I think that this questions is going to spark a debate, but no real answers are going to come out of it. The big problem I think is that there is not real quality, formal definition of permaculture, and I would argue that permaculture exists along a spectrum of options. As a direct answer to your question (and to get the debate started) I think that yes, it is feasible to support large populations, but I don't think, at least without massive support and development, it could support the global population as it stands now.

thanks for the reply Noa. i'm glad that people are still optimistic about permaculture. i think when discussing permaculture, we should contextualize its use to study it properly. permaculture literally describes a "culture" complete with core ethics, philosophies, and the like. however, i'm focusing on permaculture as a design system. of course, practitioners will attest that to use permaculture, it should be practiced in its entirety. i'm currently writing a paper emphasizing the efficiency of a design system over mass production of crops for food security.

Aha...already a little bit of a disconnect about what permaculture is (or at least what aspect of permaculture this discussion might focus on). :) I do a lot of both research and application of farming and cropping system design, and although I have never applied the label "permaculture" to what I do I'm sure a lot of what I do does fall under that banner.

Permaculture as design as I understand it could maybe also fall under the label of bio-mimicry, and looks to incorporate design lessons from nature and gain maximum utility from all inputs/products....i.e. use of natural elements/processes/resources, utilizing "waste" products/zero waste systems, circular design, etc. Do you think that is true? If not what definition would you put on it?

Along those lines I think the broader definition (i.e. including the social elements) of permaculture is similar...that we want to maximize the efficiency of the system. Just a silly example, but we tend to think of farming as hard labor work, and not desirable. So we move to industrial farming so fewer people have to do the hard labor, and these people can move into different, easier labor jobs, and then in their free time they go to the gym and do hard labor to make up for what they are obviously missing in their lives.

I agree, your first point is absolutely true. Including the social dimension of permaculture, every aspect should work together for an efficient system. I like your example, it's not silly, more or less, this paints a picture of what is happening.

I think the term "permaculture" is given many labels (or falls under many sub-disciplines) because we cannot really "impose" or "suggest" a new culture to people that easily. Although we can incorporate elements of permaculture into already existing cultures, like the design aspect, or the landscape management aspect. Maybe the point of permaculturists is, once you practice these, you are slowly adapting a "perma-culture." it's something anthropologists and sociologists might look into. This can be the advent of a dominant sub-culture. Or social movement with an ecological ideology. It depends how one analyzes it. Thanks for your insights!

As a non-expert, do permacultulists want an agricultural system that is permanent? How would this work within the dynamics of rapid climate change, pest and disease pressures, abiotic stress shifts, economic driver shifts, etc? Or is it an evolving and adaptive system?

Permaculture is actually a sustainable system design not only agricultural and

socioeconomic systems.Feeding large populations are within this system and very sustainably. Not for the solution like "earning and burning". Large populations, large volume of foods but low nutrient values ! What is happening then! In the name of feeding large populations? I think, permacultire would be oneof the sustainable solution.

Permaculture is actually a sustainable system design not only agricultural and

socioeconomic systems.Feeding large populations are within this system and very sustainably. Not for the solution like "earning and burning". Large populations, large volume of foods but low nutrient values ! What is happening then! In the name of feeding large populations? I think, permacultire would be oneof the sustainable solution.

Jabez - I would be very interested to hear more about what type of design elements, specifically, you would consider incorporating into efficient design of permaculture. If you have the time.

Are there good, published studies comparing permaculture with conventional agriculture? That would serve as a good scientific basis for a discussion about pros and cons of systems, their regional adaptations, impacts of biotic and abiotic stressors, economic assessments, environmental impacts, etc.

To Mr. Noa Lincoln and Nick Brich< Please search, Global Eco Village Network,Global Eco Village Network- Asia and Oceania, Permaculture Institute of Australia, Ecological Solutions inc, Dr. Bill Molison and David Holmgreen for details.

Thank Neem. One other that I've worked with a bit is the Regenerative Leadership Institute.

Nick - I don't know but I don't really think so, and mainly because permaculture as a whole does not strictly refer to any particular practice, but more a philosophy of approach, so much more difficult to quantify effects. But I am sure there are at the very least some case study examples in the scientific literature.

Permacuture(1905) and Permatherapy(2000) is a new invention and synthesis of all natural sciences. It one step further than any other culture

.

