Monthly Archives: June 2012

Annuals, Perennials and Permaculture

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I posted a while back on the issue of annual and perennial plants and the permaculture movement. An interesting debate on the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia website initiated by Angelo Eliades has prompted me to reflect further on the question.

Other than confirming once again that the Y chromosome finds ever new arenas in which to construct its fragile ego, the debate turns on the possibilities for replacing the widespread cultivation of annual plants in global agriculture and horticulture with perennial plants. As explained in my original post and as further outlined in Eliades’s article, the potential benefits of doing so are multiple. The question is whether it’s possible to provide enough nutrients – particularly macronutrients such as energy and protein – to the planet’s vast human population with a purely perennial agriculture.

It’s striking that most wild floras are dominated by perennials, whereas most agricultural crops including the major staples are annuals (wheat, rice and maize provide the majority of global macronutrients). But there are some perennial staples – mostly tuber crops such as potatoes, yams and cassava, although very often these are cultivated as if they’re annuals, thus losing most of the environmental benefits of perenniality. It’s also worth pointing out that since the Neolithic revolution, most of the world’s population has been fed by annual grain agriculture including all of the famous ancient civilisations, with tuber/perennial-based systems dominating in only a few areas such as New Guinea and parts of sub-Saharan Africa (see, for example, Mazoyer & Roudart A History of World Agriculture or Mithen After the Ice). But though relatively rare, these tuber-based systems have proved stable and successful.

Now, an important permaculture principle is to model human landscape design after natural systems, and since perennial plants are so dominant in the wild this alone is enough to make many permaculturists favour perennial-based cultivation. The puzzle then is why it’s proved so relatively rare in human agricultural history. Eliades believes, first, that perennial plants are more productive than annuals, while simultaneously requiring less energy and effort to grow, which would make the puzzle all the greater if it were true. His answer is that, second, the only reason we plant annual crops is because of “arrogance and lack of perspective”.

Both of these claims are so absurd that they shouldn’t really require any refutation. To fabricate a cultivation system that conjures additional productivity out of nothing, while simultaneously  dishonouring the many annual-based farming cultures that have laboured to create viable social ecologies takes a lot of cheek, and is the sort of thing that prevents the wider world from taking permaculture as seriously as it should. OK, perhaps I should register one slight qualification here – as I mentioned some time ago in my post on potatoes, it’s possibly true that grain-based agricultures better suit the interests of state-building elites than tuber-based horticultures (though I very much doubt it’s really that simple), so in that respect perhaps there may be a small role for ‘arrogance’ in the development of annual cereal culture, but not nearly enough to explain its ubiquity.

So we’re back to square one with the puzzle of annual agriculture and perennial flora. In my earlier post, I mentioned Professor J. Philip Grime’s CSR theory as a way to explain the puzzle. Grime classifies plants as ‘competitors’ (selected for in high nutrient – low disturbance situations), ‘stress tolerators’ (low nutrient – low disturbance) and ‘ruderals’ (high nutrient – high disturbance). Most wild habitats are low nutrient, low disturbance and are characterised by stress tolerator perennials, with slow growth rates, cautious reproductive strategies and defences against herbivory, all of which tend to make them less appropriate for domestication in terms of yield and possibly palatability.

As Paul Hillman pointed out in a response to my original post, and as Angelo Eliades also points out, there are nevertheless quite a number of highly productive perennial crops such as sugar cane, cassava, plantains, potatoes etc. With my thinking clouded by the perennial vs annual distinction in the context of CSR theory, my initial response was to suggest that these crops were probably less productive than the annuals. Quite how productive they are in terms of yields per unit fertiliser input or per unit solar input in comparison to the major annual crops is something I need to work on some more, but I’ll now readily accept that they might well compare favourably. Because on reflection, the broader point about all of these perennial staples is, I suspect, that they fit naturally into the ‘competitor’ category of high nutrient/low disturbance crops – essentially pioneer plants that quickly occupy and crowd out fertile space (think of the way gardeners describe potatoes as a ‘cleaning crop’, for example) before giving way to stress tolerators in long-term succession. Many woody fruit and nut species also occupy the competitor or competitor-stress tolerator hybrid niches, as Grime has remarked. In this respect, perhaps we can place the three strategies on a continuum of agricultural usefulness (yield and perhaps palatability) from R to C to S. And if we map the annual-biennial-perennial distinction onto that continuum we’ll find most of the annuals and biennials and a few of the perennials at the R/C end of the spectrum, and most of the perennials at the S end.

