Frank is joined by Cliff Davis of Spiral Ridge Permaculture. Cliff begins by breaking down the natural history, forest composition, soil types, and topography of his permaculture farm in central Tennessee. The topic then shifts to permacultural strategies for success in this challenging environment, and concludes with a discussion of the political challenges of a establishing a permanent culture in a damaged society.
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7 responses to “Episode #131: Spiral Ridge Permaculture”
Love the podcast. Great to see it back up and continuing! For me, being a part of the population that tries to get out of the 9-5 corporate and get into permaculture its inspiring whenever you interview one of these people living their permaculture dreams. I wholeheartedly agree with cliff, while I live in a small studio apartment I have persuaded my parents to allow me to start working on our old backyard in the suburbs a few times a year. While I have not taken any classes yet, and have read many books, in the end I don’t think much can replace just getting your hands dirty. Great work frank and thank you for the podcast! Have you heard of Derrick Jensen? I think his work concerning the relationship between ecology and civilization would be a great perspective to bring onto the show.
My spidey senses were pinging a lot during this podcast.
(1) Cliff mentioned buying expensive nutrients and battling early succession growth with free human labor. And yet he’s aware of how Sepp Holzer did it… I know Sepp’s story is not completely transparent or reliable, but why would his experience not apply? Sepp did not use free labor, and he did not machete plants all day. His subsoil, almost any subsoil and rock layer, contained everything necessary for maximum productivity once he made his ponds, terraces, and mulch mounds (hugels). He used seed mixtures of dozens if not hundreds of plants to seeks out and redistribute nutrients across soil horizons, create humus, create space for atmospheric microbial life to take hold. He actively cultivated ants, worm eggs, and other insects. It’s really disheartening to hear that Cliff knows what Sepp did, but doesn’t show us that he tried to replicate the same techniques — if we aren’t going to be adamant about experimenting with the best insights from the past and finding out whether they work or not, we’re destined to a life of brute force human labor stupidty.
(2) You brought up the issue of lacking access to land for the young generation. In America I think that’s a myth and a blessing. Would we want the young generation to have access to the scads of land that previous generations claimed through force, gov’t programs, or bank debt? Have we proved ourselves to be more ingenious and better stewards and money managers? Nope, we’re suckers just the same if not worse. In the eastern US, everyone has access to at least 1/8 acre, which is plenty enough to prove yourself. If you can prove yourself on 1/8th acre, you have the tools (cashflow, skills, human connections) necessary to get more land, guaranteed. In reality most of us in the east all have access to 1 to 10 acres or more easily within 1 to 10 miles of our homes. For those in the east, midwest, and plains, there is a dying generation of farmers who do not have enough people to pass their land on to. If only 5% of Americans are farmers and there are not enough people to replace them, of course land will be bought up by agri-conglomerate holding companies. No systematic effort has been made to fill this demand of attrition or make it transparent. In the west, the same is really the case — concrete cities are more concentrated and land is more expensive, but the desert, mediterranean, and temperate rainforest conditions that prevail are perfectly suited to bountiful year-round food growth, unlike the wet humid cold cloudy east.
Lets get a program together for making many small 1/8-acre plots productive, and scale up from there, using every insight we’ve got access to, from Sepp Holzer to Salatin to Growing Power to Stamets, and be very picky about not accepting brute force human labor over intelligent permaculture-style observation of ecological connections.
A.J. Thanks for your comments and I agree that observation and upfront design to lessen labor is the best strategy. However, we do use a lot of Sepp’s techniques as well as many other approaches to land management. With a time limit only so much of the story can be told. Best to you in you farming. Where is that?
Cliff, I really can’t say any more than I said without seeing videos of your land, or visiting. I’d love to hear the full story if you can tell it — I don’t see anything on your website that approaches the detail I would require to replicate your methods. And that’s what I’m after: clear experimental replicability, of success and failure.
I’m in Pittsburgh! I own 1/4 acre and have direct access to 20 acres abutting my land, and have indirect access to many more acres within a mile of my home.
Do you know anything about acquiring mountaintop removal land? Been a goal of mine for a while. Sounds like you are in a clear-cutting region, but not coal-cutting!
:r]
AJ mentions that Cliff should try to replicate Sepp’s techniques and that using human labor is stupid. I heartily disagree. While it is true that we should use smart design and learn from those who have successful models, those models are not always easily replicated. For instance, I know many that have tried Fukuoka’s methods and were not successful or found that his methods were not the best fit for their needs. It is important to use the knowledge available and go forth and develop methods that work for your particular site, with your particular resources. Sepp used big machinery to set up his systems (this has a cost all it’s own). Most (non-western) people on marginal farmland do not have access to money or machinery. What they do have is community. Call it brute labor if you will, but the community comes together to work on projects and improve their quality of life. Here in the west we typically have the wwoofing/apprentice model. Again it is a community building exercise to work the land together. You share knowledge, gain skills, interact with nature and observe the landscape. It is also great exercise! My husband and I spent years in this learning model and now have people come help us. Anyone who thinks developing a permaculture system and healing the land doesn’t involve physical labor is not doing it! Chop and drop, with machetes, is a very acceptable method of establishing a forest garden in the permaculture world. A recent study said that your labor (planting, maintaining, chop and dropping) decrease 90% over a ten year period. That is still smart design.
