31 May, 2018 | Remembering Bill in Print
The Lost Stories are Bill Mollison’s articles published in the print magazine originally named Permaculture, then International Permaculture Journal and finally the Permaculture International Journal that was published between 1978 and 2000.
All stories and other content ©Permaculture Australia unless otherwise noted.
Story by Bill Mollison, 1988. Edition 29.
Feature photo: Bill and Lisa Mollison, Australasian Permaculture Convergence 9, Sydney, 2009. ©Russ Grayson 2009 https://pacific-edge.info
Resources of the Kalahari — Botswana
THE WHOLE THRUST of this report is to value the natural yeilds of fragile systems like the eastern Kalahari, to listen and report on the extensive local knowledge, to care for ordinary people, especially for their nutrition and basic needs for clean air, water and food, and to try to reduce the impact that broadscale agriculture has had in creating deserts.
More food of better quality and value can be obtained from compound gardening and smallholder training than can ever be obtained by large herds or large field crops. All but some 84 percent of the land area of Botswana can be freed from the devastating weight of cattle and crop if rainwater is conserved, producive compound forests grown and high value perennial forages fed to good local strains of livestock.
Or, Botswana can follow Ethiopia and Mauritania into oblivion and take with it the great resources of the Kalahari _ a world loss. This is for the people of Botswana to decide, and their decision needs all the education and information that they and others can bring to it.
It is my strong belief that the innovative development of natural yields and use of local knowledge will ensure survival. To continue with unthinking ‘development’ will obliterate lands and people alike.
The people
Tswana people are vigorous, intelligent, good observers, of a very hospitable and cheerful nature and perceptive in learning new skills. However, past superstitions and a great deal of popular misinformation means that quite hamless animals (lizards, frogs, snakes) are regarded as dangerous, evil or bad, and killed. This ‘zoophobia’ is striking to visitors. It could probably be cured by TV nature programmes and sensible school instruction. Most striped snakes are harmless or beneficial.
One of the unforseen results of this fear of animals is that almost all compounds are beaten flat and swept clean to prevent snakes from approaching unseen. Thus, the towns present the aspect of a hard red desert despite the example of a few (often European) productive gardens and orchards. There are dangerous snakes (mamba, cobras, sand vipers) but also a host of beneficial or harmless snakes that eat termites, slugs, snails and rodents. Many snakes seek refuge from heat or drought in termite mounds or in the rock caves and stony slopes of ridges and cliffs, so care must be taken in these areas.
Thus compound gardens are a rarity although water is available at all settled areas from dams, bores or wells and normal greywater can be used in gardens. One of our strategies was to create domestic shower gardens, pit gardens and vegetable gardens using wastewater and mulch, with conservative water use. Trickle irrgation equipment is scarce and expensive, so we used mulch-filled soak pits for these gardens or placed vines near taps or washwater areas. All the rondavels (thatched huts) and modern homes would benefit from trellis shading to the north and west.
Settlement pattern
All Tswana people of traditional mode (most people not in the City of Gaborone) have three-family settlements or compounds, each one of which consists of a series of three to eight thatched huts and a kitchen hut in a thorn-fenced or hedged compound (liveset Euphorbia tirucallis the ultimate hedge, but goggles must be worn when taking cuttings as the milky sap can blind people if not washed quickly from the eyes). One compound is in town, where much of the dry season is spent. This means that from March/April to October/ November the main group of people are in settlements.
In a broad zone of up to 30km from town are ‘the lands’. These lands are cultivated for market and sorghum, once tilled carefully by teams of donkeys and oxen but more recently the tractor (costs are subsidised by the government) is used; this can be a three-way disaster. First, because the thorn bushes, once preserved in the fields, are cleared (the fields are ‘de-stumped’, again by government subsidy or drought relief money) and the hot winds can sweep across the bare sandy fields. Secondly, the fields of tractor-owners and their families are enlarged, creating up t 100he of bare soil. Traditional fields are 4-12ha with trees as hedge and intercrop. Lastly and perhaps most disastrously, the tractor operators speed up all phases of cultivation, breaking down the soil structure to ‘snuff’ that blows away even in light winds, thus ruining topsoil’ Soils seal and cake or wash away.