Permaculture principles are very ancient, dating back to the domestication of wild plants for food, and figuring out how to grow them. The fact that humans exist after these tens of thousands of years is due to that. It is certainly the moist sustainable path for mankind and the ecosystem. However the problem is that the particular approach depends from place to place, depending upon climate, soil, vegetation etc, and has to be figured out by trial and error (such as what Masanobu Fukuoka, author if One Streaw Revolution did). That takes time, at least 4-5 years, and the issue is most people do not have that luxury of personal experimentation, especially concerning organic agriculture, crop patterms and biological pest control. If the agricuktural universities and ministries would devote some effort to figuring out permacultural practices for a certain region, that would lead to large scale sustainability.

There are some good scientific studies published comparing organic versus conventional systems using meta-analysis. I wondered if this is also true for permaculture so that scientifically robust arguments can be made to leverage more research funds?

Hello Noa! I'll post a summary of my paper here soon. Basically, I focused on the zoning strategy of permaculture, where each "frequency zone" is visited for a certain number of times per year. This limits long trips to zones that are regularly visited for example vegetable and herb gardens are located in the first zone since these are visited almost everyday. Orchards and trees for lumber and fuel, on the other hand, are seldom visited so they should be located in outer zones. These zones are not independent, rather they interact with each other as components benefiting from other components of the design, i.e. animal manure in the grazing zone are used a fertilizers in the garden zone, and things like that. The placement of each component should make sense to benefit other components. The permaculture zonation design can be applied in varying scales: household, village, town, city, and so on. The design is also relative to location, depending on land area, property lines, slope and elevation, etc. Bill Mollison's Permaculture: A Designer's Manual offers detailed explanations of methods of design and pattern analysis. Landscape ecology can confirm the relationship and effects of one permaculture patch to another, not only ecologically, but also socio-economically.

Neem, Andrew, and Amartya, thanks for your inputs in this thread. I really do think permaculture still needs to be further studied. There are a lot of successful projects out there that deserves scientific validation.

Andrew, I searched "permaculture" here in Researchgate and saw some good studies about permaculture.

Copeman D. 2007. Permaculture for Urban Sustainability

Jensen, MV. 2009. “Applied Landscape Ecology by Multi-Function Agriculture: [A] Comparison Study of Landscape Ecology and Permaculture Design

Rhodes, CJ. 2012. Feeding and Healing the World: Through Regenerative Agriculture and Permaculture.

Scott, R. 2010. A Critical Review of Permaculture in the United States

Smith T., Willets J., Mitchell C. 2007. Implications of the Synergies Between Systems Theory and Permaculture for Learning About and Acting Towards Sustainability

Veteto JR and J. Lockyer. 2008. Environmental Anthropology Engaging Permaculture: Moving Theory and Practice Toward Sustainability

There are many more.

Permaculture principles are sound ones, but difficult to put into practice, since so much depends on local soils and climate, not to mention markets (where the socioeconomic systems come in), and in my experience a good deal of experimentation is needed ! In theory it should work on a large scale as well as a small one, but I have to say that I have only applied it to my own attempts at horticulture - and am very happy with it. I assume you have tracked down the core texts on the subject; I could supply references, but there is much on the web.

Sorry to be joining the conversation so late, as it's very important to me.

There is no, repeat, no, empirical peer-reviewed research on permaculture systems in any English-language journals. There is very little peer-reviewed literature on permaculture at all - especially in the natural sciences. (Note that only one of the articles listed above is peer-reviewed.)

There is, however, an abundance of research on the themes, principles, and kinds of systems that permaculture is proposing. I have a systematic review of the permaculture literature coming out in Agronomy for Sustainable Development (hopefully this fall, but maybe in 2014), that identifies the distinctive content of the permaculture literature, and find the points of consonance and conflict with contemporary peer-reviewed agroecology and agroforestry literature.

Jabez, I'm very excited to see that you're working on the zoning aspect in permaculture, as the emphasis on spatial configuration within agroecosystems is definitely one of the most distinctive aspects of permaculture thinking. There is no agroecological research explicitly addressing in-agroecosystem configuration - especially as it pertains to labor productivity. This is one of several examples in which the permaculture perspective exceeds the scientific literature, and helps to identify questions for investigation. I look forward to reading your paper!