Big machinery is not always the answer to stopping early succession, especially if you want to be selective about which plants you want to let grow. Many of those early succession plants are pulling up valuable nutrients and preventing erosion and can be left instead of (again) spending money on millions of seeds to do the same job (a la Sepp).
Another thing AJ seems to want to knock, and I find this true with a lot of permaculture folks, is the use of expensive nutrients. While it is true that an abundant harvest can be reaped without their use, the food is not necessarily nutritionally dense. If these nutrients are not in the soil, the plants are not going to bring them to the surface, the edibles are not going to be packed with them and they will not find their way into our bodies. Then we go buy expensive supplements to ingest! Remineralizing the soil, if affordable, is a great way to increase the nutritional value of our food. These rarely add up to too much money, especially since their application rates decrease over time. Closed loop systems sound great in theory, but in practice are hard. The nutrients have to be there to begin with. All waste has to stay on the farm. That means no selling, or giving away vegetables and all humanure is collected and stays on farm. You still have nutrient loss because we are absorbing many of those minerals for healthy functioning.
Lastly, I like the idea of growing where you can, proving yourself and trying to gain access to more land based on your performance, but there is no guarantee. I think AJ is oversimplifying. Taking over agricultural land, even if it is free, would cost a lot in resources (especially if it was used for conventional growing) and those are not as easily obtained as AJ makes it seem. Maybe I am wrong? I would love to see examples (more then one) of this model being a success, otherwise it is just theory.
Jennifer: Wow, a lot to respond to there. The cost of machinery is getting more and more prohibitive, but I do think we need to explore our options in that arena in more depth. P.A. Yeomans took full advantage of cheap fossil fuels in the 1950’s to keyline his entire farm. What an intelligent, cross-generational investment. Likewise with Sepp, and kudos to him for taking advantage of fossil fuels while they still are cheap. In Bolivia and Venezuela diesel is heavily subsidized, so it’s still like $2.00 a gallon at most. Yet people, even those with capital, don’t seem to be taking full advantage of what must be a once in a lifetime opportunity to keyline, build dams, swales, terraces for cheap.
Most of our heavy machinery runs on diesel, so there’s a lot of opportunity to continue to run this machinery by producing biodiesel on the farm site, especially in areas that aren’t water limited, or perhaps through the use of drought tolerant tree crops for feedstock in areas that are. I’ve got a great interview with Dorn Cox that I haven’t published yet that addresses this possibility.
And finally, your exactly right about the use of nutrients. I think chemical fertilizers are a great tool, and I use them in my gardening frequently. Touching up some tomato or eggplant seedlings with a bit of N-P-K solute does the trick so nicely, especially when they show signs of nutrient deficiency. The issue is scale. I mix my fertilizers in a small cup and apply directly to the potting block, not in a huge tank attached to a machine that injects the nitrogen into the soil only to later become runoff. Machinery, fertilizers, machetes, animals…all tools. The successful permaculturalist doesn’t discriminate against any, but instead chooses to use the right one at the right time and at an appropriate, human scale.
Let me say just this: I want readers of Sepp Holzer to actually test his specific, hard-won knowledge. We must know, as soon as possible, whether he’s a fraud or not, and why, so that we can get on with the work of the world. In Cliff’s case, I want to see:
(1) reestablishing plants on bare soil:
– using a seed mixture of 50+ species,
– chosen over the course of many years,
– favoring rare and poisonous plants,
– plants of deep, medium, and shallow roots and varying canopy
(2) making hugels:
– of 1+ meter in height,
– with conifer logs and branches as the core,
– implanting select ant and worm species — for eggs and colonies
– covered in seed mixture and food plants
Sepp Holzer, Alan Savory, and more importantly Joel Salatin — they don’t rely on free human labor, and they don’t spend their heartbeats on the face of this planet mucking out manure stalls and scrounging for organic matter, much less buying minerals. If you are, that’s a red flag — that’s what dummies like myself do.
It’s well known that Fukuoka’s world was an obscure labor of love and not directly replicable. The more relevant case is that of Takao Furuno. Furuno’s method has spread to thousands of farms. It’s labor-saving, cash-paying, food-growing, holistic, replicable, applied ecology — and it looks good bb!