People go to the land just before or after the first rains. The men plough the lands then go on to the more remote cattle posts where large livestock is ranged. The women and children plant and tend the grain crops, weed them, scare off birds (mainly weaver birds) from the ripe grain in summer. The men return to the lands to help with harvest and to cart in the grain to town in February-March, and from then to November only a skeleton crew of (often) San people or Basarwa tend the remote cattle posts. Their ‘wages’ are some milk, perhaps a calf, some clothes and the security of a well or borehole.
Livestock management
At the cattle post (some 30-80 km from town), wells and bore- holes or ponds dug in river sands provide water for livestock. Although the Tswana think of themselves as cattle people, and cattle have great status, there are very few large cattle owners (of more than 30 head) and these are for the main part absentee officials, chiefs on parliamentary people on relatively large salaries.
Most Tswana (60-70 percent) have no cattle and perhaps 25-30 percent have from three to 30 head. Thus, most of the large livestock of Botswana, perhaps as 80 percent of the national herd, are owned by nine percent or so of people already rich from salary or position. The total herd in 1980 was about three million head. Even though all land is tribal, cattle ownership is therefore unbalanced, and tribal lands stressed or eroded.
Small livestock (mainly goats, but some sheep) are more equitably distributed and form the largest part of the domestic meat consumed. These smaller livestock and a few milk cows and donkeys are kept in and near towns (Gaborone excepted) and of course in remote settlements and family compounds. A very unusual underutilisation of the national herd is evident from census data and abattoir records. Although Botswana just might be able to support 700,000 cattle ‘wet and dry’, the cattle numbers will climb to three million in good seasons without any increase in cattle killed or exported.
Only 200-300,000 cattle are killed annually for export to the EEC as hamburger or boned meat. Thus, wealth is wasted and the country devastated by unused herds — the problem is that large herds are part of high status — and a great dying takes place (as is now happening) every 18-20 years as wells dry up, vegetation is devastated and soils blow away. The main sufferers are the Tswana people, not the bureaucrats who own the herds and who can afford deep bores or expensive wells. Every drought therefore reduces the number of ordinary people who can keep cattle. Every drought kills draught oxen and donkeys and makes it difficult for smallholders to plough their fields. Every drought erodes more soil and destroys more vegetation, thus making recovery more difficult. Drought has a 18.6-20 year cycle as is common everywhere and 15 of the last 19 droughts were El Nino years, with a large blocking high-pressure cell in the South Pacific.
Desertification following drought
In my very sober estimate, Botswana is on the rapid road to permanent desertification via tractors, boreholes and the sustained overstocking of cattle. Another desertification effect comes from large fields without windbreaks.
Another such drought, or this one, will create a true permanent desert of what was (in peoples’ memories) a well-forested land of permanent streams, a great deal of wildlife and abundant food in all seasons. Botswana, as a viable nation, has modernised to near extinction since 1950.
As for the small—stock (established at 8,000,000 head), the goats and sheep, donkeys and chickens so important to the domestic economy have also been increasing the pressure on the every-failing plant resources. Consequently, yields are low, milk production per animal minute and local foodstuffs rare. This is a golden opportunity for South Africa, and the Boers export most market food in Botswana. This despite a not-so-long-ago self-sufficiency and a previously sound range land. The whole real economic position of the Tswana people is therefore precarious, tied as it is to the unstable South African economy which in itself is in a state of change and whose future looks bleak.
Thus our emphasis on the elements of self-reliance — home gardens and compound orchards, high-value intensive fodders for small stock, careful domestic and field rainwater harvest and a decrease in reliance on broadscale grains and beef.
Given careful local economic analysis, a great many jobs can be generated by decreasing reliance on South Africa and by compound gardening trials of high value food and fodder, while the future sale of managed wildlife rather than the dependence on beef (of which there is a world glut) would assure specialist products indefinitely.
It has been clear for several decades that the processes that lead to desertification are rooted in economic-political factors and Botswana still has a narrow chance to use her resources to save herself. But time is not on her side and to ask bureaucrats to change is to wish for the moon.
The role of agencies, bureaucrats and government in desertification
We later note the role of the EEC in the death of herds of game animals by cordon fences, the desertified fields subject to Acacia destumping (removal) for tractor ploughing and the fast-speed cultivation that destroys soil stucture following subsidised mechanisation.
But the most insidious role is played by the development of wells and boreholes by aid money, plus the deforestation of great strips of country as drought relief money is diverted to road building and whole villages employed to cut, burn and waste useful trees to create dust destroyed roads.