As for the question itself: yes. As a design approach, it's perfectly amenable to being scaled up. It's history of use is with smaller-scale systems, and it has a strong association with a body of technique that are well suited to small scale. With an appropriate shift in thinking (and technical palette) the principles and design strategies are very scalable - up to a point. Permaculture principles clearly advocate for a re-decentralization of agricultural activities, which in turn requires substantial political-economics shifts. You can't just replace industrial agriculture with permaculture production like changing a battery, and it would be very difficult to justify intensive production on 10,000 ac parcels in terms of permaculture ethics and principles.

I also hope to shed light on the question of configuration, among others, in my current project. I'm visiting 50 permaculture-identified farming operations in the US, and conducting enterprise analyses, assessing quality of life, and mapping land uses (for later assessment of multifunctionality).

Glad to see that other researchers are interested in a critical discussion of permaculture! Permaculture has suffered from an overabundance of cheerleaders and a conspicuous isolation from scientific research for far too long. It's too useful to allow that to continue.

thanks for the reply rafter! i checked out your website, Liberation Ecology. actually, i'm still in the process of familiarizing myself with permaculture, i'm not even a permaculture designer. it just happened that a classmate of mine in an Organic Agriculture course i took gave me a copy of Geoff Lawton's Introduction to Permaculture Design video. then i read literature by Mollison and Holmgren. i used these materials as a springboard for my inquiry since most of the people i meet in here haven't heard about permaculture.

having a background in sociology gave me a rather different angle regarding permaculture and how it can be practiced and promoted. the paper i wrote for our landscape ecology class in grad school had a sociological flavor to it even though it wasn't meant to be a sociological paper. it was supposed to be a landscape management strategy but i couldn't help but discuss the theoretical effects and impacts of a permaculturist in a community. in summary, the paper focused on a meta-theory of "what permaculture can do" and "how to use it" as a landscape management strategy.

if you want, i can send you the abstract of my paper. maybe it can give you additional insights for your research. kudos to all the permaculture practitioners out there!

Let us know when your article appears, Rafter, it sounds important because you are right: the empirical evidence is hard to find in the literature. Us practitioners just struggle on. Another useful website for Jabez might be www.ecoagriculture.org, which partners with many leading organizations in the sustainable agriculture field. If Jabez can download his paper, I'd rather like to see that.

I'm delighted to see this being discussed - there's concurrently a similar discussion on Sustainable Agriculture on LinkedIn - an indication of the importance and concern about such topics, too long ignored at policy level. Perhaps change is on its way.

hello Peta! thanks for the link. i already posted the abstract of my paper in my profile. i will upload the rest of the paper soon. it hasn't been peer reviewed yet, i'm sure i'll get a lot of insights here at RG.

Permaculture is a system of principles and methods useful for the design of sustainable human settlements. Not because it is dependent on environmental conditions and characteristics of each place ceases to be a solution to the problems we face today. The main problem of permaculture is lack of common sense of the people, all seeking economic improvement, while permaculture offers a full and healthy life, not just those who practice it but also the people around them. The main objective is not to produce large quantities of a specific cultivation, but rather in every home produce the necessary crops for consumption, doing this with everything first hand and not throwing elements that can be reused.

In fact, permaculture design, if properly applied, can enhance the production of each crop included, by effectively controlling the micro-environments along with pests and diseases. It is tricky to apply, however, and all those using it must be very conversant with each plant and its needs. Given that, the results can be amazing.

This wide, diverse discussion of the permaculture (P) topic is very appreciable. Although less than 1% of global people-made plant-production is from P, one can easily sense the importance, which P, mixed cropping, alley-farming, eco-farming, etc. will gain in the coming decades due to the partly dramatic eco-impacts of pure agro-chemistry based agriculture. The progress of P and thelike will depend on the creative cleverness and networking and exchanging of best-practice-experiences of P-workers in practice...not in THEORY!. The P-advocates themselves have to be careful; Sepp Holzer, a major early P-actor in Austria, has become very controversially discussed. Ideology-like features of P have to be eradicated whereever they crop up.....See attached a short paper, which I worked out in context of a specific project in Ethiopia while working in NGO Welthungerhilfe. It reveals also the complexity of the topic and the gigantic potentials.

We must not forget that Permaculture is particularly labour-intensive at the beginning, although labour requirements, especially for weeding, can reduce over time; not, however, for harvesting. Mechanization is virtually precluded, so it would be very difficult in areas where labour costs are high. Well suited to family farming, however.

