Permaculture: Feeding The World In Our Backyards

how often do we ask ourselves how does the earth work and largely it's not something that we tend to be very cognizant of that we are on an amazingly well designed well functioning ecosystem services providing planetary phenomenon how does this plan at work and it's oftentimes not something that were thinking about or paying attention to or saying to ourselves hey I am nested within this planetary thing that really I don't understand and we don't generally stay curious about it as well and we'll find that that's one of the most important things to having a good life is being curious being interested asking questions about the world how does the world work we live in a culture that is very much as William Burroughs calls it created a gray dead world due to the presupposition that science has got it all figured out when in fact we'll find that well science is a useful tool and we're using it in this analysis here it certainly is not the be-all end-all of what it is that we're putting together which is a vision of how it is we can go food independent energy independent and become more connected to how the meta system of the earth itself works it seems conceivable to me that when we live and realize that we do live on a planet in outer space circling a massive thermonuclear furnace that is the core of our entire existence which is why it's called a solar system because everything revolves around the Sun how much of the mass of our solar system is in the Sun again we don't often ask questions like that for some reason and yet it's the primary driver of all life as we know it and it is ninety nine point six percent of the mass of our solar system is in the Sun and I think that's why it's clearly empirically relevant to ask the question how do we begin to design systems that pay attention to the biological living entities that have adapting to the Sun for billions of years on planet earth rather than thinking the way that we tap into the Sun for instance is simply through a photovoltaic panel or through generating electricity we'll find that really the best way to first tap into solar income is with trees is with plants is with animals is with human beings having a good diet that's produced by trees plants and animals rather than thinking that we're gonna grow a bunch of synthetic food like this impossible burger that's been created that's made from genetically modified soy and has nothing to do with something that biologically naturally occurs on the planet so the two questions are how do we feed people how do we create energy and how do we achieve the basic independence and quality of life that we're all looking for so some of the image here behind me is looking at the watershed that we reside within right here which is the Hudson Valley River watershed which is approximately fourteen thousand square miles in its drainage basin which adds up to somewhere in the neighborhood of eight million nine hundred and sixty thousand acres of land and when we're asking a question for instance how do we begin to go food independent how do we eat and how do we eat in a way that makes sense for where we live and the second one is energy how do we have material comforts how do we take as I like to say it a long hot shower and not feel guilty about it because it requires huge standing militaries giant nuclear power plants and strip mining in West Virginia in order to be able to do things like take a hot shower cook our food have lights on at night it seems to me that these are fairly domestic and mundane activities that could be achieved with a lot more elegance and a lot more finesse and what the present system does is what I like to characterize as bludgeoning diversity and complexity with homogeneity uniformity and centralized power energy and food systems and we have a population that's held hostage to a global import/export economy just to have the basic needs of their lives met for instance dinner on the table clothes on their back lights on at night heat in the wintertime the Hudson because it is so large 8 million nine hundred and sixty thousand acres of land we're gonna boil it down to a sub watershed and what we're gonna be looking at here in particular is the rond out watershed in Ulster County the Rhonda is a sub watershed of the Hudson and it takes up about 1124 square miles of land the drainage basin is referring to when rain lands in that particular pattern on the planet it ends up in the round out the ron Dowd is the main stem here that we're looking at that starts here at a reservoir that feeds New York City through an aqueduct system and then flows out of the dam and flows actually unusually for river systems in the northern hemisphere it flows north rather than south to the city of kingston where it hits the hudson the real opportunity to go food independent and energy independent in part is connected to the ability for them to begin to have a visual and a geographic understanding of where they live and this is where the Center for bio real center for bio regional living resides as we are right in the beer kale sub-watershed of the Hudson and this is part of why it's a focus area for our study we need to transform how it is we're doing agriculture make something that isn't so tractor heavy hybrid heavy and chemical heavy become how it is that we provide real healthy food for people healthy food for all we'll find that there's very clear evidence from many different studies triangulating on the question of how much of the food within a local population and the landscape where they live is grown within that landscape in other words when people are living in a particular area how much of what they're consuming actually comes from the area and this number we're looking at is pretty much what it is that study after study is agreeing upon we're looking at a number of 90 percent when we talk about how much of the food that people consume is coming from where they live well ninety percent of it is not coming from where they live it's coming from outside of where they live and I would suggest to you that that is a very vulnerable place for a human population to be