Conversation with three grower-researchers and leaders of the global movement for a natural, permanent agriculture, speaking on the seeds of our future and ecological farming.
The following edited discussion is a head-to-head exchange between men who are taking key roles in defining our planet's future.
Bill Mollison's diagram on Permaculture, Figures 1, 2, 3 and 4.
A MOTHER EARTH NEWS interview on ecological farming with three grower-researchers who will plant the seeds of our future.
Australian Bill Mollison created the concept of permaculture in ecological farming. A gravel-voiced graybeard, Bill has a dry sense of humor, a feisty temperament, and absolute dedication to his cause. Introduced before his keynote conference speech as "a great yarn teller who's motivated thousands of people to action," Mollison has held every job from seaman to Tanzania bush researcher to senior lecturer in environmental psychology. He left that secure university position two years before retirement to blaze the permaculture trail.
Wes Jackson researches perennial crop mixes in Salina, Kansas. A hulking midwesterner with broad hands and a ready smile, Jackson combines a warm nature, down-home humor, and impeccable scientific scholarship (he has a Ph.D. in genetics). For example, his favorite lecture title is "Herbaceous Perennial Seed-Producing Polycultures: Their Contribution to the Solution of All Marital Problems and the End of the Possibility of Nuclear Holocaust."
At his 200-acre Land Institute, Wes and his research staff are working to breed a mixture of perennial sunflower, rye, and other plants that could produce an ongoing yearly seed harvest on the midwestern prairies. This high-yielding system would sponsor its own fertility, have minimal pest and weed problems, and require no erosive annual tillage. The self-maintaining food system would be designed by humans but follow the principles of nature. "It's not that humans don't learn faster than nature," Jackson says. "It's just that nature's been at it a lot longer."
Fukuoka was an agricultural scientist who, after a serious illness, had a "flash of insight" that nature was perfect, while human knowledge was meaningless. He set out to prove these ideas through farming and has been raising rice, barley, and citrus on a small commercial farm since World War II. Fukuoka advocates what he calls "do nothing" farming: He has used no tillage, no fertilizer, no weeding, and no pesticides for four decades, and still achieves grain yields as high as conventional Japanese farmers. An example of his techniques: He wraps his barley and clover seeds in clay pellets, and broadcasts them into his maturing rice crop. Later, he scatters rice straw into the sprouting barley. The straw mulch and permanent clover ground cover suppress weeds and promote soil fertility.
Maybe the best way to start is to simply ask each of you about the purpose of your life's work.
MOLLISON: I'm a very simple person. All I want to do is regreen the earth. That's what I work on all the time.
Bill, do you think Fukuoka's type of natural farming is included in permaculture?
MOLLISON: It's not only included but welcomed. Actually, until Fukuoka wrote The One-Straw Revolution, I had a mind set against all grain farming, so I didn't include any references to it in my first book, Permaculture One. Now I know that the approaches of both these other gentlemen fit naturally into the permaculture framework. Indeed, Fukuoka-san and I are basically the same person.
MOLLISON: I think we're three aspects of a simple endeavor to do one thing. Fukuoka-san works in nontillage grain production. Wes is concerned with prairie revitalization and developing a good-yielding perennial grain. I, and many others who labor with me, work with edible plants and also with health, land, and financial integration to support environmentally sound enterprises.
JACKSON: I would say that Fukuoka-san works a lot with herbaceous annuals. He's trying to take advantage of the natural integrities within current, traditional crops. Mollison emphasizes landscape design, edible landscaping, and so forth. At the Land Institute, we're trying to put together sustainable, herbaceous, perennial ecosystems for farmers.
We're also trying to determine what biological principles may be at work. That's one of the most important contributions of our efforts: discovering the principles of ecosystem agriculture. These principles would be applicable in Chad, the Soviet Union, Japan, or anywhere.
We're trying to become ecosystemologists who use a dialectical whole-system approach, not a Cartesian part-over-whole approach. And let me tell you, that's hard. To help us maintain such an interconnected approach, we're hoping to create a natural, physical connection between our soil scientist, plant breeder, ecologist, entomologist, and plant pathologist. They'll use the same laboratory facilities and all have their names on any papers produced. We hope that shared environment will help dictate a pattern of holistic, ecosystem thought and behavior.
