Village-based permaculture in Indonesia by Willie Smits

You can access this video through the Permaculture Voices conference talks for about $10USD (worth it IMO, but you might like to just get the whole bundle, or DM me if you can't afford it). For a free talk by Willie, see How to restore a rainforest. I'd #recommend this to anyone vaguely interested in Permaculture who wants to see how to effect change at a large scale on the frontiers of the destruction caused by industrial capitalism.

• Optimal planning in Permaculture with Willie Smits' Software. I'd love to use it.
  • By providing value maps of soil, rainfall, climate, etc you can plan what sort of plantations would best suit local areas to set people up for success. By modelling economic viability for suitable crops, you can find cash crops that will provide an economic (aka compelling) reason for locals to keep them alive. You can also enter labour availability (ie how many workers do you have access to) to find logistically feasible crop plans (because there's no point fronting a bunch of capital and effort for fruit that will rot on the field).
  • To give an idea of the detail involved Willie modelled tree growth that accounts for the sunlight exposure to individual leaves and calculates the subsequent nutrient requirements of a tree.
  • This tool tells locals when to do what for optimal growth. You can sketch land, take the above data, and model how adding or removing a plant affects your cash flow. This means locals can figure out whether they should chop down a tree now or wait a year.
  • But what is "optimal" is not fixed. You can choose to optimise for hydrology (water quality), food output (more reserves), or other goals. The system will plan not only the optimal end state but also the tasks for getting there. You can see when and where you will need to do work.
  • Master-planning, or planning at a high level, is also important. For example, if farming becomes a once-again viable industry, and someone's child wants to open a farm in a distant forest, the tool can calculate the extra flooding risk that converting this forest to a field will create for existing fields.
  • It sounds utterly fantastic; it's basically codified permaculture.
• If you don't plan for extremes (eg el nino), which will happen again, you will lose all your progress.
• In the Netherlands, they have a concept called fuluksteiners(?), places where people grow on little plots and swap information. Willie's father learned a lot about succession and companion planting living in this way (for basically every plant). Communal living
• Farming #advice Do not plant avocado and lemon trees next to eachother
• One of Willie's forests produces sugar palms (among many other things) on the order of 20 tonnes of sugar per hectare per year. This is twice as much from sugarcane plantations.
• In Makani, people experience extreme floods (1.5m) and droughts (during which they have killed each other for water). Since reforesting the area, flooding has not occurred (despite occurring everywhere else), people can build houses as a result of refilled groundwater, and it has created many jobs as a consequence of harvesting wood and sugar from the plantation.
• Converting solar radiation energy into storable chemical energy. The male flower stem can be cut off and tapped on a daily basis, allowing you to harvest an energy equivalent of 80 barrels of oil per hectare per year. Sugar palms also have roots that can go 12m deep to tap water and nutrients deep in the earth. They have many uses.
• In the event of crop failure, by cutting and eating the sugar palms one by one, a village of 1000 people could survive for six months.
• Politics and permaculture. In Indonesia (and I'm sure many other countries), the government issues top-down directives like "we want another 400 million hectares of rice because we spend too much on imports". But their execution is very suboptimal; they set up coops where farmers can loan seeds from and pay it back with money, but then they must spend their extra money on fertiliser dependent on global oil which locks them into another monopoly to extract their wealth. Land ownership is a big problem in Indonesia; the government has laid claim to all "unclaimed" land, even though many people have traditionally moved their entire village after 80 years or so between various areas. They are unable to return to the land of their ancestors even though they are clearly buried there. Offering land up for foreign capital and investment is a big incentive.

Sugar is the temporary solar radiation stored into the permanent battery which we all call "sugar".
You can convert sugar into

• hydrogen with plant-based catalytic conversion
• jet fuel and diesel with hydrotrophic algae
• bioplastics
  That can only be done with a permanent layer of trees that can be harvested on a daily basis.
  Willie Smit, #quote on Permaculture