MY RESPONSE TO CURTIS STONE "What Permaculture Got Wrong... Dispelling Five Common Myths"

so a bunch people have been asking me if I would make a response video to Curtis stones recent video what permaculture got wrong a few myths that he's identified in the permaculture movement so I thought I'll do that surprising to some of you I actually agree with Curtis on on many points and perhaps I come from the border farming experience and I want to share some points because I talked openly about the criticisms I have of permaculture and I think there's a lot of things that it's done right - so we should talk about them - and how to integrate it to production landscapes and I think it's picked up on a couple of important points like homesteading doing things for self sustainability it's very different from production agriculture and so our farm has been you know trying to bridge that gap and that's why it's been so important for so many people I think now if you're homesteading it's actually quite easy to supply all your own food needs and we do learn here we supply a whole human diet but we also produce for profit in some of the enterprises that we run here which I've explained in loads of videos and those that watch the channel really you can get a lot of detail about everything work - here in the videos we put out but the main difference between self-sustaining and production sudden you have regulations and you have economy coming in the picture and so you know you would need to run tight margins farming's hard now we've demonstrated successful viable economy and many other people are - but I think it's really important if you're interested in agriculture production of surpluses for sale to other people then we need to be far more pragmatic and we need to cut away all the bits that aren't so useful and get stuck into what is useful and we've done that and I'm quite well known for integrating particularly keyline design holistic management and holistic management gives us holistic decision-making and a whole decision making matrix that permaculture has never really had as well as financial planning that's perhaps not so new to anyone that runs a business and grazing planning for livestock as well as keyline design give us an ordering framework the scale of permanence of PA Yeomans that gave us an organizing framework for permaculture design it was in fact the first integrated land planning system and some of these things have become their own movements and that's the trouble with movements they want to sort of encapsulate everything and this is ours this is what we do and I'm not bid I'm not so interested in I'm actually just passionate about good design and agriculture and so that's been my career focus is bridging the gap for people to production landscapes you know if we want to do this stuff to produce an income then we need to cut some other fluff and we need to get pragmatic and to the point so I guess first off it's important to you know explain what my perception of permaculture is now for me it's the integration of regenerative agriculture with social adjust environments that provide us with fulfilling livelihoods through managing whole systems and we learn from nature we copy natural energy systems just how we mimic moving our chickens behind our cows on the cycle that mimics how birds follow after herbivores in nature and we do take a lot of these little interactions and try and apply them to our production landscape we need to learn about the systems we're working with if we want to plant tree systems how does nature do tree systems if I want to plant an apple orchard where's the best place to study is it a Dutch intensive nursery system professor or is it going to the wild apple forest of Kazakhstan and understanding how do these trees function in nature what does the soil look like how does nutrient cycling work in these systems how much carbons in the soil what other plants are growing in guilds or Assemblies with these plants and this will lead us to concrete knowledge and this is something that I do then I specialize in is teaching people about pattern languages in ecology and that's what my book is all about just teaching people the main bones and patterns that we've used in design work all over the world now obviously design looks very different in the tropics and in brittle landscapes than it does here in our cold temperate climates but for much of Europe in our humid old and all temp requirements there's a lot of similar pattern languages now I've had the great fortune to work all over the world in all the different major climate zones and spent a lot of time in the tropics and dry landscapes but design is quite different in those landscapes so we're not really looking at that in this focus and it's not what we're doing here at our farm we focused on cool cold temperate climates but agriculture is very easy to sit and criticize production agriculture but a lot of myths do come out of it and also a lot of good things come out of it for example the permaculture world has never been particularly good at gathering data so if I want to run pasture poultry and you know really make an efficient productive profitable regenerative system that builds my soil which has been doing amazingly here and makes a good income then I need to look for data from the industry because they're the only people supplying data you know so I reference data from the industry all the time because it's just a massive lack of it in the permaculture world and there's another compounding problem is that a lot of people coming to agriculture through permaculture these things and not farmers so they have no baseline to compare things against so they can't really quantify what's productive what's not it's like these things like hygge culture why is that better than growing vegetables in the you know who are the best vegetable growers market gardeners typically so why