This is a post I have been wanting to write for quite a long time, but wasn't quite sure how to explain how I felt. After reflecting on it for awhile, I finally figured out how I wanted to explain my point of view on these farming concepts: organic farming, permaculture, and biodynamic farming.
Organic is a very wide-spread term used in the food industry now. The government has even taken control of the word and made some money off of it. And with this control, you can't be surprised that it is now something that can't necessarily be trusted. For city folk without great access to farms, you rely on it. (I know I did.) It was the only way I could somewhat control the food that was going into my body. The government has now created a certification process that farms have to follow (and pay for) in order to be coined as "organic". Many of the small scale farmers no longer see the use of the time and money that certification comes with. It was very well put in a USA Today article.
So what does organic mean now? It's literal meaning is "from the earth". But now you see frozen TV dinners with this adjective in front of it along with a list of ingredients you can't pronounce. Is that really made from the earth? Today's meaning of organic is actually this: not made with chemicals (usually in the form of pesticides or fertilizers). In other words, people can make anything from anything that doesn't use pesticides or fertilizers and still call it organic as long as they put in the time and the money needed to get certification. One of my first conversations with a friend in the restaurant industry was around infusing chicken skin onto fish. In order to complete this process, he needed a mask so he wouldn't breathe in anything harmful. Could this fish still have been called organic? Yes - if whatever was needed to infuse the skin to the fish came from organic sources (and I have no idea what he used, but the principle still stands.) Luckily, my friend has the rule, "if you can't smell it, don't eat it," so I can still talk to him. (I'm assuming that tasted amazing, even if it was toxic.)
Now it comes to the hard-to-define topic - permaculture. Permaculture is a combination of the words permanent and agriculture. I still have yet to crack that combination for what I feel permaculture actually means, but maybe it will eventually come to me. To me, saying that you practice permaculture means that you use your resources wisely. (Beware - this could be the Girl Scout in me talking.) Permaculturists use anything from nature that they have and reuse everything possible. They are master recyclers. Joel Salatin is a great example of a permaculurist. Everything is connected on his farm. His cows create food for the chickens who fertilize the pastures who then feed the cows. Each of his animals/plants helps out another piece of the puzzle. His farm is very low-input. (Low-input means he doesn't have to rely very much on other things produced outside of his farm in order for his farm to prosper). When deciding on his "outside" purchases, he not only takes into account the cost and quality of the product, but also the environmental and economic impact. He takes everything into account, as everything is connected. He doesn't care so much if his feed is organic. He wants to buy his feed from the guy down the road to keep the local economy flourishing and to reduce transportation costs and carbon emissions. Permaculture is thinking universally about everything and everyone.
Thinking universally is a pretty hard thing to do. Our world is a complicated place, with many complicated systems to decipher and analyze. Since I believe in permaculture as being a very general universal practice, many things would fall under it. Biodynamics is a subset of permaculture. It mainly deals with the unexplainable forces that affect plants and animals: cosmic forces, vortexes, sound, etc. Rudolph Steiner is the master of biodynamics, and I will talk more about him in a following post (as I've already read a book on the subject). Other subsets of permaculture are Keyline farming founded by Percival Alfred Yeomans. (I believe Joel Salatin follows him, but hasn't thrown out the buzz words. When I heard him speak he talked about his trip to Australia and how amazing their water conservation system was.) Cover crops and companion crops I would also throw into this category as a subset, along with many others.
There is very little documentation I have found on comparing these topics, so this is purely my opinion. I don't think there is really a right way, but I wanted to be confident on how I felt about the subject.