The role of over-used wells and bores in desertification is long attested in India, North America, Africa and Australia. Not only are clean groundwaters exhausted and aquifers collapsed, but the larger herds and annual crops developed around these water sources are the main cause of nucleated desertification. Nor are sophisticated analyses of water quality made, so that very dangerous radioactive and mineral pollutants can be brought up to pollute local soils, to be ingested by people or to be washed into streams in flood.
Very narrow, well made, gravelled and winding roads with swales are useful in transport, and clean-water wells ideal for the development of permanent tree crop and domestic water, but the latter do nothing that village roof tanks will not do if rainwater is harvested. Any method of rainwater infiltration is beneficial whereas bores are destructive and tempt people to ignore the realities of cyclic drought, and thus to maintain destructive herds.
Aid, bank and government money should therefore be critically reassessed or these funds will create insoluble future problems. Small local schemes are always preferable to grand policy systems. As for forestry, in it’s pitiful present state it poses a threat via dieldrin that will threaten long term exports. Local sensitive forestry hardly exists.
Next issue: Wafer problem, exotic plants, and insect foods in Botswana.
31 May, 2018 | Remembering Bill in Print
The Lost Stories are Bill Mollison’s articles published in the print magazine originally named Permaculture, then International Permaculture Journal and finally the Permaculture International Journal that was published between 1978 and 2000.
All stories and other content ©Permaculture Australia unless otherwise noted.
Story by Bill Mollison, 1988. Edition 29.
Feature photo: Bill Mollison and Robyn Francis, Australasian Permaculture Convergence 9, 2009, Sydney, ©Russ Grayson 2009 https://pacific-edge.info
What is effective aid?
At the 1985 Australian National Permaculture Designers Conference Bill Mollison gave the following talk, having just returned from teaching several courses at Alice Springs in Central Australia. Hard hitting, it describes the situation faced by most Aboriginal communities in Australia. Although some progress has been made in recent years it is not significant enough to make this thought-provoking assessment out of date.
Background
There are about twenty years of active aid programs to review. Broadly speaking, the record has been abysmal. From technological aid to food aid it is difficult to find any successes although the efforts have been enormous and the amounts of money spent very large.
In the Northern Territory in 1985, the budget of $17.6m is supposedly going to Aboriginal communities, yet it is hard to find an area where aid has actually reached anyone in any meaningful sense or solved any real problems.
We have a Third World in Australia. A Third World whose infant mortality is greater than in any other area of the world; a Third World whose spectrum of illness is more severe than it is in any other area of the Third World; a Third World which has a peculiar addition to those illnesses — the modern diseases of affluence — on the top of the diseases of poverty. This is a unique condition.
There is gross malnutrition, no vitamin C testable at all in urine or in mother’s milk. The children are subject to every sort of infection. Seventy percent of the children suffer middle ear infection identifiable by a snotty nose, then bursting eardrums — not once, but three to four times. About the third time the inner ear is rotting, the tympanum is gone and the bones behind are rotting. The skull inside the ear rots also. The lungs become infected. The child can be deaf for life.
Of Aboriginal children, 30 percent have gross malnutrition;all of them have had scabies; all of them have had lice; 63 percent have sugar diabestes; 47 percent of children have kidney damage; some are chronically ill.
The horror story of aid is phenomenal. In any one Aboriginal settlement, if there are a hundred adults at any one time about six of them will be in sufficiently good health to do anything. This means that nowhere within the Aboriginal population is there a significant number of adults to handle any sort of program.
Unless the health level changes nothing else can change. Since 1967, with huge inputs of Government assistance to Aboriginal society, the health level has declined. There is a population sector which will grow up chronically ill. That is, another fifty or eighty years of sick people. The damage done to children before the age of five is so severe that their future as adults is reduced. After 20 years of government assistance health has gone backwards.
One of the reasons is that Aboriginal communities are fairly small. It would be unusual to have 300 people in a community. But government and non-government organisations are in such multitude that there is literally one of them per Aboriginal adult.
The Aboriginal industry
If there is a typical community of seventy people and there are seventy-two government and non—government organisations to serve this community, there is created a Major Disturbance Factor (MDF).
Each group depends for its existence on some input into the Aboriginal community. If there are six or eight people the demands on them and on the unfit people are a major cause of stress. There a about 70 organisations or 60 percent the Northern Terriory so employed.
The Aboriginal industry is enormous. It supports about 30 percent of the public service in some areas where there are Aboriginal communities and easily 30 percent of the commercial business people, particularly those in alcohol and junk food.