I like the comment about labor, and I think a big part of this conversation is the discussion of where agriculture fits into our societal well-being. I just saw an ad for a 52" high definition TV for $225. That is only a couple weeks worth of food, or maybe 15 meals if you are eating out. I think that is a huge part of the underlying problem...that as a society where we put our resources and what we value is so skewed that the really "good" options aren't available because of economics. Farming offers a huge range of benefits, from environmental to health to community to social, but these things are undervalued in our current system. I understand that farming can be hard work (believe me I've done enough of it), but it can also be very healthy and therapeutic when it's not so demanding (i.e. working 10 hours days 6 days a week). There was a great article just released talking about how industrial agriculture is not actually focused on maximizing food per unit area (and some of my work on agro-forestry systems supports that) but maximizing food per unit labor. This is the latent case of the modern world...we are often not interested in any type of efficiency except production per unit area. But what are we doing will all this labor once it is freed up? It seems like we don't have a good solution for that, and are constantly battling unemployment, and creating meaningless positions within the more profitable industries (the industries, typically, that take the most from the public good and natural resources...that's why they are profitable). This is a systematic and reoccurring problem that I think is near the root of the problem in modernized countries.

Where does agriculture fit into our societal well-being ? The simple answer is: wherever FOOD fits ! But it is sadly true that we are becoming increasingly removed from the realities of food, and today's children are not encouraged to link the act of eating with the practice of farming, especially under pressures of urbanization. In our increasingly bureaucratized world, I have noticed this oddity: I am perpetually asked to prove where I live, and apparently the way to prove this is to produce an electricity account or a water account. When I point out that I get my electricity from the sun, and that helps me pump my water out of the ground, I am met with blank looks and disbelief. Officials simply don't understand how I could be living at all, without even a street number and name ! And they are adults; what are the children thinking ?

The definition of permaculture has a chequered history. Originally defined as a system based on perennials the classic "Designers' Manual" changed this to a system of sustainable agriculture and settlement design which could mean anything the environmental movement is promoting! In practice, permaculture writers concentrate on a polyculture of plants including a large share of perennials as being what is most "sustainable". This is reflected in the comments so far. Whether such a system can produce enough food to feed the world is not such a difficult question to answer even if studies of "permaculture systems" identified as such are few and far between. Basically what is being proposed is a particular array of components in an organic agricultural system. Each of these components has itself been tested in comparison to yields in conventional farming. There is no reason why a combination of them would do worse. Basically, the research suggests that yields per hectare may be slightly lower (about 20%) in comparison with the high input highly technologically organized agriculture of best practice commercial agriculture in the rich countries where labour costs are high and inputs are relatively cheap. On the other hand, the cost of such systems is an eventual inability to grow anything at all as soils become salinized, compacted, eroded, acidified and so on depending on the place in question. Other problems are the over-use of aquifers and side effects in bio-diversity of various kinds - eutrophication of waterways, elimination of beneficial organisms, of wild species and so on. In the developing world where high input agriculture is being used, the relative expense of inputs and other factors means that productivity per hectare is about the same as in organic agriculture. In the marginal lands where inputs cannot be afforded at all, good organic (permaculture) techniques can raise production by a factor of 2 to 4 times. (see Jules Pretty 1995 on this stuff). So the relative ability of permaculture to feed people per hectare of agricultural land varies depending on the economic context. What we can also say with reasonable confidence is that in most cases it does not make sense for farmers in rich countries to adopt permaculture or organic agriculture although there are important niche markets. To actually get sustainable agriculture happening we need a change in social context. However in the poor countries and especially where there is localized subsistence production, these organic techniques and permaculture to provide a dependable and varied diet actually makes the most sense from an economic perspective. See "The Chikukwa Project" film and article:

