Ken Taylor, owner of Green Barn Farm in Notre-Dame-de-l'ile-Perrot, is a longtime permaculture advocate
When contemplating agricultural practices in Canada today, it’s hard not to notice that permaculture, once the black sheep of alternative farming practices, has begun making inroads on small farms in this country after decades of barely registering on farmers’ radars.
The term itself was first coined by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the mid-1970s when they set their sights on developing a sustainable agriculture model that mimicked natural systems and was less reliant on the high level of inputs that had come to dominate commercial farming.
“Permaculture tried to take a really broad sweep look at alternatives to the industrial, mass production, chemically dependent agriculture that had become dominant at the time and
Agroecologist Sarah Hirschfeld studied plant diversity on commercial permaculture farms
continues to be very dominant today,” says Sarah Hirschfeld, an agroecologist whose 2017 study examining plant diversity on commercial permaculture farms on Vancouver Island and in coastal British Columbia ranks as one of the very few scientific papers to take a hard look at how permaculture’s principles are being applied on working farms. “There’s really not a lot of scientific literature written about permaculture and yet at the same time there’s tons written about it in the grey literature.”
That raises red flags that can be difficult to ignore. But despite the lack of scientific evidence, permaculture has taken off in many parts of the world, including Asia, Africa and South America where its emphasis on perennial crops, low inputs, plant diversity and overall sustainability are seen as economic and cultural necessities. And while theories abound as to why permaculture has been slow to gain a foothold in Canada, the fact is it’s only recently started picking up steam.
“I only know handfuls of people that really lay claim to permaculture farming. There’s a bunch of start-ups I know now of people that I'm in dialogue with and mentoring, but there isn't a large grouping of people in permaculture farming, and I think part of that is because permaculture got hijacked by the homestead, home garden, do-it-yourself, back-off-government people,” says Zach Loeks, a second generation permaculturist who spent more than a decade operating a commercial market garden in the Ottawa Valley. “Which is one of the things that I feel a little bit disappointed about because permaculture has so much value to offer farms, but if you mention permaculture to some people they’re kind of like, ‘Oh, you mean like that hippy gardening stuff’.”
Far from being a hippy concept, permaculture rethinks the way farms are designed, moving away from the dominant mass production system where monoculture crops are grown in ways that make them easy to mechanically harvest towards a system that organizes diverse crops into zones in which the plants that require the most attention, such as annual vegetables, are located closest to the locations where they will be processed, packed or stored and those that need less attention, such as orchards, are planted farther away.
“You do everything in a way that makes sense if you aren't going to rely on mechanical harvesting or chemical pesticides to help you out. Because it does become labour intensive when you’re using organic methods. So the zone system has a lot to do with labour efficiency,” says Hirschfeld. “Let’s separate our crops out so that they make sense on the landscape.”
Permaculture’s emphasis on incorporating a diverse selection of permanent crops such as fruits, nuts, berries and perennial vegetables and herbs, often planted in complementary groups known as guilds, should come as no real surprise considering the word “permaculture” originated from the contraction of “permanent” and “agriculture”.
Blueberries and walnut trees grow side by side at Gregoire Lamoureux's Kootenay Permaculture Institute
“So it’s perennial agriculture. Trees and shrubs and perennial crops,” says Gregoire Lamoureux, founder of the Kootenay Permaculture Institute. He has been operating a small permaculture farm in BC’s Slocan Valley since 1991 and knows well the dedication permanent crops require. “To be in this climate and to want to grow nut trees is a long-term investment. With veggies it’s easier to rent or lease land. You can move around. Pack your bags and save your seeds and try again somewhere else. But with fruit trees, nut trees and all of that, it’s more difficult so you have to have a bit of a longer term commitment to the land.”
Indeed Hirschfeld’s study showed that on the 10 commercial permaculture farms she took a close look at, perennial food crops were not only present, they far exceeded annual crops in both species richness and abundance. No farm she surveyed was limited to a single dominant crop and a mix of fruits, nuts and vegetables was found on all sites which, she notes, makes perennial crops more common amongst permaculture farms than what you would typically find on conventional farms in the region.
“I definitely found a preference for perennials among permaculture farmers,” she says. “That was one of the findings in my study. And I wanted to substantiate that because one of the very first publications praised permaculture as an exploration of perennial agriculture. The idea was that perennials would be permanent crops versus annuals that you’re ripping out of the ground every year and that has a lot of ecological consequences. It’s also very labour intensive.”
This is something that Zach Loeks understands well. Although raised on a permaculture homestead in New Mexico, Zach Loeks began his career in commercial agriculture as an organic market gardener, but after a few years in operation he found that something wasn’t sitting right.