don't we integrate what they know and apply better soil management and apply a bit of thinking around diversity and all these other things elements of design the permaculture gives us a set of design principles and there are many other ecological designers who gave us a wider range of principles too they all based on things you can observe around you and that's a big part of my learning journey is just integrating myself into nature and learning form and copying what I can and applying it where it's feasible and pragmatic to a production landscape and but that's a big big criticism my half of the permaculture world it's often people who have learnt from books or learnt from other people who aren't professional growers talking bad about you know the the people that supply their food supply and it's always ironic like some of the debates that come up on Facebook or in trainings we run when you know we're eating food from conventional growers they might be organic growers but still we're eating grains typically from conventional growers because we don't have the capacity to grow ourselves so it wouldn't be efficient on small scale and yet sitting criticizing the people that grow our food supply and I just think that that's a little naive and a little rude actually it's you know there's a lot we can learn from generations of knowledge now agriculture has caused a lot of problems wheat 400 kilos of food a year and it takes 10 tons of eroding soil to produce that and that's dramatic and you know it's extremely sad we're actually moving more soil around each year than the last ice age moved and it's it's a massive impact we have through agriculture and most people don't have the full picture of it but I do actually agree with Curtis that when we step things up to an agricultural production landscape a lot of these principles and ideas don't actually fit and actually the principles do but the fixed idea of permaculture should look like this this is something I find a pouran because it's a design approach and it's about intelligent conscious design so we need to be pragmatic and smart and integrate what we can but we must work to a triple bottom-line it must be good for the land it must be good for people our customers and it must be good financially or we're not going to be doing it and that's why we focused on the sort of startup enterprises we have our firm because if I can't show young people that come here how to get started with a low budget and make their business work they're not gonna do it and we see the trend of you know agriculture getting larger and larger and more mechanized and less people involved we're losing a massive skill base from the rural population and it's you know if you follow that through a couple of generations with your logic it doesn't look good it's why I've dedicated my life to supporting more people particularly young people to go out and get started on a good intelligent path now there's a lot we could talk about and I do talk about with our training participants I'm very open and you know I think about this stuff every single day it's you know I've been doing for the last half of my life so I have a lot to say about it but what I want to do is address some of Curtiss points and just see what comes up in my mind about them so the first point Kurtis brings up is about self-sustaining gardens and he is referencing in the video about forest gardens and talking about this idea that there's no such thing as a low input high production system and I agree totally with that I think there's a big myth around about you can do a little bit of work and create this system that will give you this abundance of yield ongoing and I think that's a little bit misleading I mean forest gardening is something I enjoy but I'm actually more interested in Agri forestry in the sense of silver pasture or silver arable systems that are a bit more efficient and a bit more orientated to field scale production where we can have one point six times the cropping on a conventional field production just by integrating trees intelligently we favor keyline design as a pattern primarily wherever possible but not always it's not something I would use unless it's appropriate as deemed by the context of what we're trying to achieve but I do think that there's you know this is a permaculture zone three or four idea it's about self sustaining and they're wonderful things and I'm not here to bash anything or criticize it but they're definitely not something that scales and they're efficient in a production landscape and they're definitely not low input high output systems their massive inputs in the beginning it's a lot of work to establish and they're low to moderately productive over time if you look at calorie mixed calorie production of a farm like ours it just blows it out the window this is one of the most productive per square meter farms in Europe when you do the maths and I think diversity is key there and that sundae that we draw from the permaculture movement but also from mixed farming throughout the eons all farms in the past used to have animals and perennial crops and field crops you know it's a much easier way to complete or work towards completing nutrient cycling etc on the farm as well as supplying a diet that's workable for most humans on this planet but I think there's a big myth about the amount of production you can get out of these systems and it just it's not true in my experience competitive productions we can get by making things a little bit more efficient for example behind me we've got our tree lanes and we have different orientations this Lane is in what we call top field is orientated more east to west and so we have a line of berry fruits on the front now we can have lines of all the same berry fruit ripening at the same time it just really promotes efficient harvesting on the back here we've got fruit trees interspersed with hazel and