The Rise and Fall of Permaculture (for me) - Part 3

Reality is messy

If you missed them, here is Part 1, and here is Part 2.

Gardening ain’t easy. Weeds, pests, disease, poor soils, extreme weather, bad seeds, too much moisture or not enough, and “user error” can all conspire to thwart your ambitions to turn dirt into food. Gardening on a large scale for profit – what we call farming – is an even greater difficulty. Permaculture ups the complexity of basic gardening by an order of magnitude; applying that to the scale of a farm, then, is possibly the Mount Everest of agricultural challenges. There’s a reason “permaculture” farms are vanishingly rare (no farm I ever saw in my years of conference-going qualified for that designation, in my opinion). Permaculture is doctorate level gardening.