because now we have no independence no autonomy no control over food security we also have a food system that leaves a toxic wasteland across the entire countryside and many of the Superfund sites in the Midwest are from atrazine and from roundup and from groundwater contamination and these are a legacy of this import/export economy they're a legacy of our dependence upon centralized transportation of goods and services the movement of things like electricity from nuclear power plants from coal burning power plants the amount that we rely upon petrochemicals to do mundane things like grow food for us we also live in a country where 37% of our rivers and streams according to the federal government so you can be sure it's worse than that 37% unfishable and unsuitable 50% of lakes and ponds not safe for our children to go take a dip in and that is a sign of a failed flawed system that we can absolutely do a better job than that and that's why the focus is on food independence energy independence lights on dinner on the table clothes on our back and true autonomy and food security being the essential solution to why it is that so many of the nation's waterways are in fact polluted due to the manner in which we grow food and the manner in which we generate electricity and in fact the u.s. government estimates that the single largest non point source of pollution in the entire country is agriculture we want to adapt agriculture to topography to water to the landscape to keep all of these impacts of erosion and deforestation from getting into our waterways so that people can have good food a good life and good rivers and streams and ponds to go swimming in and to eventually be able to eat a nice bounty of wild protein from fish that come back into those waterways as we move farms out of the floodplain and reforest the riparian landscapes the places next to the streams next to the rivers and next to the ponds with a diverse forest ecology that prevents erosion prevents pollution and provides a nice abundance of wild-caught shad wild-caught brook trout wild-caught rainbow trout trees are still the best solar collector on earth especially when they are integrated with grazing animals on diversified farms designed to be ecological and highly productive right not just trees any old trees but trees in particular that provide a multiplicity of beneficial yields become the foundation of our civilization as we diversify farming and agriculture to be more place-based to more full diet to be more year-round here's a farm that I installed in Pennsylvania that is a nice example of the appropriate use of tractors to establish market scale farms to be minimally machine based and what I mean by that is that really we want to figure out how to appropriately use the technologies that we have at hand to ultimately set up landscapes that don't require the continued input of that technology because it is fossil fuel heavy because it creates a lot of compaction in the soil because it cuts down on the amount of rainwater in filtration and it increases the amount of runoff and erosion that happens when you continue to tractor farm unnecessarily here's this farm planted out and we have a real diversity of plants going on here we have lupins and basil and cabbages and these will go into creating real medicinally potent crops that can be stored all winter long like kimchi and sauerkraut and garlic we also planted out this farm in blueberries in strawberries & Kosmos and flowers and it turns out that if we look at the financials of this that in fact small diversified farms that incorporate perennials like fruits and fresh market yields actually make more money per acre than simply one crop farms that grow massive amounts of a single yield but don't provide as many high-quality yields over the entire growing season we also live in a place that's very rich in rain water and it is vastly underutilized and also not typically calculated and part of what we're looking to again is to come back to my beginning statement of thinking about we are on a planet in outer space circling a Sun where there's a lot of free energy that we're not making intelligent use of and that free energy is when the Sun rises and sets are we growing a diversity of plants on a farm are we raising a complexity of organisms that provide us with a high degree of beneficial yields throughout the entire growing season and when the rain falls are we catching it and holding it and storing it and doing something beneficial with it here's one of the larger systems that we installed recently here we are back in the Hudson River watershed this is about a 2100 gallon tank and we also in addition to paying attention to rainwater in this design approached overall the layout of the beds again to be a rainwater catchment system that decreases runoff decreases flooding increases soil saturation and cuts down on your need to irrigate nice highly potent food providing crops we also train people in these systems and show them specifically how do you develop a farm that is human scale that uses local resources like local compost and the right tool for the right job am really hamming it up with some of my students here to show exactly the importance to me of giving more people the actual hands-on knowledge that they need to become food independent and become energy independent and have fun collaborating together achieving a higher degree of autonomy and a higher quality of life a lot of these crops when you look at this is another farm that we established on a property that is a small organic farm and what we're looking at are things like winter squash daikon turnips these are all crops that not a single drop of irrigation had to be added to and their crops that provided a very high degree of income benefit because we could turn them into fermented foods we could store them in underground root cellars for a nice degree of food security in the wintertime in particular the winter squash but the daikon and the turnips went into kimchi's that we made here's another operation that gives us a sense of how do we go about becoming food independent this is a no-till tractor farm on four acres that