Permaculture Energy Conserving Rules

Permaculture



 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Permaculture is a set of design principles centered on whole systems thinking simulating or directly utilizing the patterns and resilient features observed in natural ecosystems. It uses these principles in a growing number of fields from regenerative agriculture, rewilding, and community.


Several individuals revolutionized the branch of permaculture. In 1929, Joseph Russell Smith added an antecedent term as the subtitle for Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture, a book which sums up his long experience experimenting with fruits and nuts as crops for human food and animal feed. Smith saw the world as an inter-related whole and suggested mixed systems of trees and crops underneath. This book inspired many individuals intent on making agriculture more sustainable, such as Toyohiko Kagawa who pioneered forest farming in Japan in the 1930s


In Australian P. A. Yeomans' 1964 book Water for Every Farm, he supports the definition of permanent agriculture, as one that can be sustained indefinitely. Yeomans introduced both an observation-based approach to land use in Australia in the 1940s and the Keyline Design as a way of managing the supply and distribution of water in the 1950s. 


In the late 1960s, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren started developing ideas about stable agricultural systems on the southern Australian island state of Tasmania. 


Among some of the more recognizable names who received their original training within Mollison's PDC system would include Geoff Lawton and Toby Hemenway, each of whom have more than 25 years experience teaching and promoting permaculture as a sustainable way of growing food.




 Energy Conserving Rules



1. Place each element plant animal or structure so it serves two or more functions
2. Every important function water collection fire protection is served in two or more ways.
3. Elements are places according to intensity of use or zones, control of external energies sectors and efficiency of energy flow.
4. Using biological resources is a long term investment and is a key strategy for recycling energy and developing sustainable systems. 
5. Photovoltaic cells solar water heaters plastic pipes have used non renewable resources in their manufacture, and we can use this effectively to produce our own energy on site.
6. Dill fennel daisies and marigold placed around the garden beds and in the orchard attract predator insects insects which feed on parasite pests.
7. Ponds in the garden attract insect eating frogs.
8. Thorny shrubs provide habitat for insectivorous birds.
9. A community supported by a diverse permaculture is independent of the distribution trade and assured of a variety diet, providing all nutritional requirements while not sacrificing quality or destroying the land that feed it.
10. Permaculture systems seek to stop the flow of nutrient energy off the site and instead turn them into cycles, so that for instance kitchen wastes are recycled to compost, animal manure are directed to bio gas production or to the soil, household grey-water flows to the garden, green manure are turned into the earth, leaves are raked up around trees as mulch. 
11. At regional scale, sewage is treated to produce fertilizer to be used on farmland in the district. 
12. Good design uses incoming natural energies with those generated on site to ensure a complete energy cycle.
13. The goal of permaculture is not only to recycle and therefore increase energy but also to
14. Cath store and use everything before it has degraded to its lowest energy sun water wind manures at its highest possible use then its next  highest and so on.

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Permaculture the Way of the Future

Permaculture: You’ve Heard of It, But What the Heck Is It?

According to an article of BRIAN BARTH, 2016 Bill Mollison, the Tasmanian son of a fisherman who first coined the term 1978, defined “permaculture” as:

“The conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive systems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of the landscape with people providing their food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way.”

Is permaculture a gardening technique or a special approach to farming, like biodynamics? Is it some type of back-to-the-land, off-the-grid intentional community? Is it about sustainable architecture, aquaponics, philosophy, horticulture, design? Permaculture is all that and then some, which is why it’s so hard for anyone to capture what it means in one neat sentence.

In other words, permaculture is a holistic, living-in-harmony-with-nature worldview, as well as technical approach for how to do so.

Mollison eventually became a professor of biogeography and environmental psychology at the University of Tasmania, where he met David Holmgren, a graduate student at the time, who helped him develop the principles and practices that are now taught around the world in the standard Permaculture Design Course, typically a two-week immersive experience held on a farm or property that has been developed with a permaculture approach. The word permaculture is intended as a contraction of permanent and agriculture, which, as Holmgren notes, has been expanded to include culture in addition to just agriculture. The root word “permanent” is intended as a reference to sustainability – an unsustainable society would, by definition, eventually cease to exist; it would be impermanent. Practitioners are known as “permaculturists” or “permies.”