That, at any rate, is my working hypothesis. It explains why agriculture and horticulture tend to favour R and C strategists and invariably try to prevent ecological succession (by ploughing, mulching or burning), and this in turn explains why our cultivated plants are mostly annual and biennial but with a number of important perennials.

All of this matters because C strategists – whether annual or perennial – are essentially short-lived, high nutrient demanders, so they don’t exempt us from the fundamental agricultural tasks of generating fertility and preventing succession. This shouldn’t be all that surprising, because in the spartan energetic economy of nature, nobody can expect a free lunch. The more we try to push productivity, the more we need to fertilise and curtail succession, and the more perennial agriculture starts to resemble annual agriculture (eg. with sugar cane replanted every second year in high output systems). And unfortunately we do need to push productivity, because there are 7 billion people on Earth. I think it’s worth being a little sceptical of anyone who claims to grow all their own food, and even more sceptical of anyone who claims to grow it all from perennials – which is not in any way intended to suggest that I think it’s a bad idea to try. There’s much to be said for abundant polyculture, but we do need to keep an eye on overall yield and energy balance. In that respect, every step towards a more perennial staple agriculture and horticulture is important, and initiatives such as the Land Institute need our unqualified support. But the ultimate goal of a productive perennial agriculture is not an easy one to achieve – to state otherwise on the basis of a simplistic reading of permaculture principles risks discrediting the movement. There’s already far too much snake oil on sale.

I have a lot more work to do to flesh out this basic thesis, but I think that’s enough for now. I’d be interested to hear anyone’s further thoughts on the topic.

Seeing The Wood For The Trees…Again

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I posted a while back about the relative merits of grassland and woodland for food production. Here’s a little addendum to that post.

Suppose you can produce 170kg of beef from 1 hectare of grassland annually – quite a generous supposition, I think, if the cattle are being fed from the grass alone. That amounts to something like 1,960MJ of food energy.

Suppose alternatively that you have two oak trees and two crab apples on your hectare of woodland, producing something like 160kg of acorns and 100kg of crab apples annually. In practice, you’d probably have more than that, or at least you’d also have some other trees or shrubs producing something of food value, but frankly harvesting it all would be a pain so let’s take those figures as a realistic achievable harvest. That would yield something like 2,680MJ of food energy.

Now, I’m not saying that this crude exercise tells you anything very significant about whether you should choose woodland or grassland in any particular situation. And there are lots of additional factors to consider – other nutrients, processing inputs, fertility inputs and outputs, joint products, management issues, system redundancies, and palatability to name a few (a plate of roast beef or a plate of acorns – I know what I’d choose). Still, on the face of it this suggests to me that choosing to plant a woodland may not necessarily be inferior nutritionally to retaining permanent pasture, which is interesting.

In my earlier post I hedged my bets a bit, but I suppose my general drift assumed that a mature woodland was of less food value than permanent grassland. But now I’m not so sure that this is necessarily the case.  Well, that’s the beauty of a blog, I suppose. Yesterday’s thoughts disappear off the bottom of the page, and are easily replaced with today’s entirely different ones. And nobody will notice and give me any grief about it, with the possible exception of Paul Hillman. But I don’t expect he’s looking.

Global Commons…Or Local Privates?

