So, I've always sort of assumed there would be some sort of milk production on a farm that had cattle, for instance, in part because I like butter and I've hoped that raw dairy would be good for me. Store bought dairy has never been good for me, and recently I got to try some raw milk kefir. It was great, but after drinking it I noticed my sinuses were suddenly filled up and that I was sniffling. This hasn't happened to me for years and now I think it must be the casein. I can drink whey protein powder and eat butter with no problem.
Anyway, so my idea of a farm changed a little bit after that. Salatin (not really permaculture though) seems to be doing interesting things, but what happens if you give up the milk production, and figure you'll just have to go foraging for eggs if you want them? If there are natural boundaries to the property (like a valley where it is hard to get out most places and where it is easy there are humans- the 'farmers') and various animals can more or less engage in roaming where they see fit. Okay, maybe the pigs need some cajoling to go where the land needs a bit of rooting up or whatever, but I'm thinking, since different animals eat different things, they'll be attracted to different areas, and it's the human job to plant the stuff they are going to want to eat and generally care for the land. Keep the animal healthy, happy, and alive until you need it for food rather than have regular times or seasons of production.
I'm also thinking a lot about herbs and spices- how these are the plant based foods are often prized over other things for their nutritional and medicinal benefits. They often get over looked- in terms of calories they usually have very little to offer, but if you are banking on the fact that the pig, who might get into your tubers, will provide you with plenty of calories via fat, then you are basically looking to plant life for taste, variety, and nutritional benefits.
There would also be periodic need for various human interventions. I think the extent to which, for instance, the Native Americans had an effect on their surrounding has been deeply underrated. Obviously, in a valley like the one I described above, can't use fire like they did out on the plains, but there would be need to keep the system healthy. As simple example would be if the land became successful enough for a population explosion among the animals on the property. More, bodies, more byproducts of bodies. more of a need for human intervention.
The dirty little secret is that the charges of sustainability, or lack there of, only work in the negative. We can tell, for instance, that trucking bees around California to all sorts of almond orchards is crazy. This is why there is massive bee death, though it seem folks want to use dying bees to scare people about cell phones for some reason. The bees die because they are no longer in a healthy habitat, and modern medical bee science can't keep their population numbers up enough to satisfy the almond grower's demand.
So, we can tell this is unsustainable, and we can make vague gestures towards smaller, more diverse systems, but we don't really know what is sustainable. Indeed, it is too easy, if you've grown up with a particular system in your life, to assume that it must be sustainable simply because you've known it for your whole life. Also, it might be more sustainable to do something big, like return the buffalo to the great plains, but we seem to have a preference for the small and the local, despite it being perfectly possible to burn through more resources in the backyard than it takes to make something in China and ship it here.
This is no urge to return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Paleo, or evolutionary thinking, is a tool via which we can head to living better than we do today by uncovering the needs we have not, until recently, realized we had. I'd like a whole city; I like what the distribution of labor brings. I don't like the fraud, of course, but in no small part, if you eat real food, you tend to find yourself less gullible.
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