Chapter 26 - Replacing Petroleum with People

What is in this chapter is basically what I am currently doing with a half million acres.”

- Willie Smits1

Someone once asked me how I would do permaculture with 20,000 acres (~8000 hectares) of raw land (one acre is about the size of a football field). At the time, I had less than five minutes to convey my thoughts. Here is my answer, now with a bit of polish.

Let’s start by looking at the conventional (or even “conventional” organic) path. 20,000 acres is 31.25 square miles (80.9 km2). A chunk of land of that size might include some mountains and some valleys. The conventional approach would be to run cattle on the mountains and then drain the swamps and convert the valleys to crop land.

Converting raw land to “productive” land takes time. Maybe a team of 30 or 40 people will clear the land, remove all of the stumps, drain the swamps, work the soil, and build up fences to make it suitable for conventional agriculture. It might take three years to get the first thousand acres from raw land into production. In ten years, all 20,000 acres are productive. Then it will be possible to drop down to 20 people.

Those people are going to need a place to stay, so there’s an upfront investment in housing for 20-40 people. And then there’s an upfront investment of roughly 10 million dollars on equipment and 10 million dollars on infrastructure such as machine sheds, grain bins, and irrigation systems. With such large start-up costs, it’s going to take a while to break even – especially when you consider the need to cover the significant annual costs that come with conventional ag: seed, petroleum-based fuel, petroleum-based fertilizer, petroleum-based pesticides, energy for pumping water, etc.

Then it’s time to play the commodity-farming game and mass-produce three to nine different products. If a few of those products have a rough year in the field or on the market, so do you. Plus, if you’re hungry, you can’t just walk into your field and grab a meal – you still need to go to a grocery store. And you have to spend most of your time with loud, smelly, petroleum-powered machinery.

Bill Mollison made it pretty clear that a big part of permaculture is replacing petroleum with people.2

If I had 20,000 acres, I would divide it into a hundred chunks – that’s 200 acres (~80 hectares) per chunk. On each 200-acre chunk, I would select one person to be in charge, and then sprinkle in 12 to 30 people who would live there and work the permaculture system.

Rather than a monocrop focus, this would be a massively distributed, overlapping polyculture system. And rather than the 20,000 acres having one beekeeper managing 10,000 hives, there would be 500 beekeepers managing 3 to 30 hives each. Instead of one person doing only beekeeping, each person would manage 20 to 60 different crops or small enterprises.

Here again it’s going to take some time to get the system going. For the first year, I would start off by selecting 10 of the 100 plots, then select leaders for those plots and begin constructing housing for 100 people. On top of that, some people would be focused on making five acres (two hectares) of each plot into a super awesome permaculture garden. It’s not much (and not enough to sell), but it will provide some of the food for the people working on the land. And part of permaculture is “feed the people on the land first.”

In three years there might be a total of 200 people on the land using the first 50 acres of each plot productively. After ten years, 2000 people and all 200 acres of each plot are productive, except maybe for the newest plots to be started – which are on their way.

The food produced from the 20,000 acres would first feed the roughly 2000 people who are now living there. And since 2000 people can manage the system much more intensively than a few people with big machines, there would still be a bunch of food left to sell.

For an apples-to-apples comparison, the whole system could still be set up for commodity farming. But rather than having three to nine products growing as 30 to 5000 acre (~10 to 2000 hectare) monocrops, the production would be distributed as part of a polyculture of over 100 products on 20,000 acres. Then one day, a semi truck would pull up and everyone would bring the extra tomatoes from their plot and load it up. On another day, they would load it up with chickens, and on yet another day, they would load it up with walnuts. If a few products don’t do well in the field or on the market each year, it’s not a problem – there are still 100 other products to carry the weight.3

This approach solves one of the biggest problems with small farming: marketing. Most farmers would rather spend their time farming instead of worrying about how they are actually going to sell their products. This is a big reason so many small farms fail to make money. On the other hand, a 20,000-acre, multi-million-dollar permaculture business could easily take the burden of marketing off the shoulders of the farmers.

As a bonus, while the potential to out-compete conventional ag in the commodity market exists here, there are opportunities that I think could bring in far more money:4

Whether they just focus on farming or take on one of these extra ventures to boot, each person could receive a stable income while also having a beautiful place to live and delicious, healthy food to eat. Things might be so good that besides paying for their food and rent, they barely have any living expenses, allowing them to put aside a bunch of money in savings each year. Maybe someday they’ll go buy their own acreage…but things are pretty good where they are.

By relying on people to do most of the work with hand tools, we would drastically reduce the petroleum footprint of our operation.5 That said, there would be a few times when petroleum might still be used to accomplish a task, such as using an excavator to build ponds. Once built, the ponds would require no petroleum inputs to maintain. And, spreading the amount of petroleum used in construction over the lifetime of the pond, the fuel use would be practically negligible. Especially when compared to the annual inputs of chem ag.

The start-up cost of the permaculture system is mostly in housing and the people to implement the system, while equipment and infrastructure costs are a tiny fraction of a conventional system. And we’ve eliminated the need to buy fuel, fertilizer, and pesticides year after year. Rather than pouring money into petroleum, we’re investing money in people.