estimates by the grower J Moser that they make somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred and sixty thousand to two hundred thousand dollars a year and there are no facade facility which is the Northeast organic farming Association one of the really rich opportunities when we begin to scale up this question of food independence and energy independence is a missed opportunity when we look at many of the pre-existing studies so here we're looking at a study from scenic Hudson and you can see this tendency within farm analysis of how much food could we grow within a hundred miles in New York City to say well we can only grow it right along the Rhondda River when in fact we can grow vast amounts of food in other parts of Ulster County there's also a huge amount of waste that's going on in the present system it's estimated that one third of all food in the u.s. is wasted is actually destroyed lost mishandled damaged before anybody even gets to eat it so there is a lot of opportunity to improve our capacity to become food independent by tapping into this wasted food to produce compost which enables us to grow in places other than prime agricultural soils because then we can take that compost from the one third of wasted food and grow in places that are less than prime less than ideal and as we zoom in on the rond out and begin to say well given that most studies are saying approximately we need a little less than two acres per person how much food independence can we achieve within the rond out drainage and it is clearly achievable to grow all the food for all the people within the rond out drainage because we're looking at only needing a hundred and eighteen thousand of the seven hundred and nineteen thousand acres to produce full diet year-round food consumption when we begin to pan out and say well broader landscape mosaic what are some of the ideas that we're talking about involve stepping out vulnerable settlements from the floodplain of main river drainages and conserving them and turning them into a kind of orchard that produces benefits for the brook trout and the brown trout and children and families who are canoeing can begin to be harvesting both wild caught fish as well as heart nut bort nut Japanese walnut pecans to just name a few in addition to the old classics like apples and cherries and pears combined with Sycamore and American beech and oak here's a design that we did to show how do we begin to do this on a particular property this is in the round out drainage this was a farm stand that had been put up for sale that we did some analysis of and came up with recommendations for extending the buffer with nut trees planting out blueberries having row crops of carrots and garlic and onions that then we could store in root cellars and make kimchi from and make sauerkraut from as well as raspberries and greenhouses and a retail space and an event space so that we begin to look at land as something that we need to diversify and create more eco complexity as well as benefits for flooding and river water quality again we'll find many organizations that all agree that the Hudson River watershed is a thriving opportunity to begin to create more entrepreneurial endeavors to generate income through food production so the potential for just beginning to tap into the financials that are estimated for food consumption in the tri-state area is a number somewhere in the neighborhood of eight hundred and sixty million dollars that is looking to be spent within the tri-state area for local organic food and right now is not finding any opportu you need to do so hop into this massive thermonuclear furnace that's 93 million miles away pouring vast quantities of energy over the earth every day rather than depending upon all these ground extracted rare materials like uranium and petroleum when we look at the numbers to go energy independent we'll see that we create a vast array of jobs here we're looking at some numbers that Stanford University generated and they estimate that the number of jobs that will generate by going 100% renewable is about 552 million jobs that will be created as we transition the US economy from being a fossil fuel and nuclear energy hog with a crazy array of pollution legacies rather creating an energy system that uses offshore wind uses tidal power uses biogas uses solar thermal as well as photovoltaic in China 600,000 people work in a passive solar hot water system that right now we will be advocating as part of what we bring to the rond out and we bring to the Hudson watershed and in China this passive solar thermal hot water technology provides all the hot water for 1/3 of all the homes in China this enabled the Chinese population to offset the need to build 40 nuclear nightmares here we're looking at Burlington Vermont which uses these biogas digesters so as people enjoy conviviality and good beer they can also provide all of the electricity to 42,000 citizens in Burlington need with a combination of biogas digesters a series of large wind turbines on Georgia Mountain a massive array of solar panels at the airport as well as a woodchip to steam plant called the McNeil station the magicapp brew in Vermont makes good beer and provides energy and compost from their wastewater a biogas fuelled electric generator in Staten Island actually powers twenty thousand homes in Staten Island thus the city of New York makes twenty three million dollars off for the Fresh Kills landfill taking the methane and powering and generator from it that then they sell back the electricity to twenty thousand homes within Staten Island and no nuclear power plant in the entire country has ever made a profit because they cost so much to build and then when you're done generating electricity done making hot water you've still got biosolids that you can make excellent fertilizer with and again it's important for us to celebrate our humanity celebrate our natural bodily processes rather than thinking that it is somehow a detriment to the earth that people need to do things like go to the bathroom and take showers when in fact in a city of New York City size like eight and a half million people 220 million