There's another way. Don't carry out your research by asking, How about if we tried this? How about if we tried that? Instead, go in the opposite direction and ask, What if we don't do this? What if we don't do that? After 30 years of such efforts, I have managed to reduce my own labor essentially to just sowing seed and spreading straw.
JACKSON: This is a healthy difference of opinion about the role of science. Our current scientific knowledge has come at the expense of forests, soils, and fuel. To regard that knowledge as damnable simply because it was accumulated at a cost of a lot of ecological capital is to treat it the same way we treated those forests and soils. We can't do that now. We need to turn that knowledge to work toward the regeneration of the earth. It has the potential to be regenerated, just like any smaller landscape does.
JACKSON: Well, of course, we don't know nature very well. But ever since the beginning of agriculture, we've had to figure out how to work with nature as much as possible. To do it well, I think we must ask, Is science an inherently alienating force in society? That question should always be before us, because if we are scientists first and human beings second, we can't afford to ask that question. But if we are human beings first and scientists second, we can't afford not to ask that question.
I think perhaps you are reacting to the current personality of science. I don't believe that science has to alienate us from nature. Let's hope a future science would have high precision along with a higher measure of humility about its own imperfections and the mysteries of nature.
I understand Mr. Jackson's scientific approach. I used to have the same view when I was a scientist. You can just think of us three as being on the horse of Don Quixote. It looks like we are saying different things, but we are really on the same horse. The horse is running toward disaster. Wes Jackson's trying to stop the feet of the horse. Bill Mollison's trying to turn the head of the horse. (Laughs) I'm just hanging onto the horse's tail!
MOLLISON: Modern agriculture is the single most destructive activity on the face of the earth. If we're going to make things better, we have to do it soon or not at all. I'm absolutely convinced of that. I travel a tremendous amount, and I've seen signs of the collapse of large systems everywhere.
JACKSON: Agriculture's high yields create an illusion of success, but they're really just the result of transferring fossil carbon into the carbon of agricultural products. If there were a full accounting, we would have to say that modern industrial agriculture is the least efficient and most devastating form of agriculture to ever be invented-it undercuts the very basis of our existence.
To me, agriculture is the number one environmental problem, aside from the possibility of nuclear holocaust. All in all, we're facing the most dangerous situation that the human race has ever found itself in.
One day the trendy people will say, "Did you notice so-and-so is eating annuals?"
MOLLISON: I'll concentrate merely on the destructive catalytic reactions we're causing in the atmosphere. Chlorinated chemicals now seem to be destroying the ozone layer over the Antarctic-creating an ultraviolet window larger than America which will sterilize the earth if it widens.
FUKUOKA: If we lose just 3°7o more of the greenery on the earth, we're just not going to make it. There's going to be a critical oxygen shortage that will affect human beings' feelings and way of thinking.
MOLLISON: Oxygen deficits are really critical now in Greece. You'll see a serious oxygen shortage there soon.
JACKSON: I doubt it. I don't think that oxygen shortage is the issue.
MOLLISON: He thinks it's the carbon surplus.
MOLLISON: I'm working with people who are going the next step beyond property design-into economics. We're using ethical investment and innovative financing to fund a whole raft of businesses in small communities. Our goal is to create people polycultures whose purpose is to create and preserve permacultures, or stable systems. In parts of Australia, we have almost achieved this.
We're also developing more permaculture teachers. And we're trying to preserve those species-rich areas which still exist. For instance, we'll soon purchase a threatened rain forest by setting up a unit trust. You can resell your share; you just can't change the rain forest. Sometimes we buy damaged areas, repair them, and then preserve them.
FUKUOKA: There is no natural farming in Japan. In China, they've started a 1-million-hectare natural farm. There's some natural farming happening in India and the United States. It hasn't started yet in Africa, but I can feel the people's strong interest.
JACKSON: One of the basic problems in our attempts to increase perennial yields is that, in general, a perennial plant's very nature resists such attempts. Whereas an annual puts its energies into seed production to guarantee future generations, a perennial neglects its seeds and puts most of its energies into a surviving root system. So the first basic question we've had to ask is, Can perennialism and high yield go together?
