I was pleased to read in the Post this morning that its editorial board came out in favor of the zoning change that allows the sale of “cottage foods” from the producers residence. Later in the article is a statement that shows just how far we still need to go. The editors state that: “Were not about to go back to pioneer times when most people grew or made their own food stuffs or bought them from a neighbor. That would be horribly inefficient and impractical.” The Posts editorial board, and a lot of your neighbors, see industrial agriculture as efficient and practical and the alternatives as the opposite. They have no idea how efficient and practical natural systems can be. They dont want to have the dirt and noise and stench of industrial agriculture in their neighborhood, and I dont blame them. They have no idea that a abundance of food can come from a beautiful garden in the same space in which you live. They believe that food must be wrested from the earth in an endless competition with nature and other growers. They have no idea that food can flow naturally from a harmonious relationship with the living things around you. Industrial agriculture is based on economics of scale. At scale, we take the capital costs and spread them over as many units as possible to make the cost per unit as low as possible. That is how you can justify millions of Dollars in tractors and concentrated animal feeding operations to produce food at a loss requiring government subsidy. The alternative is to practice economics of integration. Food for all the participants is a natural feature of ecosystems. Ecosystems are integrated closed loop production systems that produce all of their inputs as a part of the production cycle, reducing operating costs to zero, and that utilize all of the by products of each process in other processes reducing waste to zero. Which approach to producing food is “horribly inefficient and impractical?” This is your task as permaculture practitioners. Until we can demonstrate efficient and practical integrated closed loop food production systems, we will be on the outside looking in. When we are successful in that demonstration the entire world will change around us. I dont think we can do that by trying to produce food for sale in the market. I think it can be done through people owning the capacity to produce food for themselves. I also think that many of you can make a good living helping people to develop that capacity. We will need to work together to figure out the details.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 17:35:28 +0000
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