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Here in Frome we were lucky enough to have an excellent programme of evening discussions recently entitled Generation Next. A common theme of the evenings I attended was the need to come up with something to replace the dysfunctional and unsustainable systems of power, finance and knowledge that currently hold us in their grip. And this was a ‘common’ theme literally inasmuch as several speakers referenced the idea of ‘global commons’ as a way of transcending these current difficulties. The term has a nice ring to it. It’s surely right to emphasise that we’re common denizens of just the one globe, who must all ultimately share its risks, responsibilities and opportunities. But, beyond that rather basic point, I have some misgivings about the concept of a global commons, particularly when I think about it from my perspective as a local grower. And no, it’s not just because I’m a private landowner. Or maybe it is, but not simply because I fear the expropriation of my humble plot. Let me try to explain…

The first point to make is that we need to think about what a ‘common’ means in practice. People often think of it as a place that nobody owns but everybody has a right to use. But actually this isn’t a common, it’s an open access regime. The classic example of an open access regime is a fishery in international waters, and it’s not a very promising model for an ethic of ecological care. In an open access regime it’s in everybody’s individual interest to grab as much as they can for themselves, and there is no collective check on them doing so. That in a nutshell is why cod are on the endangered species list, and we’re still eating them.

A true common, though, is not an open access regime, but a common property regime – that means that while nobody owns it individually, people’s individual usage rights are carefully allocated within the community. In enduring common property regimes, it’s usually very clear who is allowed and who isn’t allowed to exercise some precisely defined right (eg. summer grazing for so many cattle).

It’s easy to romanticise the process of allocating common rights as something benign and communal, but often it’s anything but. In medieval England, common rights were essentially a sop to the labouring classes accorded by the gentry, and rural life for those classes generally entailed a grim struggle to hang on to what scraps of property rights were available so as to avoid sinking into the category of servile labour. Deplorable though the enclosures that removed commoner’s rights may have been, what they were replacing was hardly benign.

The appeal of commons seems to me to owe more to the misgivings many people have about the usual alternative – private landownership – than anything especially benign about commons as such. Those misgivings about private property are usually twofold: the human conceit of ‘owning’ the earth, and the unfairness of access to land.

I think the first objection is quite easily overcome, because it’s based on a misconception. Ownership is not fundamentally a relation between a person and the thing they own, but between them and other people – it’s a usage right that the owner has in respect of the thing they own from which other people are excluded. But, particularly when it comes to land, those rights are limited – public footpaths, planning restrictions, sporting and mineral rights, environmental regulations and so on create other usage rights in which people other than the owner retain interests. We can argue about whether those rights should be extended further, but the basic principle that property is a non-exclusive, social relationship between people is clear enough. And anyone who thinks that ‘owning’ land gives them, Canute-like, some kind of special sovereign control over the earth is quickly disabused of that notion as soon as they sow their first crop or experience their first winter storm.

Unfairness of access to land is more serious. There are various dimensions to the problem, but I’d suggest that mostly they boil down to three things:

  • land values are inflated to the point that few people can afford to buy land (much the same applies to the private housing market)
  • it’s not possible to cover land costs through farming income
  • land inheritance creates a relatively closed class of landholders who are then able to extract economic rent (ie. a price beyond free market value)

But all this is a result of the regulatory and tax framework that our political leaders have put in place, not an inevitability. Suppose we created a different framework through land value taxation, inheritance tax, agricultural ties, environmental regulation and so on so that young people could get a mortgage for a farm, earn a modest income from farming the land well, pay off their debts in the course of their farming career, and then fund their retirement by selling the land to the next generation of farmers. Would we still object to private ownership of farmland?