We're getting enough encouraging results that I can now say the answer is yes. I look forward to the day when the trendy people in a natural food restaurant around Berkeley or Cambridge say, "Did you notice that so-and-so is still eating annuals?"
MOLLISON: To escape disaster, we need to open a broad-scale discussion on defining the future, the way they discuss political issues on TV in Sweden. We had a five-part television series in Australia recently called "Heartlands," which showed examples of positive action individuals are taking-and it had the largest viewing audience in the nation's history.
If we don't get the media into this discussion soon on a global basis, it may be too late. Perhaps we should take charge of local radio and television stations and present case after case for action to the people of the United States and all countries. Get good scientific speakers on it. Get people who have sensible suggestions about reversing things on it. My own passion is to locate enough small examples everywhere to allow us to teach continuously that permaculture works in Fiji, in America, in Sydney because we've got people everywhere making it work.
Let's divert major investment funds toward regreening earth, first of all by telling a lot of people how to do it for themselvesa lot of people. Indeed, gardening self-reliance in your backyard-is the biggest cure for the agriculture problem.
JACKSON: I have a hard time speaking for the rest of the world because I haven't been around. I've never been to Africa or Asia. Why, Bill here may be from the next county for all I know. I haven't been there, either.
What I can speak for is American agriculture, which is probably the major agricultural liability in the world. Unfortunately, it has also become the idealized standard throughout much of the world. The trouble with American agriculture is that it's overcapitalized. Four-wheel-drive tractors cost $120,000; combines run $80,000. Studies now show that if an average farmer has $10,000 to spend, it's more cost effective to hire a person than to buy more equipment.
MOLLISON: Foresters, he's talking about. Foresters tending tree crops.
JACKSON: In the top 20 crops there are only two trees—banana and coconut, numbers 19 and 20. When you're really serious about food, you eat grains and legumes. (Laughs) Considering Bill's strong point of view, I think that statement took bravery on my part!
I'm saying that to make sustainable agriculture work, we need more small farmers. You have to keep your systems small enough that you can keep observing and learning. I think that having landed small farmers what Jefferson had in mind—is not nostalgia but is a practical necessity. Achieving that is the challenge for our time.
I do agree with Bill that the first thing we have to do is find the good examples that already exist around the country and make them highly visible. I don't know if we should spread the word through a journal or word of mouth or what—I'm not as fond of the idea of using television as Bill is. But there are some people who have been doing sustainable agriculture for years, and only God has been watching.
You know, the problem of agriculture isn't insurmountable. It's fundamentally a religious problem. Land is not a gift from God. We don't own it. What we have is the right to use the land. We have no right to damage it. Instead, we have to obey what is effectively a commandment: We are to care for God's garden.
FUKUOKA:Even if we practice natural farming—and that's something we have to do—I have a feeling it will still be too late. If we cannot change the way of agriculture now, it will be too late.
Do you three really think that's true? Can we turn things around, or do we have to face an agricultural Armageddon?
MOLLISON: I agree with Mr. Fukuoka that there is not much time. However, while disaster, if it strikes, will affect agriculture and may well have been caused by agriculture, it won't happen in terms of agriculture.
We won't wash all the soil away before we finally unbalance the atmosphere.
And I don't have any great optimism that we'll survive. Not long ago, we asked something like 900 Australian scientists to help us call on all Australians to get together and discuss ways to change the environmental future. Seven hundred of them wouldn't help. They said it was already too late.
JACKSON: Well, I think things will get worse before we begin to make a significant turn. We don't have to wonder about that; things will get worse.
But we can do better. I'm certainly hopeful.
FUKUOKA: There's one last chance. In sumo wrestling, there's a way to win at the very last moment. When a big wrestler pushes a little wrestler back, back, back, just as the little guy is back at the end of the ring, he uses the weight and power coming at him, and flips the big man over his shoulder. The big wrestler is thrown out of the ring, and the little one wins.
Then when there is food for people everywhere, they won't be in such an uneasy, confrontational state of mind. People's attitudes will change. You'll regreen the earth, fix the ecological crisis, fix the economic crisis, and give people the chance to find happiness.