that's because we're angled at the Sun east to west so everything gets light so we're taking some of the principles of cropping on multiple levels but we're just making a bit more linear it works because it's on a key line layout in parallel strips that means things that have fixed width like a key line plow or a boiler pan or a fence around an egg 'mobile fit through and it's just elegant and graceful to work within and likewise in front field we have fruit trees in the middle and berries on each side because we orientate north to south and this Sun arcs overhead giving everything Sun and the research shows that berry fruit yield in our climate fully at forty percent shade so if you spaced trees apart at their combined combined diameter say you have a four meter diameter tree on both sides you plant them eight meters apart when they're fully grown you'll get full production underneath so we can take the forest garden principles and apply them to more efficient and usable production landscapes that can provide a quantity and efficient harvest to actually make some kind of viable product I asked to mate about 30,000 euros of crops in our perennial systems but they're not in the way they're not jumbled up you can see when they're ripe and ready and they just fit gracefully into the farm layout on this beautiful keyline layout that we have here because his next point was about the lazy gardener idea and he took down different directions but it's interesting I have some differences in my perspective to Curtis here he maintains that market gardening is the low asperity entry enterprise and the most profitable with the least work and I do agree it's definitely the lowest parity barrier to entry you don't need to know about animal psychology and physiology and nothing's trying to kick you in the face or pick your feet or whatever it is so certainly you know vegetables are really easy to get into and they are very profitable per square meter however where I disagree fundamentally is that they are massively labor and input intensive and they can be profitable but in terms of hours in and cash out animal enterprises can be far more productive and profitable and I'm here with the cows and I just think you know when you look at conventional agriculture meat production bad vegetable production sustainable these means that fly through Facebook all the time but actually if you look and you know this is true of modern conventional industry production but if you actually look at what generative agriculture and how to do these things properly the exact opposite is true there is no more effective way to produce high density good food for humans and turning sunlight to grasses to flesh nothing's exported off the farm and in countries where you can take the bones back you can turn those back into a soluble form of phosphorus and calcium and totally close the nutrient cycle all you're exporting is flesh which doesn't contain the sort of nutrient levels like phosphorus in the bones exception so I think there's a lot of myths flying around through very partial understandings of ecology and I spend a lot of time speaking up for good animal enterprises because there's another part of you know certain parts of the permaculture world are totally on the animal and there are no vegetarian ecosystems on this planet animals are essential at driving nutrient cycles and I think they've got a bad name through horrible production methodologies from the industry but you know these animals are incredibly well bred for our climate they take very little work to maintain and grass-fed beef sells for a premium here and it's a very nice small enterprise now for us it's not an enterprise yet it's been to have really high quality milk the fats and proteins is double as high in these animals as it is in modern dairy cows but now we're starting to consider breeding something like he referred on to them to have a bit more be focused animal to do grass-fed beef on a small scale as a sideline enterprise now permaculture definitely needs different tools as we scale up to AG and that has been the focus of the farm and what I've dedicated my life do because that you know if you read the permaculture literature there's a lot of authors writing about things at a conceptual and they're not tested in their experience and I think this is a great floor if we want to be learning about effective systems we need to go see them in the flesh we need to send some smell and taste them you know it's really important to consider integrating anything that works and throwing out anything that doesn't you know in our professional design work as well as following the work of some of my colleagues around the world a lot of us who associated with the permaculture world have got rid of a bunch of the things that just aren't important to us and it's why our trainings have evolved over the years to only include the things we actually use and not talk about things that are typically in a permaculture course curriculum but are just things that aren't used on a professional level and I think you know that's something that is worth considering and now some people won't like some of my viewpoints but on being as open and honest as I can about it because it's something I think about continuously and I'm trying to dedicate my life to be of benefit to others through sharing useful information from my own experience not from book learning and these kind of things because I think that's so limited you need to go out and see the sort of farms that are doing what you aspire to do and go spend the season working there and see it inside out and learn about the production techniques learn about observation and critical thinking learn about the business planning etc we need to integrate and is why I've you know used holistic management and keyline particularly to replace some of the things that just aren't effective in my experience from my