I agree that there are some cargo cult farming practices like biodynamics. The reality is, permaculture, a systems approach to farming, works. Not just in profit or yield, but also for unaccounted for value such as biodiversity.

Look, you are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts. You have provided little more than anecdotal evidence; no better than the 'the postings of internet denizens who've read some blog posts'. Permaculture has enormous potential to restore environments and ecosystems[0] and is better for the environment than industrial farming[1].

I'm actually genuinely curious why you seem to have such hate for permaculture? What has it done to you that you dislike it so much?

[0]https://www.omicsonline.org/scholarly/permaculture-journals- articles-ppts-list.php [1]https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/9/3218

I don't hate permaculture. If it works, I'm all for it. But it seems like a fad, so I'm skeptical. And there's a certain level of dipshittery and lack of critical thinking on this website when it comes to diet and food production. I'm not sure why that is, but it's almost as if diet is religious and/or ideological for many people. So I push back.

Regarding facts: you're right, I'm not entitled to my own facts. But here's a fact for you: roughly 2.5 * 10^14 calories are consumed in the U.S. each year (360 million people * 2,000 calories/day * 365 days). Approximately 0% of those calories are produced using permaculture. The producers of those calories are voting with their feet on the viability of permaculture to produce the calories needed to feed Americans.

So on the one hand, we have all of the people most intimately involved in the day-to-day business of producing food. And on the other we have a bunch of people making noise on the internet and in academia. You'll have to forgive me for assuming that the people with real, practical knowledge are probably right here.

Look, no offense, but I'm growing most of my family's food using permaculture techniques and selling the surplus at the local farmer's market. Just like my parents did before me and my grandparents did before them. I'm not just some internet denizen who has read some blog posts. Just because it wasn't called permaculture until Bill Mollison published his "Permaculture Manual" in 1988 doesn't mean farmers haven't used many of these principles for a very long time. In fact, this is how stable, complex natural ecosystems actually work.

As for my effective hourly rate, I haven't bothered. The peace of mind and food security alone is priceless, not to mention the health benefits of getting out and playing in the dirt.

I spend on average, around an hour in the garden a day. The property was badly eroded range land when I began. The soil was basically sand. Through careful management, I have built a significant amount of humus through carbon sequestration, composting, mulching and no-till techniques.

What is your effective hourly rate? What is it once you factor in what your land could be leased or sold for?

Natural ecosystems don’t feed humanity. Heavily modified ecosystems subjected to highly engineered agriculture practices feed humanity.

As you say it looks for profit. Not yield but profit. Which means that it can be profitable to always have mass culture of the most profitable crop even if having pluriculture with different less profitable crops would yield more. This is how you get entire regions or countries dedicated to a single crop that happens to be expensive and profitable, to the detriment of soil and general output.

No offense, but your argument is an attribution fallacy. You need to go research permaculture instead of posting chippy comments about your ignorance if you want to contribute.

Permaculture means permanent agriculture. It's a way of farming multiple types of plants, animals, and fungi in a way that is sustainable from a standpoint of soil health.

Many ideas/techniques/whatever are good in theory. But for something to actually work, it needs to be good in practice. Right now, all of the practitioners are voting with their feet. That is strong evidence about the (non-)viability of permaculture. I'm open to being wrong about this, but there is a huge chasm between what works on paper or in small scale experiments and what works in the real world, at scale.

If permaculture is a viable way to produce food at the scale necessary to feed 7 billion people, we would be in the midst of a wide-scale roll out. But we're not. So I remain skeptical.