people we need to begin to get creative about what we're doing with sewage so that it becomes a resource rather than part of the 24 billion gallons of combined sewer overflows that we have in China these biogas plants right now power 40 million homes the goal in China is to power the equivalent of over three quarters of the United States population off of a technology that is barely developed within this country and this is an exciting opportunity and a key part of the node of how we go energy independent we're going to incorporate the most cutting-edge systems that rely on some of the most ancient aspects of life which are microbes and plants to digest black water and nutrient streams so that we can integrate biogas digesters with living machines when we combine these two we have a bio digester at the beginning and that will take all the solids and then after that we'll send it to a living machine to polish and finish cleaning the water and provide cut flowers in nature connection in the winter time in Calcutta we have something like 26,000 people employed just processing compost we want to combine electrical generation with hot water with ecological systems that are going to provide honey that are going to provide beauty and they're going to cut down on the need for the building to be using energy to stay cool in the summer time and to stay warm in the wintertime it turns out that in fact when we look at renewables that when we combine living rooms and green roofs with photovoltaic systems and solar thermal systems we actually get better performance in these because they get too hot on a conventional roof and in fact we can add to that and have some beehives in the mix and add pollinator habitats in addition to solving environmental problems with green roofs in high-density urban environments and this is about a vision that connects cities to countries that helps regions to become more self-reliant for energy and for food beginning to map out areas that can be interconnected where we create flyways where we create natural pollinator corridors where we create bike trails and connectivity also paying attention to plans of pre-existing zoning code and municipalities this is from a comprehensive plan done in the village of Ellenville and many of the ideas that we've suggested dovetail purposefully with this existing plan that is already on paper saying they want to go more food independent they want to begin to create a place in the village where people can enjoy nature and have some connection with it and here we're laying out a prospectus for how could we revitalize Ellenville with a arts and community center a food co-op and satellite store in cafe a commercial municipal compost facility and a Ulster County green tech training facility that would enable people to learn all these different skills about natural building solar thermal hot water biogas digesters which are key to taking many of those one-third food waste materials and turning them into a resource and understanding where we are and that there are rich opportunities to increase nature connection by daylighting streams and waterways one of the projects we're working on right now is actually from Avenue Avenue B down east 8th Street to D and what we're doing is looking at places where we could daylight this waterway and rallying local public opinion than the Lower East Side around creating opportunities like this within New York rather than an opportunity that doesn't exist at present as far as someplace where people can go and touch the water that isn't polluted where we get a place all this green infrastructure in New York City the biogas digesters the solar thermal arrays the photovoltaic facilities the compost facilities the green job training centers well much of it we can build on what are considered to be brown fields which are places that are not nearly as polluted as a Superfund or a more highly toxic site they need some mitigation and remediation and there's over 4,000 acres of them on 6000 parcels the perfect place for the green infrastructure that we want to establish here we want to reforest along rivers and waterways we want to create a national economy that's made up of local bio regional economies where regions are able to become more food independent and energy independent and then have excesses of really high-quality local products that they can share and export as value-added products to one another cheese coming from the Northeast oranges coming from Florida wine coming from the Pacific Northwest grazing animals and beef coming from the Midwest each region will have unique crops buildings and energy systems that are designed and engineered to be well adapted to each geographic area of the country we get much higher benefits from beginning to adapt how are we building buildings what types of crops are we growing where how are we engineering things to be more adapted to where we're actually building them and installing them Farms energy towns and infrastructure because at present were vulnerable were held hostage we're very food insecure we have many food deserts we have a lot of Americans who don't feel that they have access to the basic necessities of life and this is about providing high quality healthy food for all as well as energy autonomy and jobs with integrity and landing back into our local sub-watershed of the rondell and going food independent energy independent will create a diversity of green jobs keep a planetary perspective so we appreciate the true scale of our existence and design for our cosmic inheritance thank you

Channel: Andrew Faust

Views: 1,748

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: #permaculturedesign, #permaculturedesigncourse, #permacultureconsultation, #permacultureconsulting, #permaculturetraining, #permacultureclass, #permaculturecourses, #permaculturecertificate, #permaculturecertification, #permacultureconvergence, #permaculturegarden, #andrewfaust, #andrewfaustpermaculture, #newyorkpermaculture, #brooklynpermaculture, #sustainablefashion, #sustainability, #sustainableliving, #permacultureplanet

Id: ijbmLGPoiq8

Length: 30min 10sec (1810 seconds)

Published: Tue May 19 2020