permaculture design career and I'm all about integration I think it's really important that we think very carefully about what tools are appropriate in what setting and get away from this idea that things must look a certain way because they really shouldn't and that's something that I picked bones within the permaculture movement is a poem called yoga and should have some of these in some of these and that's a block that's that's not leading to progress permaculture doesn't look any particular way it's about conscious intelligent design to meet our context because this next point was about mulching everything and how you know and I've seen this too where you look up permaculture garden on Google maybe try it because I haven't done that for a while and you see very weird shapes and you see you know everything planted with hundreds of species per bed and I'm exaggerating but you know funny shaped beds with loads of things in them and straw mulch everywhere and it's something that you know I think it's a particularly bad strategy particularly where we are where we have a Spanish slug problem again context is everything but we actually use compost on the ground as the mulch this is a wood based compost we do no dig production here and that's something that I do very differently to cur this I'm interested in bringing in a bit more soil care a little bit more ecological principles and trying to apply the best of soil care so the best of market gardening because ultimately you know you've got to ask who are the best veg grows their market gardeners professional market gardeners they know how to grow the most veg in the smaller space efficiently and so I think we need to be humble and take advice from there go to the best people and see what they're doing and what happens when we actually copy nature and put all this beautiful organic manner down on the ground building soil from above like nature does we're not only feeding the plants you know annual plants have all been bred to extract as much nutrition from the soil as they can so we need carbon to drive the soil food web carbon is also what holds moisture in the ground which has served us extremely well in the drought this year in this wood based compost that's just saved us in these drought conditions but it's also responsible for buffering pH back towards neutral if your soil is too alkaline too acidic is carbon that buffers it back to neutral but besides all those benefits we can direct seeds straight into it with our six rosita or any other seed we can also transplant very easily we don't even need to the boardwalk anymore these beds are super soft they look really dry but under here it's really nice material and it's holding moisture really good but beyond that it's also not attracting slugs and slugs are a major problem in sweden where you have the spanish killer slug and most people grow and vegetables here have major problems with them we don't have any we have very little pests and disease issues here we get flea beetle which is very common here let me get some cabbage caterpillars but we've had the only disease we've had these rough spots on beet leaves which don't affect the beets at all anyway so it's really working well the other beautiful thing about no dig is you can just pull crops straight out in the ground and it remains soft and moist down in there which is perfect now if you're in a dry landscape where evapotranspiration exceeds precipitation then yes you might need to use things like straw or whatever you can get your hands on but here we often to wet this year's been a funny drought year but we're often too wet and that's the issue but I would never put straw my guns I wrote about this in my book and I think you've got to really think carefully about what you're dealing with and how you're going to address it and what potential drawbacks there might be with it so the next point is about swales and swelling everything and again it's a common thing swales hookah culture herb spirals all this stuff that to me is not pragmatic the use of principles in design it's taking something as a fixed idea if this is how it should look and I think we need to get away from that when we're dealing with complexity complexity moves in ways we cannot predict and that's why we need holistic decision-making and we need to get away from things must look a certain way we need to integrate the best and plan really hard and work really hard to have effective farms here we choose keyline design because I find it so much more graceful and the scale of permanence is something that I would use in my design work now for the last over a decade now it doesn't mean I'll always use a key lime plow doesn't mean I'm dealing with moving water around in a landscape necessarily Yeomans scale of permanence which I've talked about before is an ordering framework for the priority in design and designing a farm is very different from designing a back garden or an urban homestead or whatever it is key lines a lot more graceful because it puts water at the top of priority and the trouble with swales is that they're not appropriate for most of the environmental conditions in Europe therefore they're actually a temporary relief there are a symptomatic relief they're not addressing the core problem which is a broken water and nutrient cycle so you're always relieving symptoms if you move in the soil around to try and deal with water the problem is in the soil itself we need to have animals on the ground animals in the ground but in our case we're using keyline design as a layout which you've seen on the aerials these smooth curving shapes that work really well we're farming because they're parallel swales on contour so they're not parallel because land form is irregular and that means you have weird shape fields that don't necessarily work very well but also you're concentrating water into a very small part of the landscape and we