So. a lot of people, both public servants and commercial interests, depend for their living on maintaining a basically ill and uninformed group. That is, if the group were neither ill nor uninformed, a very large section of employment would collapse.
The Aid business is enormous. It can be assessed by calculating who employs whom, who draws wages or commercial gain from the business. All sorts of groups view Aborigines and other distressed peoples as their major activity.
The problems in the Aboriginal community are personal and domestic. The responses are public and organisational. Can these responses deal with personal and domestic problems? The whole hierarchical edifice has very few people at the contact point. There may be one or two well-meaning Europeans long in personal contact or with personal knowledge of one Aborigine. The greatest part is out of contact with the clients.
Where the money goes
Most money is expended in the high salary, high administrative area. It is basically absorbed there and minute amounts come to ground level. This is particularly true of government aid. At the interface where people are in contact there is very, very little money, hardly any although the officially designated money is apparently enormous.
In 1984, DAA (Department of Aboriginal Affairs) stated that $4 million out of a total $8 million in CEP grants had been earmarked for Aboriginal gardens in Central Australia. A further analysis was requested since there did not seem to be any gardens. DAA said 80 percent had gone into salaries and most of the remainder into fencing — for what? — for cattle.
So the money earmarked for gardens went into fences for cattle and benefitted white business. The rest went into tree programs. The trees were purchased largely from forestry and other supply centres and planted by CEP teams. But very few were fruit or food trees. After $4m spent there are no gardens. There is still no food in the settlements.
In South Australia in white recorded history, about $4000 was allocated directly for funding for gardens. Managed locally, it banked $40,000. It was very successful aid that got through, and aid that gets through can be very succesful and cheap to fund if it goes directly to an Aboriginal group.
Contact people
In the service area of government, just behind the contact interface, there is a peculiar and unexpected thing which becomes obvious over time. That is, the people who seek employment close to service in the Aboriginal areas are almost all racist. These people generally hate the client population. They are probably in high bureaucracies but just behind contact there is hardly anything else than racists. Not just Aboriginal racists. People who service aid programs almost aways hate the groups they serve. They are there for the high wages with many extras (vehicles, fuel and generous living allowances). Many run a racket. They live off, not with the people.
The problems of aid are rarely logistical problems. They are seldom technological. They are almost always problems of appropriate people for the job. Rarely are these people chosen from the local community of activists.
Another group are the amateurs and failures. People who have not been personally successful. This is their God-given opportunity to make a paid success in contact with people who they consider to be inferior. They are well meaning and fairly plentiful on the ground. They dash off and knit socks for Balinese children.
Now almost by definition, those in constant contact cannot be racists. They would not be in contact and contact would not be sustained. So people in actual contact have to be fairly tolerant and acceptable people. Othenrvise nothing works. No one comes to see you.
These problems are not unique to Aboriginal aid. They are problems not atypical of aid anywhere.
There are no screening programs and appointments are made on flimsy grounds. Very few people come forward as shopkeeper in Aboriginal settlements or rush in as doctors and nurses in hospitals which are basically slaughter houses where people die all the time. You cannot cure the illness because you are dealing With the end results.
What works and what does not work
Short term, anything does not work. The problem are very long term. When planning Aboriginal health today there must be a 100 year plan because it will be that long working with chronically ill people. Long term programs and long term funding works.
There are two grave inpedtments to that. One is our governmental system which is quite incapable of long term anything. There is no certainty that any government will be returned to office longer than three to five years. Very often the opposition does have a policy which means discontinuing the policies of the previous government. The political process is totally unsuited not only to aid but in fact to any long term effective change. It is particularly unsuited to fixing soil erosion to reafforestation, to aid, to health. So the Government system is a totally ineffective and inappropriate way to deal with such problems which must somehow be solved outside the extremely short term, self-survival interest system of politics.
Public bodies don’t work. Their main concern is with their own survival. There is no genuine concern to cure a client when it is the end of their career. It the problem is fixed you do not need a department.
Much volunteerism is too amateurish and short term. It generally doesn’t work.
Occasionally, official self-help works by accident. That is, Aboriginal aid departments or Aboriginal policy units. However, irrespective of how many at these are set up they appear increasingly ineffective. In fact, to proliferate this money flow or even to maintain it is simpiy a very Major Disturbance Factor in the community.