Mollison wrote a number of books over the years, including the hefty Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual, which is the bible for the movement. He also starred in Global Gardener, a docu-series made for Australian public television in the early nineties, which is now a cult classic available free online.
The proof of permaculture’s influence in the mainstream is everywhere.

None of that has stopped permaculture from being highly influential in the discourse of sustainable agriculture and green lifestyles. Though permaculture has largely been an underground social movement, its ideals and concepts have bubbled up in the mainstream more and more. I was a die-hard devotee in my early twenties, eventually earning my Permaculture Teacher’s Certificate and offering courses on everything from designing food forests to building bio-swales on the farm in California.

The proof of permaculture’s influence in the mainstream is everywhere: its basic tenets are embedded in every idea about sustainability that blares from the television or the menu of a farm-to-table restaurant. Here are five of its more well-known principles to help you understand what permaculture is all about.

Closed Loop Systems

Any system that provides for its own energy needs is inherently sustainable. This concept can be extended beyond things like biofuels and solar power to what permaculturists call “inputs,” like food and fertilizer. For example, rather than importing fertilizer to a farm or garden, the system could be designed to provide for its own fertility needs – perhaps from livestock manure or cover crops. And if you’re raising livestock, you should certainly aspire to provide all the food for your animals from on-site, whether raising grain, forage crops, or recycling kitchen waste as animal feed. Any permaculturist worth their salt would remind you that a successful closed loop system “turns waste into resources” and “problems into solutions.” “You don’t have a snail problem, you have a duck deficiency,” Mollison was fond of saying, which makes perfect sense if you’ve ever seen how gleefully ducks wolf down snails.

Perennial Crops

Permies aren’t the only ones to recognize that tilling the ground once or twice a year isn’t particularly good for the soil. Which is why they advocate using perennial crops that are planted just once, rather than annual crops which require constant tillage. Agroforestry, the cultivation of edible tree crops and associated understory plants, is emphasized – think shade-grown coffee or cacao plantations in South America. The only problem is that few crops that most of us eat are perennials; but there is no doubt that if we could replace all the monocultures of corn, soy, and wheat in the world with agroforestry systems (while still feeding the world), agriculture which be much more sustainable.

Multiple Functions

One of the more original ideas of permaculture is that every component of a structure or a landscape should fulfill more than one function. The idea is to create an integrated, self-sufficient system through the strategic design and placement of its components. For example, if you need a fence to contain animals, you might design it so that it also functions as a windbreak, a trellis, and a reflective surface to direct extra heat and light to nearby plants. A rain barrel might be used to raise aquatic food plants and edible fish, in addition to providing water for irrigation. Permies call this “stacking functions.”

Eco-Earthworks

Water conservation is a major focus on permaculture farms and gardens, where the earth is often carefully sculpted to direct every last drop of rain toward some useful purpose. This may take the form of terraces on steep land; swales on moderately sloped land (which are broad, shallow ditches intended to capture runoff and cause it to soak into the ground around plantings); or a system of canals and planting berms on low swampy ground. The latter is modeled on the chinampasof the ancient Aztecs, an approach to growing food, fish, and other crops in an integrated system, often heralded by permaculturists as the most productive and sustainable form of agriculture ever devised.

Let Nature Do the Work for You

The permaculture creed is perhaps best captured in the Mollisonian mantras of “working with, rather than against, nature” and of engaging in “protracted and thoughtful observation, rather than protracted and thoughtless labor.” On a practical basis, these ideas are carried out with things like chicken tractors, where the natural scratching and bug-hunting behavior of hens is harnessed to clear an area of pests and weeds in preparation for planting – or simply planting mashua under your locust trees. Locust trees are known for adding nitrogen to the soil, while mashua, a vining, shade tolerant root crop from the Andes, needs a support structure to grow on. Thus, the natural attributes of the locust eliminate the need to bother with fertilizer or building a trellis, while providing shade, serving as a nectar source for bees and looking pretty. By letting nature do the work of farming and gardening for you, one achieves another of Mollison’s famous maxims: “maximizing hammock time.”