actually want to evenly distribute water across the landscape so for me to pull a key lime plow across my pastures and you've seen in old videos we've built soil from about 18 to 20 centimetres deep to 45 centimetres deep you can see a video about it just by pulling a key lime flower as a mechanical stickler for the subsoil as it were and then grazing managing our animals now you could do that with grazing alone and that's been shown to Allan savory's work and others inspired by him all over the world in some of the harshest conditions on earth but I think it can be made quicker with a mechanical kickstart so that's why we did it but key line for me is so much more optimal because it's so low risk and low cost and when you actually start moving soil around and changing the land form that's a totally permanent feature in the landscape and it will be affecting how water moves for hundreds of years potentially and you've got ask do you know enough about hydrology and geology to be doing that kind of work and I don't think it's good to be promoting techniques that encourage people that don't have due diligence and don't have experience to go out and mess up perfectly good landscapes in the name of sustainably I'm actually against it I think we need to be a lot more humble in our approach to landscapes we need to learn deeply about ecosystem processes and spend a lot of time observing in nature and we need to ask ourselves continuously how little do we need to do you know how would nature do this and how can i replicate that I've got some beautiful look at these in the Mackay Reds yeah so I'm personally I don't favor swells I've seen people using them in our climate zone here and I just think it's totally inappropriate and I think we must be very careful copying ideas I always say the first thing I say when people come here is like don't try and mimic what we're doing that's not my intention at all my intention is to expose people to a whole range of stuff Sheldon the nuts and bolts get them experience with the diverse range of things that they can start to pick and choose and scale things according to their needs their land base their marketplace their resources etc we cannot just try and replicate each other's work it works for me here it might not work for you 50 kilometres away might not work for you in Spain it might work better for you who knows but you know what I'm saying so the last point that he brought up was about beneficial insects diversity insect nets things like this and some notion that people think you shouldn't be using insect nets you just need to build habitats for diversity and it will sort it all out and I think yes that's a lovely principle and something to move towards and it's something we do but we have a beautiful diversity of stuff on the ground surrounded by monoculture or forestry it's not ours but it's got a bit more diversity we've got hedgerows we've got areas we specifically don't cut to generate more habitat for insects but the reality is when you are farming a concentrated group of plants in an efficient way you will of course get some pest pressure now plants are all releasing pheromones and most pests are finding the plants that they eat through those pheromones just like we find our partners through the pheromones we release that we spend all of our time trying to scrub and hide and get rid of it's a bit topsy-turvy but you know when someone grows 10,000 hectares of corn it puts a mighty great signal up into the air that means locusts come and they feed and breed and we get focus place these are not naturally occurring plagues this is a human created problem so we have plenty of diversity we don't need to be planning 30 different varieties of vegetables in one bed it's totally inefficient and if you say it's not then show me data you know I want to see data because I don't know any professional market gardeners that do that and there's a good reason for it and we have plenty of diversity and what we should actually be focused on this soil if we're building soil health then that takes care of most of the pest problems because most of our plant disease problems in the soil are aerobic and so they need tillage to wake them up or people coming along and adding chemicals these are things that stop the exchange between clay and iron particles and cause nutrients to be locked up and then plants get sick and suffers and things but when we add fertility on the surface and focus our attention on soil not the actual vegetables vegetables know how to grow themselves then we do start to see much less problems so we use insect net 4 caterpillars and we use a couple of different organic certified pest controls we use diatomaceous earth which is fossilized diatoms which cuts the exoskeleton of things like flea beetles and dehydrates and and we use sometimes we've used bacillus thuringiensis and bacteria and we've also used nematodes for caterpillars and I'm not so interested in you know I it's one place that I would differ with Curtis in that I do think we need a lot more integration of things like hedgerows and diversity spots and I think those things take time to pay off and if you are too overly focused on quick return stuff then you probably don't see the benefit of that in its true entirety so that's something that I always would press actually and we have lots of areas on the farm when we do that sort of thing I think it's you know that's something that permaculture definitely brings to the market gardening spaces better soil care that's why we've gone no dig and better integration with the wider landscape integrating trees I mean this is Landers not actually ours but if it was I would have rows of perennials right in the bed and I think that's a beautiful way to farm you might remember a video I did of a friend Terra in Luxembourg and I love that place you know bringing in trees and perennial rows and same with James bigger farm