What is Farming, What is Permaculture?

What is a farm, what is farming?

All types of farming are based on some kind of paradigm, some set of goals and principles that inform how farms are designed. What individuals and/or governments and/or businesses and/or society-at-large assume a “farm” actually IS is important: people who treat food and land as mere commodities (to be bought and sold on a footloose global market) have farms that look and function very differently than people who see farming as a means of survival (to subsist from, sustainably). A farm designed by someone who has locally-derived ecological knowledge will look different from one designed by someone who only has knowledge of factory production lines.
I first foremost see a farm as an “human-managed food(+fuel, fibre, etc.)-producing ecosystem.” Let me stress that last word: a farm is an eco-system. It is a collection of multiple plant and animal individuals and species, usually consisting of purposely-propagated cultivars which interact with naturally-propagated plants, animals, insects, fungi and bacteria.

This perspective informs a very specific approach to the question “what is farming,” because: assuming a farm is an ecosystem, one I want to get a surplus out of to provide produce for myself and for market, but still an ecosystem none-the-less.

Permaculture is a particular worldview, and is also a model for design; a discourse as a type of object. A permacuulture is a landscape which incorporates the disciplines of farming, forestry, residential architecture, hydrological engineering, plant breeding and most importantly landscape ecology. The word permaculture may only be a few decades old and have come out of the mouth of an Australian guy, but permaculture as a farming model is very old; any farming system which is designed to be sustainable for generations and maintains or enhances soil quality, landscape biodiversity, almost always involves incorporating "heterogeneity" into food supply systems. I.e. Diversity at many scales, in many forms.


A truly sustainable surplus-producing farm needs to be designed with a balance of goals in mind: to be efficienct in labor-to-surplus /surplus-to-acreage, economic viability (profitability) as a business, resilience within the market (able to handle things like price fluctuations of certain foods), ecological resilience. Alot of sustainability advocates/experts talk about three pillars: ecological, social, economic; a farm which ignores any pillar is not going to be able to be sustained for generations.


So an "ideal farm" is any operation which has all these of qualities, of being designed holistically and according to locale, embracing diversity, producing something people need.

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