Permaculture part 2

Permaculture Part 2. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. You don't hear the word permaculture everyday but the concept has been around for years. Franklin Hiram King coined the term permanent agriculture in his classic book from 1911, Farmers of Forty Centuries: Or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan. The word is a blending of permanent agriculture and permanent culture. Laura Sweany, a Core Organizing Committee Member for the 2010 Northwest Permaculture Convergence which takes place September 17-19 at South Seattle Community College. Sweany SWEANY: There are a number of tools that we use as permaculturists that we learned from indigenous cultures all over the world. So certainly permaculture is scientifically based. There's a lot of understanding about how plants work, how fungi works, how bacteria works and soil science that goes into some of the things we do in permaculture. But then there's also a lot of traditional wisdom. Our grandparents were good at using some of the more traditional wisdoms in their gardening and in fact used the phases of the moon to plant and prune by. SWEANY: How to use water in a landscape, how to group plants in a landscape, how to look at food production in three dimension and not just two dimension, not just a flat field full of plants that are all two feet tall. And it becomes sort of like three dimensional chess which flies in the face of modern agriculture because modern agriculture is about simplification. It's about controlling the soil, controlling the inputs, controlling the harvesting and controlling the output so that what you get is an extremely regular product. And that is inherently not how permaculture works. Permaculture will never replace modern agriculture simply because of the sheer magnitude of people that need to be fed. But there is definitely a place in this world for the average person to slow down, get our hands dirty and just reconnect with Mother Earth. SWEANY: If there's something I know about permaculture it's inherently diverse. We're talking about all kinds of diversity. Soil life diversity, plant diversity and also human diversity so there's definitely a back to the land, homestead culture that has arisen around permaculture. It also has a real strong scientific basis. If you take a look at the soil science that goes on in permaculture it's unimpeachable. You can't find a better soil conservation technique than no till and everybody in traditional agriculture is coming back to that. Everything old is new again. For information on permaculture and the upcoming Northwest Permaculture Convergence visit their website at washingtonstatepermaculture.org. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.