 Hello again and this month's question, because I'm doing these once a month now, is can permaculture feed the world? Well Patrick Whitefield always used to say in response to that question, can the current industrial agriculture system feed the world? And to some degree you could say well it is at the moment, but it is highly dependent on something that we've had for a very short period of time and seems to be running out, and that is fossil fuels in particular oil. And especially as many of the agrochemicals and pesticides and fertilizers that we use these days are also based on oil. So it's not just about the machines that we use that are run on oil, but also the different chemical additives if you like that we use to compensate for the fact that industrial agriculture kills the life in the soil. And one of the ways that it does that is that artificial fertilizers, your NPKs that you find in bags are salts, and when you salt the soil, well you know if you've ever salted anything like slugs, if you salt a slug you know what happens. So salt kills life in the soil and so when you have no life then effectively you have to compensate in some way providing what life provides, but in an artificial way at cost, energy cost, and the environmental cost. So coming back to can permaculture feed the world well. I feel that it could do a lot better job than we're doing at the moment, but of course we would have to change our approach to how we do things. We've been very much mechanising and trying to reduce the cost of food ever since the the two world wars, and the idea of needing to feed people quickly because the world was in a mess, we'd done a lot of damage, and we've just got used to paying virtually nothing for our food. And also giving over that food production to a few people. So to give you a sense of that on a permaculture course a few years ago we went to visit a community supported agriculture project which is sometimes called CSAs. And the idea is that a group of people, it's a bit like a veg box scheme, but a group of people put money in in advance usually to help pay for seeds and so on. And then and essentially so we would like you to grow this, that and the other for us. And it could be a farmer that does that or it could be a group of people who are perhaps more along the lines of permaculture who love to grow but grow on a smaller kind of less mechanised scale. And this particular place we went to see they were growing for 140 families, households around the city, and there was two of them doing kind of half half time. So one full time equivalent person growing for all of those people. And of course you don't have to go back very far into history to know that that was most certainly not the case. That's a real extreme to ask that few people to grow so much food for so many. What it's done is enable us to create the modern world which has given us many gifts but also seems to be bureaucratically extremely heavy. Far more people are probably pushing paper around or digital paper these days, crunching numbers than people actually on the land growing food. And it's disconnected us. For most of us it's completely disconnected from the land. We don't know what's in season. We don't know how to grow things. If it came to it and there was no food in the shops most of us would have no idea what to do beyond going and stealing it from places we could find it. So permaculture and the permaculture approach is very much about reminding us of what our ancestors knew already which was how to find food, sort of foraging for wild foods, but also how to grow food for ourselves. And our ancestors have given us great gift because they've passed on to us all these amazing varieties of fruit and vegetables that they've bred over many generations. And they're something really they're like they're a treasure that we really should be caring for and passing on to our descendants, the people that come later because they've been given to us and they are you know we take for granted all of those things bananas and cauliflower and carrots and so on. But our ancestors not so long ago didn't have those things. So we have these gifts and permaculture says let's look after, let's look after the landscape, let's look after the world that grows the food for us, the soil, keep the air clean and water and so on. So permaculture's approach really is very much less industrial. That's not to say that permaculture doesn't have ways of approaching things on a bigger scale, on a farm scale. There's certainly within the realm of regenerative agriculture there are approaches that we can use that build soil rather than destroy soil. But we're also very much trying to encourage us as individuals because permaculture is a grassroots thing and to look at starting to just grow some food for ourselves. We don't have to be self-sufficient. It's certainly not something permaculture is trying to get us to do because permaculture is about community and cooperation and how do we work together. But reminding us that connecting to food and as soon as you start growing some salad for yourself or potatoes and then you look at what you've been buying in the shops and you put them side by side and think my goodness these things are such different beasts particularly for things like salad because what comes out of that modified atmosphere bag has been in there for who knows how long. Whereas what you grow for yourself particularly if you're growing it with care and organically then those foods are just so much more vibrant and of course for ourselves you know that gives the health gives health to us but perhaps we had less off before because if we don't eat good food then ultimately our health will suffer and we see that in the world around us. So it's not so much about can permaculture feed the world as can permaculture look after the world in which we live in order to maintain a healthy environment and a healthy healthy us and I feel permaculture has so much to offer in that place but we do need to start thinking about doing things a little bit differently and perhaps having less massive fields with monocultures and lots more small scale growing that involves us and our communities and reducing the footprint of how far we move food particularly as it's full of water and generally pretty heavy. So I would say absolutely yes but in order to learn how you need to come on a permaculture course or watch a few more videos because there's plenty of people out there showing us how to do it.