RE: Is Regenerative Agriculture on the Fringe?
Regarding the idealism. I don’t think there’s a system on earth that can provide you with all your food with only 10 hours of work a week. Food takes a lot of work to produce, process, and prepare. If Paul doesn’t consider any of that work, than that statement is misleading. To keep up your infrastructure would require about 5 hours + a week. There really is so much misinformation on actual requirements for living off grid, and supplying 100% of your needs. Now I personally don’t consider gardening “work”, more like leashes/work. But I’ve picked 100 lbs. of blueberries to last us through the winter, that was work. I’ve picked 200 lbs of apples and processed them, that was work. Harvesting and threshing hundreds of lbs of grain, seeds, and legumes, that’s work. Bill Mollison wanted to replace fossil fuels with human labor, so labor is a huge part of permaculture. It’s the quality of this labor that differs from traditional farm labor, and employment labor. That’s what needs to be talked about, not the hours of work.
There is definitely a paradigm shift of “quality vs. quantity” going on there. However, the rewards of working hard for one’s direct future well being (especially when it comes to preparing storage food) is not even comparable to selling one’s time into a wage-slave arrangement.
It is this well being that I believe exists in the nostalgia and romanticism of “farm life” which endures to this day. Farmers in this day and age do work hard, yet many of them feel as disassociated and despondent as the rest of us because they’re not providing for themselves any longer, but serve as subcontractors to a long list of industrialist corporations.
Well said. I think that needs to be discussed more clearly. I think a lot of people jump in to these things thinking it’ll free them from work. But I think it will, more importantly, free your work. You’ll own your work and your time. To me that’s priceless.
Well said.