Money does not work. Now, in the Phillipines, the Dole Fruit Company offers cheap plastic articles in exchange for land titles. Until the late 1960s in Australia, people would only sell goods to Aboriginal people for land titles. Today in Alice Springs you can stand outside an art gallery and for about a flagon of wine get a line traditional painting. That is what makes this so attractive to racists. They can get lots of money being near the contact area. So it is an area to enrich yourself.
Very often, work with people in the Third World is most effective in special groups. You teach sections to different groups of people. These are just basic cultural rules. Women go in there to teach women and men here to teach men. The most in are generally the women. Among Aborigines the male mortality is extremely high. They are often the main victims of addiction because they control the money. They are mobile, they travel a lot. Most communities consist of a majority ot women. They are the group to work with and male aid people do not do this.
Some conclusions
There are four basic things needed in communities — clean water, home gardens, settling the dust, proper houses tor inland conditions. None of those has been achieved for Aborigines in Australia. We are just like the world in general. We need to find simple methods for looking after dying people. There is a job to do. It is very simple. Again it is called clean water, home gardens, well designed desert homes, excellent nutrition teaching.
Find those who can help run the community. Monetary needs are minute and modest.Dismantle the whole expensive aid process: all the money disappears into the bureaucracies.
Effective aid lies in feeding modest resources into a community; supporting the people who live and work there; doing excellent research and teaching; living very much as one proposes that others live; respecting language and culture, listening a lot and using just enough money to achieve joint solutions to the basic problems of clean potable water, nutritious food, good housing and to reduce dust in the settlements, all of which are easily achievable.
This presumes goodwill, long term planning and establishing teachers in the community itself. It does not lie in establishing large bureaucracies or in large funds carelessly applied.
I suppose that’s a pretty challenging lecture and no one is going to clap. I gave the same lecture in front of the CSIRO and government aid agencies in Alice Springs and nobody clapped because, by God, there is nothing to congratulate anybody about. No congratulations are in order.
Bill Mollison’s presentation at National Permaculture Designers Conference, Ottord NSW 1985. Transcribed by Lea Harrison. Edited by Rowe Morrow.
Rear cover, International Permaculture Journal, edition 29, 1988. The ad was for products sold at the Permaculture Epicentre, 113 Enmore Road, Enmore, The Epicentre was home to Permaculture Sydney association where the International Permaculture Journal was produced, courses and workshops held and that was home to Robyn Francis and Denise Sawyer (later of Crystal Waters Permaculture Village in the Sunshine Coast hinterland), as well as to the small permaculture-landscaped rear courtyard. At the time of writing the premises is occupied by Alfalfa House Food Co-op.
Ad in International Permaculture Journal, edition 29, 1988. The ad is evidence that an alternative economics played a substantial part in permaculture in Australia in the 1980s. Earthbank was set up by Australian permaculture practitioners to stimulate the then-new social (aka ‘ethical’) investment industry in which NSW-based investor, Damien Lynch, (1998 story) played a major role. Damien had already started August Investments which invested only in socially and environmentally positive or neutral enterprises.
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1 Jun, 2017 | Remembering Bill in Print
The Lost Stories
Remembering Bill in print — the legacy of Bill Mollison from the pages of the Permaculture International Journal
The Lost Stories are Bill Mollison’s articles published in the print magazine originally named Permaculture, then International Permaculture Journal and finally the Permaculture International Journal that was published between 1978 and 2000.
All stories and other content © Permaculture Australia unless otherwise noted. ……….
The Bioregional Association
1984, May, edition 16
THE BIOREGIONAL ASSOCIATION is an association of the local residents of a natural and identifiable region. This region is sometimes defined by a watershed, sometimes by remnant or existing tribal boundaries, at times by town boundaries, suburban streets or districts and at times by some combination of such factors.
Many people identify with their local region and know its boundaries. Ideally, the region so defined can be limited to that occupied by from 7000 to 15,000 people. Of these, perhaps only a hundred will be initially interested in any regional association, and even less will be active in it.
The work of the regional group is to assess the natural, technical, service, and financial resources of the region and to identify where leakage of resources (water, soil, money, talent) leave the region. This quickly points the way to local self-reliance strategies.
Compiling resources
Specialists inside and outside the region can be called on to write accounts of their specialties as they apply to the region, and regional news sheets publish results as they come in.
Once areas of action have been defined, regional groups can be formed into associations dealing with specific areas:
- food — consumer-producer associations and gardening or soil societies
- shelter — owner-builder associations
- energy — appropriate technology associations
- finance — an Earthbank association
- crafts, music, markets, livestock and nature study or any other interests.
