[insensible]

Permaculture designer here. That’s a pretty good take. Biggest aspect missing is that once you abandon the “parking lot” approach to farming, you get many niches where you can profit from multiple crops on the same land. The farmer in the article is grazing under productive trees, for one example. Another opportunity is to stack a bunch of berry bushes of graduated height next to rows of trees. And to graze chickens after a larger animal, yet another enterprise on the same land. And with all the added fertility from the grazing, now you can sell a cutting of hay you didn’t have before.

The profit per unit area can become very high.

[harimau777]

Does that scale? It seems like the planting and harvesting would be difficult to automate and/or require increased labor. However, I am definitely not an expert.

[lukan]

"Does that scale?"

Not in my experience.

The promises of many permaculture proponents, are close to a scam.

Basically, the claim is establish a working ecological system - and then it runs by itself, while producing lots of yield. Permanent Culture.

But in reality, wild nature takes over quite quickly, if you don't do anything. A fruit tree does usually not have benefits by making big red apples for example. Small ones are good enough for wild reproduction. But we want as many apples as possible, which means pruning, etc.

And a vegetable garden ... they like care, but if you don't tend to them, they will remain tiny and soon displaced by weeds.

So what I have seen in my experiments in my garden and on other permaculture farms - is that the result looks nice, but it is a lot of work and low yield. Some ideas like fruit forests are a nice additionm but all in all I doubt permaculture can feed the world. (I have not seen one permaculture farm, that could feed itself)

[insensible]

I have never seen a permaculture designer, or anyone, make such a claim. We aim to reduce maintenance by design, using methods that overlap with Lean Manufacturing and other process study, but it would be absurd to claim that it’s possible to reduce gardening to zero maintenance. Fukuoka was more extreme than many permaculture specialists by quite a large factor but he put his maintenance right in the title of his signature work: “one-straw revolution”.

[insensible]

The idea is that the crops are more profitable per unit of time spent. The pasture operations are very low labor.

[jethkl]

your comment introduced me to the term permaculture, looks interesting. Do you leverage numerical optimization - linear programming or integer programming for example - in your work?