Question:

I'm willing to spend time and efforts to change my farming model from the present (intensive, resource wasting, based on fossil fuel) to a 100% sustainable one. I wonder whether the small area I own (2-3 hectares) is wide enough to implement permaculture tecniques. The land is becoming dry as the years pass by. Main cultivations at the moment are orange and olive trees. I figure I should breed animals too, get energy from fotovoltaic structures, but I don't know where and how to start. Any suggestion would be appreciated. Thanks. G - Italy

Our answer:

Transition Farm –

Before you can answer the question whether your 3 hectares of land can be designed to be 100% sustainable, you need to ask yourself some questions. The answers will enable you to be clear about what you want out of the land, and therefore, whether or not it will be able to deliver, and finally how to design for that.

These questions might be:

• What income do you expect the land to generate?

• Do you expect the land to generate all the income you need to live off, or do you have an off-farm job?

• If you have, and always want to have, an off-farm job, how much time can you spend working on the land?

• Do you live on the farm full-time, or do you travel from another area to work on the farm?

• Do you work on the farm alone, or do you have consistent help?

• Are you able to pay for the help you need, or do you rely on volunteers?

• What vision do you have for the land, other than to be 100% sustainable?
  For example, does it include other people living and working there?
  What do you want the land to look like in 20 years time?
  What quality of life do you want to create?

Once you have a clearer picture of what your expectations and wishes are, you can begin to look at the land, and collect information as a foundation for your design. The kinds of questions you need to ask yourself are as follows:

• How much energy do you need to live there? Do you wish to run a computer, have a washing machine, use an iron, have light in animal stables, run a milking machine? Is it consistently sunny throughout the year? How much wind is there at the farm, and how regularly? The answers to these questions will tell you whether it is feasible to install alternative energy systems.

• What water resources are there? Do you rely on irrigation and do you have enough rights to cover any increased use, such as vegetable gardens? Do you have a reservoir? Is the house arranged so that all household water can be recycled for irrigation purposes, or is the house at the bottom of the land, in which case you would be looking at a pumping system, and you would power that?

• How many resources do you buy in at the moment to help you run the farm? Are they from un-sustainable sources? If they are not from sustainable sources, what could you do to change the situation? A simple example is replacing a diesel rotovator with a mule that can plough.

• How much waste do you generate? For example, when you prune your olive trees, do you burn the prunings, or do you compost them so that you can build the fertility of your soil, or would you consider having grazing animals that could eat them, or have you explored the recent market in olive leaf tea which you might be able to supply?

• How much of a local market is there for any farm produce you might generate? What is the competition? How far is it to market and how much would it cost to get there?

• What network of other people are there in the area who could support you on your farm, share costs of going to market, share costs of buying and using equipment/animals?

• What is your land like? For example, how much sun does it get? Does it ever have frost and where does it occur on the farm most? Is it terraced or is it all flat? What are the prevailing winds? Are there areas that are too rocky to cultivate, or too difficult to irrigate?

• Where does your land stand on the Savory Brittleness Scale? As you grow olives and oranges I imagine that you are a brittle environment, which has implications on how you manage your land to ensure sustainability.

These are just some of the issues to consider. You need to create as complete a social, economic and environmental picture of your farm as possible. You then know what resources you have and whether they will help you achieve your vision. Once, you have this information you are in a position to begin designing your farm so that it will produce the results that you want.

As the elements of design are all dependent on the answers to the above questions, I think it is too early to suggest anything. Permaculture however, does operate under certain principles, which you can think about when you start to work towards sustainability. Some of these are:

• When you design the farm, work from the big picture down to the details. For example, don’t leap into digging a reservoir until you have a complete idea about how you want the water to move round your land.

• Consider your farm, yourself, your neighbourhood as whole units within other whole units. For example, you as a person are complete and functioning within yourself, but you live within the context of your farm which provides for certain of your needs, and your farm functions within the context of the local area which provides for its needs. So you can see there is always an interconnection between things, even if they seem separate, and this needs to be considered in the design.

• The output of one activity needs to be the input of another if you want to be sustainable. In other words, you do not generate waste. For example, the household water is not emptied into a sewage system, but goes to irrigate the plants; the kitchen waste and dead plants are not thrown away or burnt but are made into compost to be added to the land to build soil and increase fertility.

• Avoid ‘putting all your eggs in one basket’. In other words, design for diversity, which means that if one thing fails one year, something else will have thrived. This is the problem with monocultures: if they are destroyed through bad weather or pests, then everything is lost.

• Remember, debt dependency is not sustainable. Arrange your finances so that you eliminate debt, particularly in this economic climate.

I hope that the above suggestions are helpful to you, and I wish you the best of luck with moving your farm towards sustainability.

Aspen Edge,Semilla Besada, 15th January 2009