The regional centre
The job of the regional office is complex and it needs four to six people to act as consultants and coordinators with others on call when needed. All other associations can use the office for any necessary use such as registration, address, phone and newsletter services.
Critical services and links can be built by any regional office. The office can serve as a land access centre, operating the strategies outlined under that section. It can also act as leasehold and title register and for service agreements for clubs and societies. More importantly, the regional office can offer and house community self-funding schemes and collect monies for trusts and societies.
The regional office also serves as a contact centre for other regions, and thus as a trade or coordination centre. One regional office makes it very easy for any resident or visitor to contact all services and associations offering in the region and also greatly reduces costs of communication for all groups. An accountant on call can handily contract to service all groups.
The regional group can also invite craftspeople or lecturers to address interest groups locally, sharing income from this educational enterprise.
Some of the topics that can be included in the regional directory are as follows. These can be taken topic by topic, sold at first by the page and finally put together as a loose-leaf notebook.
Topics to include in the regional directory:
- plants and trees of the region
- agricultural and market garden products
- nurseries, growers, seed suppliers
- social welfare services
- finance, lending and self-funding
- craft associations and retail outlets.
History and historical resources
- water sources and quality testing
- soil analysis and mapping
- recreational associations and reserves
- building co-operatives and associations
- volunteer organisations
- medical facilities
- legal firms and legal aid
- secondhand goods and exchanges
- health centres and retail outlets
- books and information published in the region
- computer facilities
- educational opportunities
- food co-operatives
- markets and outlets
- land trusts, land grants, public reserves
- musical suppliers, musicians, venues
- calendar of events in the region
- political parties
- skilled workers eg. carpenters, plumbers
- councils, shires, railway and road reserves can be included.
Earthbank Societies
People interested in self-financing need to form a regional branch of an Earthbank Society, gather data on strategies and fashion these to suit local conditions.
A local Earthbank Society exists first to locate and inform its members of good products and systems, and second to set up ethical financial systems in the region.
On a federal level, the Earthbank Society collates and reports on alternative economic and legal strategies through the Permaculture Quarterly.
It is a great help to others if regional groups try out various local finance strategies, report on them at conferences and send accounts of successes and problems to the Earthbank Society.
Contact the Earthbank Society, PO Box 255, Crows Nest, N.S.W. 2065.
Land access strategies
The establishment of a regional office opens up the potential for offering a set of strategies enabling better landuse and suited to the finances and involvement of people using the service.
A selection of strategies follows but hybrids or other modifications can succeed.
- Oxfam or land lease systems within built-up areas
- city farms
- city-as-farm and gleaning
- farmlink systems
- commonworks
- farm and garden clubs.
Oxfam model
This is the least troublesome and is particularly suited to young families in rental accommodation.
The regional office posts paired lists. List A is for those who want 200-1000 square feet of garden to grow food. List B are those (usually elderly or absentee landlords) who will lease 200-1000 square feet on an annual, renewable basis.
People list themselves and, as local land comes up, introduce themselves. The regional office prepares the standard lease specifying rental (if any), goods exchange, length and type of lease, access and the names of the parties. Councils, shires, railway and road reserves can be included.
Thus, many young families get legal access to garden land on an allotment basis. The regional office may need to map and actively seek land and should make a small service charge for registration of leases.
City farms
These can be areas from one to 100 acres in (usually) poorer or industrial areas of the city with a long lease of from ten to 30 years (renewable or purchase-lease). A management group os appointed.
On this land the following activities are promoted:
- demonstration gardens
- garden allotments where permits
- domestic animals, sheep, cows as demonstration and breeding stock
- recycling centre for equipment, building materials (income-producing)
- tool rental and access
- gleaning operations
- plant nursery
- seminars, demonstrations, training programmes, educational outreach
- seed, book, plant, and general retail sales.
City farms are spreading rapidly world-wide and usually serve 1000 or so suburban families. They can become financially independent within five to six years by sales and membership subscriptions, and seek to serve the interests of the community.
Some specialise in, for example, herb or fish products or as domestic animal supply centres. Others offer design, consultancy or implementation services to the city area and undertake house insulation, contract gardening and so on. The one essential is a long term, legally binding lease.
City as farm
This needs a tight, small (two to four person) management group.
