The BBC’s documentary A Farm for the Future is both shocking and encouraging. It’s shocking as it lays out how modern farming methods are doomed by their dependence on fossil fuels and encouraging as it explains how productive and efficient permaculture can be.
22 Billion Slaves?
Here are some interesting facts I picked up from the piece.
- The energy supply we currently depend on from fossil fuels is the equivalent of 22 billion slaves working around the clock. My, are we privileged!
- The average age of farmers in the UK is 60.
- We are losing the technology needed to farm manually (as opposed to using mechanized tractors, bailers and such).
- Plowing the soil destroys it by killing the living things within it that sustain its fertility. Mechanized farming has accelerated this process.
- Permaculture gardening in a wooded area can produce enough food for 10 people in just one acre, more than with modern farming methods. Also, it requires small amounts of work.
- Cereal farming will not be sustainable. But it can be replaced with nuts, such as hazelnuts, which are nutritionally similar to rice.
Highly Recommended
The 48 minute show is visually pleasant and quite informative. I highly recommend you give it a gander. The government is only mentioned once, at the end, where the narrator calls for government permaculture solutions – which is of course laughable.
My Strategy for Prosperity
My strategy for future prosperity includes moving to a rural area and setting up a garden, including livestock. I want to live off the land not because I necessarily think the world is going to end (though it might!), but because it is a healthy lifestyle. I want to enjoy the rest of my life close to nature and not dependent on vulnerable government-controlled supply chains. I want my son to grow up knowing how to provide for himself. I want independence, and liberty. What about you?
11 replies on “6 Shocking Facts About the Future of Farming”
I can’t wait to have a forest garden someday.
Me too! I plan to start mine in the spring. Probably in New Hampshire.
Good luck in New Hampshire.
Thanks. Maybe I’ll see you there someday?
Maybe, we will see where fate leads me.
I just watched this and was just like you said quite shocked, but also a bit inspired. I personally find accepting the implications of this to be quite a hard nut to break because I’ve always been rather hostile to the idea of living a rural life and obsessed with technology and science fiction where the way food is actually produced is seldom mentioned, unless it comes from a food replicator in Star Trek.
The idea that I’d have to get involved in producing it for myself rather than rely on the apparently compromised market processes is a little frightening and to be honest even a bit of enraging in the same way that the existence of the state is enraging. Makes me wanna curse humanity, yet I know ultimately that’s irrational because I suppose however terrible it is, it’s just an evolutionary stage.
What inspires however is the idea that permaculture isn’t exactly like rural life that I knew. It’s something new and something that operates on principles I absolutely adore – not working against nature and reality and kinda forcing it to be the way we imagine it has to be, but rather just tweaking a few natural variables and letting it do the rest of the job, what it does best. I think this has strong parallels to voluntaryism and market anarchism as well. It’s precisely that: don’t force other people into your idea of good. Let them flourish on their own terms and everyone will be better off.
Permaculture almost seems like a kind of a voluntaryism applied to agriculture, but maybe I’m stretching it. :)
The best technologies operate on the same principle as well, working with natural world rather than against it, to empower the human individual.
I have one option which allows me to engage with permaculture *almost* right away if I wanted to, but it comes with a lot of issues many of which aren’t even due to my variness or rural life. I’m wondering if there are other options. I don’t have to live it to support others doing it, or at least I don’t have to live it today or this or next year. I wanted to move to NH and/or be a perpetual traveller instead (since I have an online business).
In any case, you and this video has got me very very intrigued and interested, enough that I’ll be doing further research on these issues and permaculture as well as other methods and technologies that could be used to weather this coming storm.
Thank you!
Excellent! I’m doing further research on permaculture too; just found out about it and find it fascinating for the same reasons as you. :)
Thanks for posting this video George! I don’t necessarily agree with peak oil theory but that doesn’t make permaculture farming (or gardening I should say) any less interesting or effective at producing food and freeing our food supply from the price of oil.
I’d definitely like to get some land and have a try at this.
Glad you found it useful. Peak oil seems logical. But even if we’ll always have oil, how nice to not depend on it. Saves money. And producing your own food is more nutritious anyway.
I’m searching for land right now. Looking for rolling hills, woodland and a water source. Probably it will be either New Hampshire or somewhere in the southeastern US.
Thanks for commenting!
wow! is all i can say, right now. not really. it’s got me thinking in new ways, about some things i haven’t thought of before. i have to re-think my plans for the future, now. darn you! :O)
Hehe, glad to be of help. :)