I can’t see any strong grounds for doing so. Such a system would require a lot of state regulation – some might argue that we should go further and put land in public or community ownership. But the likelihood of achieving that in present political circumstances is even slimmer than the minimal chance of implementing the kind of private ownership I’m proposing, and it would have some disadvantages too. I suspect that its allure stems to some degree from the peculiarities of English history, in which successful political radicalism has mostly been urban and collectivist. The English working class, harried out of a countryside dominated by the gentry and into industrial labour in the cities, built over time a municipal socialism that championed the provision of collective goods free for all at the point of delivery. There is much to celebrate in this tradition, especially its emphasis on universalism, from which all other approaches must learn. However, away from the cities – which I’ve argued elsewhere are probably an unsustainable form of social organisation long-term, despite much media commentary to the contrary – the petty proprietorship model does confer certain advantages. Among them are the principles of individual and community self-reliance and whole system thinking locally, which I’d argue are key to future resource sustainability. Most left/eco collectivists that I know seem reasonably comfortable with private house ownership but less so with private rural landownership – it would be interesting to trace the roots of that distinction.

Perhaps the main disadvantage of private small-scale farm ownership that’s often touted is that it may foster sensibilities of private gain rather than community flourishing. That perception is grounded in a view, common among left and green thinkers today, that the motives of small-scale proprietors and large-scale corporations are the same. But I think that’s rarely true. In a farmer-oriented society of the kind I suspect we’ll need in the future, in which it’s hard for anyone to extract economic rent from local landownership, small-scale proprietors would gain much and lose little from investing in their local communities – and while we doubtless should not take too rosy a view of small farm communities historically, a good deal of the history of such communities tends to bear this out.

Anyway, so much for future ideals – how should small farm landowners such as myself behave in the imperfect present? At Vallis Veg, we’ve tried to make our land available to other people locally pursuing various aims and activities that seem to us worthwhile. These include garden allotments, alternative schooling ventures, beekeeping, school and other visits, outdoor courses, and parties/social events. Often, I’ve found that these ventures aren’t as simple to arrange as I’d anticipated. For one thing, people of goodwill on both sides of the arrangement can still bring slightly different sets of assumptions to the table about what the arrangement means – assumptions that aren’t always obvious at first blush. In this sense, for me the experience has been a portent of how extremely difficult it would be to establish a functioning, sustainable commons without some kind of final political arbiter (…which is one of my doubts about anarchism). In my situation, as a landowner I can ultimately decide that an arrangement isn’t working and put an end to it. Common rights would create – literally, and potentially endlessly – a much more contested field.

Another issue bears on getting the financial side of arrangements right. The fundamental fact here is that it costs a lot of money to buy land and to run a farm, money that it’s very difficult to recoup through agricultural income. So while it might be argued that the earth should be a “common treasury for all”, this creates some problems for the small proprietor. If s/he creates rights for others in respect of the land at little or no cost then s/he is effectively subsidising their activities out of already unremunerative farm activities. More importantly, by providing this implicit subsidy s/he is helping to foster the common misconception that the products of the land (food, fibre etc) are cheap and easily procured. If, on the other hand, s/he charges higher rents then s/he risks alienating potential users, and inviting the usually unfounded suspicion that s/he is recouping an economic rent rather than simply a contract rent that contributes to a modest income.

I’m not sure what the best solution is here. In general terms, I think much could be gained if the quality of the dialogue between agricultural landowners and rural land users were improved. Farmers are doing a difficult and poorly paid job which a lot of people – even those who’ve lived in rural areas all their lives – don’t always understand. Equally, land possesses other social values which cannot be commanded by farmers alone.

For my part, I think I’ve made various mistakes in the past in the way that I’ve gone about organising access to our land. The lessons I’ve learned, I think, are that it’s always good to try to make land available to people of goodwill in the wider community, but that it’s important to be as clear as possible about the assumptions involved in the agreement, that it’s probably not helpful in the long term to undervalue such land agreements financially, but equally that if you consider such agreements primarily through the lens of money you risk losing much of what makes them worth having. But of course all of that is easy to say in general terms, and much harder to realise in practice. I hope I’ll get better at it when future opportunities come along.