“The process of market gardening and the growth of market gardening is one where you really quickly get caught up in an annual cycle. And you’re like ‘Okay, I’ve got to get the ground open. I’ve got to seed it and harvest it and sell it and buy more seed.’ It’s easy to get tied up in that and to constantly invest in things that don't really help you and your soil in the long term,” he says. “I noticed that there were problems with the land, with the soil and so I got back to my roots, so to speak, and started to see how I could incorporate what I grew up with in terms of permaculture design: integrating perennial and annual food systems, maximizing soil health and seeing how that can fit into a busy profit-oriented farming career.”
Loeks soon began to transition his market garden so it was more in line with permaculture principles, incorporating perennial plants into his production fields and finding more sustainable ways of growing food crops. In doing so, he created permanent perennial beds where he planted his crops in guilds.
“So where other places till in everything at the end of the year and then reform the beds, these ones stay in place,” he says. “The unique opportunity this provides is that I can take one of my beds and I can plant it in a cherry-raspberry-thyme-grape guild and it doesn't stop me from growing a field of squash on one side and a field of carrots on the other. If I didn’t have permanent beds, it would be a logistical nightmare to do that.”
All this emphasis on incorporating perennials alongside annuals not only leads to incredible diversity but, as Loeks points out, to economic, social and environmental resilience since different crops inevitably thrive in different years. So the more diversity a farm has, the better the chances it can avoid a catastrophic crop failure.
Hirschfeld was able to confirm just how remarkable the levels of diversity are on the permaculture farms included in her research.
“I had one farm in my study where I counted 99 different crop species,” she says. “And most of the farms have multiple varieties of each dominant species. Nobody simply had an apple orchard. Everybody had apples and plums and pears and peaches all mixed in together.”
With so much diversity, it’s fair to wonder how farmers manage the day-to-day challenges all that variety can bring in terms of having the equipment, skills and labour available to manage those crops.
“One of the problems that can occur is spreading yourself too thin. Everything on the farm costs money, time, energy, investment. Skills have to be learned. This is one of the difficulties of diversity,” says Loeks. “So a big question for me was how do you increase diversity, which increases resilience in case one crop has a bad year, without increasing management?”
One solution Loeks came up with was integrating annuals and perennials in raised beds that are never destroyed. “I may reform them by taking past material and applying it to the top of the bed, but I'm not actually ever going in there with a plow or a disc or a cultivator,” he says. “So I'm able to gain familiarity with the bed and its unique situation within the environment of my fields and the microclimate of that part of the field.”
Loeks acknowledges that while conventional farming tends to be profit-oriented and annual-oriented, permaculture can sometimes err on the side of being too diversified, even unfocused, and he fears that could result in the practice becoming a relic before it ever reaches its full potential.
“So I want the permaculturist to be more organized, more profit-oriented and more focused,” he says.
Ken Taylor, owner of Green Barn Farm in Notre-Dame-de-l’île-Perrot, QC agrees. He thinks permaculture tends to bog down in philosophical concepts like establishing butterfly gardens or riparian strips that aren’t always practical on commercial farms.
“When we talk about commercial permaculture, you’ve got to show some bottom line or you might as well say your farm is a park or something else that’s an infinite money drain,” says Taylor, who has spent his career developing cold-adapted, pest and disease resistant fruit tree varieties on his permaculture farm. “I basically set it up so that the genetic species I want — which are food producing fruit trees, bushes, shrubs and groundcovers — could be integrated in a fashion that was labour-reduced, spray-reduced, input-reduced to the point where I basically have a food production farm without any of the traditional inputs that you’d have to do for a conventional farm. And the good thing about it is I can pull in $100,000 a year selling the product without any effort.”
Taylor sees climate extremes as being the biggest challenge facing budding Canadian permaculture farmers wishing to incorporate perennial crops on their farms.
“You need to find something that’s hardy and that you’ll be able to grow on Edmonton area farms or up in Fort McMurray or Flin Flon, Manitoba,” he says. “Ask yourself, ‘Is it hardy? Will it adapt to my colder climate and to the hot summers? And will it also adapt to all of the moisture I tend to get at certain times of the year?’”
For his part, Lamoureux has this advice for farmers contemplating permaculture: “Learn more, learn all you can about it and start small. Different places will bring different challenges. Take a whole year or a whole season to observe the land before making a big move and ask yourself, ‘What are my resources? What are my challenges? And how can I make it work?’ Give yourself some time especially when going into the transition. There could be some hiccups or challenges.”
Still, for Lamoureux, the future looks bright for permaculture in Canada.
“I think we’re still early. We’re still studying and developing the system,” he says. “We haven’t really reached all the possibilities. I think there’s a lot of room to learn more, to experiment, to multiply and to find a way that we can manage.”
— Vanessa Farnsworth