www.thechikukwaproject.com - for the film

www.gifteconomy.org.au - for relevant articles

Our world has been living on borrowed energy for the last 100 years and it won't take long and we will have to adopt the principles of permaculture not only in agriculture but also for any other aspect of our lives that depend on energy and materials. We won't be able to afford large powerstations in the middle of nowhere to produce electricity and let more than half of the energy dissipate uselessly into the environment as heat. We won't be able to invest 0.95 litres of petrol to produce 1 litre of petrol. We won't be able to feed pigs in the UK on soybean grown in the USA. And we won't be able to sustain large scale monocultures because the transport costs (to bring fertiliser and water to the crop and to ship the crop to the consumer) will be too high. And it would be wonderful if we would all realise this now whilst we still have enough fossil fuel to keep for more important things like making plastics, and enough affordable fertlizer to sustain high crop yields, but we won't and so only when it is all burned up will we start changing our ways and it will be harder than it would have been if we had thought about it earlier. Basic techniques to enhance productivity of limited amounts of land include efficient crop rotation, intercropping, and integrated plant and animal farming, which means that a sustainable farmer has to have knowledge of many crops and livestock, and ideally know about energy-efficient greenhouse design with heat storage and smart climate control systems. Ideally, the sustainable farmer would also know about bio-refining, fermentation, distillation, process technology. If a farm produces bio-ethanol from potatoes, the yeast can be fed to the pigs, and the nutrient-rich broth can be recycled as fertliser for other crops, and the heat from the fermentation and distillation can be used to heat a greenhouse. If the production system is integrated, much can be recycled, and if many crops are grown on the farm, then crop rotation helps to reduce the need for fertilisers and helps to reduce pests... it is not necessarily more work, but it requires more knowledge. Why do we have large powerstations? To be able to run the business with a minimum of human labour. But if large buildings would have their own powerstations, they could use the off-heat as well as the electricity. Why don't we do this? Simple, energy was always cheap (and still is cheap) and so we didn't have to bother. Only 100 years ago having a basement full of potatoes was cheaper than having a basement full of coal, because people grow their potatoes in their garden or allotment, but they had to buy the coal with real money. "Do you have coal?" is German slang for saying "do you have money?" and most people don't know where it comes from, essentially it meant (can you heat your home and cook your food in the coming winter?). Energy was always more expensive than food, except for the last 100 years, simply because energy was cheap and food prices could grow due to bank speculation and unsustainable practices (like fishing shrimps in the atlantic, ship them to Thailand to get them peeled by cheap labour, and then ship them back to Europe). Regarding permaculture, 100 years ago a large proportion of the population was engaged in local food production, now only a minor portion of our population produces food in an utterly non-local manner. You can't think of permaculture if you don't accept that more people and more knowledge will have to be invested, it is harder work, it requires more thinking, and it even requires inventing the wheel again to establish practices that worked for centuries but that were abandoned because energy was cheap....

Very late to the debate but here goes...

Can it feed large populations? The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation seems to think small-scale agroecology has to be the answer to global food shortages. (July 2014)

As for the previous suggestion that there is zero empirical studies into the efficacy of permaculture, it seems there is a fundamental misunderstanding of what permaculture is; permaculture is nothing more than an interconnected system of not-particularly-revolutionary techniques, linked to complement each other in terms of input/output. Permaculture did not invent the swale, or humus-building, or soil microbiology, for example, but it makes use of all of them. If you can find evidence for the efficacy of improving conditions of the soil food web and subsequent nutrient availability in plants (many thanks, Elaine Ingham), you can find evidence for the efficacy of permaculture. If you understand that humus is a stable carbon-based substance made of decomposed organic matter, and that a permaculture fundamental is humus-building, then you can only conclude that permaculture helps to sequester carbon as humus (Dr Ingham might at this juncture point out that this also tends to expand and enrich the soil-food web). If you understand that water moves at right angles to a contour, then you understand that placing obstacles (e.g. swales) on contour will slow the flow of water. Once you understand that slow-moving water deposits sediment rather than erodes, and that sediment contains nutrients and organic matter to further the soil-food web, you can only conclude that swales are good for the soil-food web. That swales increase the infiltration of rainwater into the soil, subsoil and eventually parent rock, is perhaps an even more significant benefit, of course!

If you need a quick overview of the improvement of degraded land and the lives of the people who live there through other permaculture techniques, I suggest Willie Smits' TED talk "How to restore a rainforest".

Yes that is absolutely it. The same thing in reference to food security. If you know that a diet rich in protein, carbohydrates, vegetables and fruit will contribute to nutrition and health you will know that a permaculture polyculture in which small livestock are fed on crop and other food surplus will make a nutritious diet available to smallholder households.

I must say that permaculture is a design thinking system so it is beyond food production which implies the place of sustainability. Permaculture owns a solution to feed a large population but i want you to know that it is systemic in approach, it requires a slow and steady approach. A system that is self sustaining and self reliant in approach.

In Nigeria, a need for our universities to take a course on permaculture is very key and important. I think permaculture can solve food security problems even with little resources.