Mark Shepard - Restoration Agriculture

From Permaculture Voices conference talks.

My key takeaway is that perhaps livestock animals and machines are more helpful than I thought for managing land ecologically. I used to think that Mark Shepard and the other pastoral livestock-loving permaculturalists were just so addicted to meat they'd wilfully ignore the superior energy efficiency of growing plants (ie legumes). Similarly, I've become quite disillusioned by mechanical agriculture for its dependence on fossil fuels; but Mark's take on growing things at scale somewhat changed my mind. To be able to provide food for people at scale, we need to integrate permaculture with mechanisation, so long as we can minimise the ongoing dependence on machines.

Notes

• War to secure oil is a natural consequence of our critical dependency on oil
• Annual grains and legumes are addictive and largely anti-nutritious, we're not designed to digest them (we lack the gizzard and "crock?" other animals use to digest them), and hence we are required to cook or ferment them to make them non-toxic. Mark thinks they're addictive because: why else would we eat things that are largely devoid of nutrition?
• Hazelnuts have thrice the Protein and oil of soybeans.
• You can make diesel fuel by mixing oil and alcohol. Take the top third of your distilled apple cider (aka the "tops" which is poisonous and will blind you). 20% tops and 80% oil left in a barrel for a year becomes diesel. Better yet, convert your engines to work on vegetable oil and grow your own fuel crops. Mark says you can fuel your entire farm by allocating 10% of the space to oil seed. He uses only 3 acres of sunflowers to power the whole farm.
• To integrate capitalism and permaculture, we need regenerative farms that work at scale, with machinery. In the future, perhaps we can revert to more peasantry methods (without such machinery).