottery lessons
with a teacher nearby, and they raising honeybees and sold the honey in
the wife’s pretty pots. After a few years, they had a couple of kids and the
farm grew, and they bought a larger car to ship their vegetables and honey to
the markets in a city nearby, and that all went well for a while.
The city boy didn’t like the high cost of gasoline,
so they changed to a diesel car, and he tried to use used cooking oil instead.
That all went well for a while, but it was a messy process, and the city boy
started neglecting his fields in order to fine tune the engine and the mechanical
system he built for purifying the fuel. The wife was busy with the toddlers and
had less time to make pottery and care for the bees. Kids went to a local
pre-school, and the wife wanted to get more serious about the veggies.
They decided to get a couple of goats to
see if that could help clear the fields from weeds. That all went well for a
while but the male goat and the female goat had one kid after the other, and
there wasn’t enough room. Also, when the kids became adult goats, the
inevitable happened – the male goats started having a go at the females, even
though they were all related. That created offspring that were inbred, which
had to be put down because they were unhealthy and didn’t grow up right. The
city boy and his wife – and their children who were now about to enter first
grade school - liked the goats, but this was getting complicated. Then the old
goats died of natural causes, and needed to be replaced. But from where would
they get new, healthy goats?
They decided to raise chicken instead, and
ignore the weeds that grew in the fields. They got a couple of hens and a
rooster, and the hens got eggs one after the other. That all went well for a
while, and they could sell the eggs in the markets in the city nearby, but when
they were away, some of the eggs hatched and suddenly they had lots of little
yellow chicks, one after the other. And when they grew up, the rooster started
having a go at the females, even though they were all related, just like the
goats. And again, that created offspring that were inbred, which had to be put
down because they were unhealthy and didn’t grow up right. The city boy and his
wife – and their children – liked the chicken and the hens and the rooster, but
this was getting complicated. All this slaughter was really getting too much. Then
the rooster died of natural causes, and needed to be replaced. But from where
would they get a new, healthy rooster?
The moral of this story: In any animal
population, you need a certain population size in order to have a healthy gene
pool. This in essence means you need a herd to raise even a few animals. If you
can’t have a herd on your own farm, you need neighbors with animals of the same
kind, but again, unless you are all working towards the same goal, inbreeding
is always a risk. For larger animals like cattle or pigs the problem is even
more difficult, as the diseases that result from the inbreeding are that much
more serious, and there are all kinds of rules and laws that you need to follow.
And as each female animal will have a 50-50
chance of having male and female offspring, you will need to slaughter a lot of
male calves and piglets or chicken. If you raise cattle, you can of course
castrate one or two of the young bulls and use them as ox in your fields,
instead of relying on a tractor and fossil fuels, but that still doesn’t take
care of your male-female ratio problem. As for poultry, you only need one
rooster for a cage full of hens, or the males will fight bloody battles over
who gets to sit on the highest stick!
Thus...
I don’t believe animal husbandry can
contribute much to permaculture. There are some organic farms that raise chicken,
small-scale, which can produce manure and egg shells that are great for the soil in the vegetable
fields. Goats can be helpful to some degree, but you would have to be prepared
to slaughter a lot of kids unless you keep your adult animals separated. And
how would you make sure that you have a large enough gene pool to avoid
inbreeding? Having just one goat is not permaculture.
I don’t believe
purchasing animals should be regarded as part of permaculture, because it means
you may end up depending on outside breeders with other, less sustainable goals
for their animal husbandry than yours, such as the use of veterinary drugs and
commercial feed.
Animal feed is a huge issue. Do you have
enough feed on your own farm, or access to sustainably grown feed from
neighbors? Or are you going to use commercial grade feed, which usually
contains soybeans and other grains like maize? Will you need to transport the
feed by car or truck, using gasoline or diesel, or used cooking oil from oil
seed like canola, that is also usually imported? Is your feed imported from
other countries? That is not compatible with permaculture either. Is it
genetically modified? What kind of pesticides and herbicides were used?
These are hard choices to make, and as for
the story above, I worry that the city boy and his wife would quickly forget
about their initial inspiration, to farm in a way that makes a long-term
contribution to healthy life and to the future for our precious Planet.
Comments
Nice parable, well told. Although I'm slightly confused as to how my few sentences led to you writing it? Surely there's more to it ! :-)
People have all these definitions of permaculture as this or that. Mine happens to be what it is because with permaculture I'm practicing minimalism in today's economy, which ironically includes not using money to get the permaculture certification or go to convergences.
So actually I'm not a permaculturist. I do like the movement, although like all movements there's some dodgy stuff that gets in, one being - as you point out - a certain style of animal husbandry that people are using under permaculture.
Oft-times what we see in permaculture are people using the word and bringing all sorts of things under the umbrella of that word. Whenever there's a word that points to something good, inevitably people kind of veer off from reality. They start using that shortcut.
I do think that we could all do with some chickens pecking around, perhaps we even need them to be? And goats, etc.
To me the bigger problem seems like a matter of 1. landbase, 2. scale, and 3. how-to.
1. Obviously if you or your community isn't on the sort of landbase required to sustain the furry and feathered, then those animals shouldn't be there.
2. We can do fine with less.
3. There are different models of animal husbandry that don't require antibiotics, separation, and other outside inputs.
Different examples of benign husbandry can be applied in different places. To sort of justify my own keeping of chickens, I'll say that I do it the Amazon Basin way. It's where the chickens peck and scratch around during the day and roost up in the trees at night. They lay eggs and eventually get chased down by a villager for harvest.
Anyway, I could on with this stuff for days, but I hope you see my points about animal husbandry and stability.
ken