I think these are things that are well worth doing and I would always do them if I have the choice but I was still put the focus on soil care as opposed to growing vegetables and that will take care of most of the problems for you I've been to some very old established no dig beds where you can put your arm down to past your elbow in the ground and they're certainly not big pests and disease pressures now I think you know this film that Curtis made was filmed that James big farm and there's a problem with scale when you scale up vegetable production like that you have Wacken out massive amounts of pheromones to pest and you will see more pests pressure I don't know but I bet JM has a lot more pressure from pests and disease because they're just doing it at scale and that's the nature of it so I think it's a very valuable thing they've done they're integrating some of the design principles of better ecological systems thinking into their productions and I think we need more of them so to reiterate we do need to be pragmatic and we need to rain down some of the wilder ideas that are meant to illustrate principles I believe well you know patterns in thinking as opposed to be described literal systems that will many go out and put down I think that's too simplistic and it will fail and you know show us the production farms there aren't many productive profitable permaculture farms and I think that's because the approach has not been designed for that it's been about homesteading it's been about self sustainability but there is a massively growing amount of people who want to do production farming and I think that's been you know focus of this place and it's been why a lot of people interested in agriculture are following us because it's actually mostly people from outside the permaculture space that are coming here because they're focused on wanting to start out profitable regenerative agriculture so whatever you call it you know it doesn't really matter but we need to take the best of ecological systems thinking and understanding and apply it to good production techniques to prove them so that we can grow abundance of yield you know these are really low tech really low input high-density high yielding tomatoes but like Curtis said this doesn't exist in nature so we need to think about how to deal with the pests problems now we don't do any imported insects we're not a scale where I think we need to we don't have much pest pressure but we have to do extra work like grafting Tomatoes so that we can grow them year after year without getting disease pressure building up in the soil so it takes some work when you do agriculture because you're doing things differently to nature however you like to think about it and and that's the point I really like to reiterate this you know there are no high production low work systems that I've ever seen and certainly all the farmers inspire me come from production backgrounds and have come to this stuff looking for you know better soul care and better ecological systems thinking which is also a big part of then marketing your product and you know feeling good about what you do it's really important that we take pride and you know feel like we're doing the best we can just gonna go and look at some of these cherry tomatoes coming along because it's looking beautiful in here yeah we've got to do good and do smart so to summarize I think it's really important people go and study with people actually doing the sorts of things they want to do in the field that's critical there's only a point that you can get to watching videos from people like me or reading books there's a massive amount of great information out there but really at some point you just got to go out there and do some you know do one or more seasons at other people's farms now we've been running some of the most intensive broad-reaching trainings of their nature anywhere on the planet in the last years that we've been here but something that's really key is I haven't encouraged any of my past course participants to go into teaching it's really critical I think to get something established that you can actually demonstrate something viable before you start teaching other people about it and that's one criticism I have of the permaculture world and having a decentralized system personally it's affected my work and it's affected other professions that I know about too and I'm not bitter about it but I am strongly opposed to people going out teaching other people about things they don't have enough experience of we need to be way more humble than that and we need people sharing direct experience not forc learning and so that's a challenge to folk you know I'm not trying to put anyone off if that's something you're passionate about but you've got to know what you know and you've got to know what you don't know and it's a challenge to go out and get experience I hope you've enjoyed watching the video let me know in the comments below I'm very happy to follow it up if people have more questions this obviously brings up a lot more questions in itself just the topic manner but thanks for watching if you enjoyed the video click Subscribe share it with your friends and look forward seeing you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Richard Perkins

Views: 129,372

Rating: 4.9276118 out of 5

Keywords: ridgedale, ridgedalepermaculture, curtisstone

Id: cS6uOWhjJE0

Length: 34min 22sec (2062 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 30 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/SOPalop]

Worth a listen, people.

Plus, he really gave it to swales.

[u/greenbluegreen]

Why is everything a video?

[u/ecoperma]

Nailed it. Covered everything that was running through my mind as I was watching Curtis' video except 1000x better than I ever could articulate. He shot down Curtis IMO who I'm not a fan of due to his arrogance in a lot of his videos.