Surplus city product is collected, sorted, packaged and retailed. Some groups collect, grade and sell citrus or nut crop and may provide young trees to gardeners on contract for later product off the trees. Others range sheep, duck, or geese flocks for fire or pest control.
All seem to make a very good income by treating the city as a (specialist) farm. A processing, shearing or like facility may be needed by the group. Glasshouse crop is another possibility.
Farm Link (producer-consumer co-ops)
These are appropriate to high-rise or rental families in an urban area. From 20-50 families link to one farm in the nearby country.
They can purchase and manage a property but usually come to an arrangement with an already-established market gardener. Quarterly meetings are held between both parties to work out what products can be trucked direct from farm to families who use the product and can retail surplus to others on pre-orders.
The farmer adjusts production to suit family needs and as the link grows, the system can also accommodate:
- holidays on the farm
- educational workshops and teach-ins
- city help on the farm at rush periods.
Commonworks
A farm held by a land trust near the city or a country town arranges a whole series of special leases for forestry, livestock, crafts, teaching, flowers, fish, bees, dairy, mudworks and other complex enterprises. Some of these need land (area) leases, some only activity leases.
Urban or village people can lease and develop separate enterprises. If about ten percent of nett profit is returned to a commonwork fund, then the land can be developed for further leases.
On one such place in Kent (UK) up to 20-30 people obtain a living from one nearby farm. This is one of the best models of farm use at the highest level.
Farm and garden clubs
These suit families with some capital to invest as shares, with an annual membership (shares can be sold).
A farm is purchased by the club or society on a public access route one to two hours from the city. Depending on aims and share capital, people can lease small areas or appoint a manager. Rich clubs develop motel accommodation and recreational fisheries. Worker-based clubs usually develop private plots with (caravan-style) accommodation for weekends.
A management committee plans for the whole area (access, water, fences, rates, etc) and can be selected by the club. This, too, suits condominium or high-rise groups and provides a rural outlet.
The essentials to remember are:
- firm, legal access organised; this is very basic to success
- lean management (two to four people plan for the rest)
- no frills
- arrangements based on friendship and ethical social values.
Summary
Regional association membership fees can be kept low and regional groups charge only normal handling and service fees for work done.
A bioregional office should be able to make its own way providing it is staffed by a small group who usually offer services in energy-efficient architecture, permaculture design and implementation, legal aid, accounting, Earthbank (money management) or ethical investment advice.
Given that any small group in a region can come together to set up such an office, then the results on local unemployment, food supply and investment capital can be striking.
Normally, via international corporations and banks, money, monocultural food or mass manufacture are exported out of the region, reducing residents to what is effectively an unregarded work force dependent on centralised share-market whims or distant managerial decisions.
If only a proportion of capital and skills are used to produce the food, shelter, energy and finance needed locally, employment and goods become controlled by the region itself via resident owners.
Many residents become small shareholders in local service or provision industries which are no longer susceptible to external manipulation and, by providing for local needs, command loyalty as a matter of self-interest.
Accompanying article
A short story accompanied Bill Mollison’s The Bioregional Association:
Valley Farm, which is on five acres of land owned by Sutherland Homes for Children, is at present providing work for five people under the federal government’s Community Employment Program.
Coordinator Peter Chambers, project officer Tony Watkin and three project workers started work following the allocation of $60,000 in late January.
By the time the project was opened officially they had already begun to implement the permaculture design prepared by Mr Watkin.
If the design is a success, the farm workers will not need to bring in food for the animals or fertiliser for the plants. Instead, all facets of the project will be beneficial to each other.
Mr. Watkin said the design incorporates the planting of vegetables, flowers, herbs and fruit trees. The workers also plan to establish forage systems for chickens, sheep, bees and other livestock at the farm, which means the animals would be able to find all the food they require in the areas to which they are confined.
There will also be a solar-powered greenhouse and a building incorporating an office, resource centre and food co-operative.
Mr. Chambers said the farm would be operating in three different areas — employment initiatives, community education and as a food co-operative. The farm will eventually provide fruit and vegetables for Sutherland.
The long-term aim of the project is to give all members of the community the opportunity to pursue an interest in farming, working on a co-operative basis.
Editor’s note
Notes on Bill Mollison’s The Bioregional Association
Dimensions:
- 1 square foot = 929.0304 square centimetres
- 1 foot = 30.48cm
- 1 acre = 0.404686 hectares.