One species is eastern gamma grass, a relative of corn that has three times the protein and 1.8 times the methionine. It also fixes small quantities of nitrogen. It's an "ice cream grass" for cows and is highly nutritious for humans, too. However, it's low-yielding. In the next county north, though, a mutant was picked up that produces two to three times the initial yield. Once developed, this could replace corn, wheat, and soybeans on sloping hillsides in high-erosion country.
Then there's sorghum, a useful perennial that's not winter-hardy. We crossed sorghum with Johnson grass until eventually we got a mix of 1,500 plants. Some 455 of them lived through last winter-making it the first winter-hardy herbaceous perennial to ever be produced by humans on purpose.
We did a biculture experiment of Illinois bundle flower, which fixes nitrogen, and wild senna, which doesn't. In the first year, the two species together yielded the same as they did in monocultures. By the third year, though, the biculture produced almost twice the yield of the monoculture.
We're also encouraged by results from our perennial Maximillian sunflower. It's allelopathicthat is, its roots exude a chemical that acts as an herbicide. There's also giant wild rye, which grows on sandy lakeshores in Siberia. It shows good promise for high yield. It sent up shoots in January, thinking it was spring in Siberia, I guess.
Since trout live and breed along the pond edge and blueberries planted beside the pond will have more water, the more edge you have, the more production you'll have. So maximize edge by extending the pattern in the first example and spiraling your pond (see Figure 3 in the image gallery).
Such designs can boost the productivity of a system tremendously. Indeed, the more permacultures I see and work with, the more I've come to believe that there are no biological limits to yield. There are only design limits.
As for citrus, I grow several varieties on the hillsides near my home. First, I had to recondition the red clay soil on the hillsides by planting clover as a ground cover and allowing the weeds to return. I also introduced a few hardy vegetables-such as the Japanese daikon radish-and allowed the natural predators to take care of insect pests. As a result of that thick weed/clover cover, over the past 30 years, the surface layer of the orchard soil has become loose, dark, and rich with earthworms and organic matter. In my orchard there are now pines and cedar trees, a few pear trees, persimmons, loquats, Japanese cherries, nitrogen-fixing acacia, and many other native varieties growing among the citrus trees.
To plant my vegetable crops, I simply cut a swath in the weed cover and put out the seeds. There's no need to top them with soil: I just lay the cut plants back over them as a natural mulch. Usually the resurgent weeds have to be trimmed back two or three times afterward to give the seedlings a head start, but sometimes just once is enough. You can raise produce wherever there's a varied and vigorous growth of weeds, but you have to become familiar with the yearly cycle of the indigenous weeds and grasses and learn what kinds of vegetables will best match them.
1. Since humanity first dabbled with agriculture, we've eliminated almost half of the earth's plant and soil cover.
3. American agriculture now uses 40 million tons of commercial fertilizers each year, at a cost of over one-fifth of our nation's annual supply of natural gas.
4. Over 80% of our nation's water is consumed on farms and ranches.
The center of American permaculture efforts and education is The Permaculture Institute of North America, Clinton, WA. A one-year membership in PINA costs $25, includes a subscription to the institute's quarterly newsletter and magazine, and is the quickest way to learn about our country's permaculture network.
All three interview subjects have books and tapes available from PINA. Bill Mollison's Permaculture One and Permaculture Two cost $12.50 each. Masanobu Fukuoka's new 280-page explanation of his ideas and methods, The Natural Way of Farming, costs $15.95, while his earlier One-Straw Revolution is $3.95. And Wes Jackson's excellent 150-page critique, New Roots for Agriculture, costs $6.95. Include $1.25 for shipping and handling when ordering one or two books, $2 if ordering three or more. You can also obtain cassette tapes of each man's conference speech and of their joint panel for $5.75 each postpaid.
For information on Jackson's Land Institute, its tri-annual magazine, and ways you can support his work, write The Land Institute, Salina, KS.
Another fine resource guide, filled with articles and access information, is the 1986 International Permaculture Species Yearbook, which is available for $13.75 postpaid from Yankee Permaculture, Orange, MA.
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