The Oxfam model
The Oxfam model mentioned in Bill’s article is similar in principle to the landshare schemes set up in Australia and the UK in recent years. Neither appear to be operating now and their websites appear to be closed.
Essentially, the landsare model of land access provides an online platform through which people seeking land for food production and those with land they are willing to make available make contact.
It would now be regarded as a type of platform co-operative within the Cooperative Commonwealth model of social organisation.
In March 2011 Australia’s Milkwood Permaculture reported on the Landshare model of land access: https://www.milkwood.net/2011/03/14/my-land-is-your-land-the-landshare-concept/
Another report appeared in the same year: http://www.pigswillfly.com.au/2011/03/landshare-australia-up-and-growing/
Historic note on bioregionalism in Australian permaculture
Bioregionalism became a topic in permaculture design courses in the 1980s. In the 1990’s the late Peter Berg from the Planet Drum Foundation, a US-based bioregional organisation, visited Australia, spending time in Sydney where he met with the then-Permaculture Sydney Association at Lurline’s Permaculture Cafe in Annandale.
Bioregionalism was also a deep influence on the Australian Association of Sustainable Communities, set up following the 1994 Aquarius Festival-ten-years-after event in Nimbin, northern NSW. Permaculturist, Stephen Ward, was a leading figure in the organisation in Sydney, which published the periodical Evidently/Sustainability, an “alternative news agency” press clipping service compiling reports of environmental and social challenges and solutions.
Planet Drum Foundation: http://www.planetdrum.org
Other notes
Consumer-producer associations
The consumer-producer associations mentioned in the story are more commonly known today as CSA — Community Supported Agriculture. They link farmers in a region to food buyers in nearby population centres, providing access to, usually, organically produced (certified and uncertified) foods produced in the region.
In larger cities, distributing regional farm produce has proven a transportation challenge, so intermediatery social enterprise and small businesses have established as food aggregators, services to which farmers deliver their produce, where it is boxed and from where it is delivered to subscribers. These are variously known as hybrid CSAs, food hubs or food box systems. Examples include Brisbane Food Connect and Sydney’s Ooooby (Out Of Our Own Back Yard).
Brisbane Food Connect: https://www.foodconnect.com.au
Ooooby: https://www.ooooby.org
Earthbank Society
The Earthbank Society was a permaculture initiative set up to promote the ethical investment movement that was emerging in the 1980s as well as related social investment initiatives. More at: http://pacific-edge.info/2009/09/earthbank-and-permaculture-a-productive-nexus/
Ethical Investment Comes of Age ….finally
The new economy reborn in Sydney
The man who brought ethics to investment
City farm
In Australia, city farms have evolved within the same urban agriculture/sustainability education context as community gardens. Generally, city farms are larger social enterprises than community gardens and incorporate a wider range of activity. Australian examples include Northey street City farm in Brisbane, Perth City Farm and CERES in Melbourne.
More on city farms and community gardens: http://communitygarden.org.au
City as farm
The city as farm model was implemented in the US where people made their gardens available to a food aggregator for a fee. The produce was then sold to a community food system.
Owner-builder associations
Owner-building was a characteristic of the alternative or back-to-the-land social movement of the 1970s. The movement both influenced permaculture and was attractive to permaculture practitioners in the 1980s. Earth construction, usually mudbrick but also pise or rammed earth in suitable climates, were popular as they were low cost, providing the builder had the time to make the bricks and to build.
In the US, Lloyd Kahn and his Shelter Publications was and continues to be a documenter and educator in owner building. Lloyd with Bob Laston produced the influential book, Shelter, in 1973.
Shelter Publications: https://www.shelterpub.com
Shelter: https://www.shelterpub.com/building/shelter
Owner building became a significant enough approach to affordable housing, more so perhaps in rural areas, to spawn The Owner Builder magazine in 1981 http://www.theownerbuilder.com.au/
Regional directory
The regional directory, sometimes called the bioregional directory, was a compilation of regional resources published by bioregional groups in an unknown number of locales in Australia including that produced by AASC — the Australian Association for Sustainable Communities — in Sydney.
Commonworks
The commonworks model of livelihood creation through small business or social enterprise on shared land and with shared infrastructure was implemented by the Permaculture Institute when it was based near Tyalgum, in northern NSW’s subtropical Tweed Valley, in the 1990s.
any internal structure. Pioneered in the 1900’s by a German settler in Iowa, USA, lamellar barn rooves may be of any curve, including half circles.
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