Restoration Agriculture: Real-World Permaculture for Farmers

The big point of this book--that permanent, perennial-based polycultures must largely replace annual crop production to make agriculture sustainable--is right on the money and occasionally well-argued. Those good arguments, however, are buried in a rambling mess of a book and severely undercut by copious logical fallacies, self-contradiction, and the occasional bald-faced lie.Shepard says we have to build perennial polycultures that can be harvested by machines if we're going to provide the world with food, then advises the would-be farmer to commingle crops in ways that would eliminate any possibility of mechanical harvesting.He says that there's no such thing as nutrient deficiency in soil, just farmers planting the wrong crops for their biome. Later he talks about how he had to use chemical fertilizers to get asparagus to grow on his own farm, which he also says is his best cash crop.He claims that his efforts have converted his farm from red clay subsoil to rich, high organic content topsoil, having sequestered loads of atmospheric carbon in the process. Not one actual measurement of the soil's organic matter content to back the claim up, though, and certainly not a before-and-after to compare real-world results to the purely theoretical estimates he claims instead.Chapter 12 is an especially magical chapter, where 13.9 million is actually a smaller number than 5.9 million, and a lactating dairy cow, a beef cattle, two pigs, 10 chickens, and 2 sheep can all be raised simultaneously on a single acre of pasture...

Good book but is basically a rehash of the 1929 classic Tree Crops by J. Russell Smith which is publicly available from a dozen sources. Actually in many ways Smith's book is better because he actually conducted research and correspond widely with others and didn't just showcase his own farm, which is what Shepard basically does. Shepard is also heavy on the personal opinion and light on the practical advice. It is not a bad book, but I would get it from a library if you can, or just read Tree Crops. I sure regret dropping $25 on it! It sure doesn't contain much in the way of instruction. More than a few times he says to go read other peoples books to figure it out. It comes off as lazy to me.After reading this book a second time I will add that I commend some of the ideas in the book, however, I must denounce some flaws. To being with, perennial crops are not more reliable than annual. I have perennial and annual crops. It's almost an every other year that a late frost, for a season, makes either apples, pears, or peaches a TOTAL loss where I live by killing the blossoms. It's rare, where I live, to find a wild nut bearing tree where fewer than half the nuts are wormy or ruined for anything but pig feed. And, as someone who has sat down and shelled a big bowl of hickory nuts, I can tell you it is tedious and you don't end up with a whole lot of food after about 8 hours. In fact, that quantity of nut meat bits (and they will be little bits) can be consumed by some greedy children in mere minutes. A harvester built in 1980 can make ready as many calories in a millisecond. Part of what makes modern agriculture possible are the machines that work very well at harvesting. And there seems to me that there is considerable variability among food bearing trees that will make mechanical harvest inefficient and expensive, even if someone where to feel it economically worthwhile to develop such machines. J. R. Smith understood this. This is why he urged grafting of "genius" scion wood to ordinary trees and attempts at breeding native species into economically efficient crop trees. Shepard seems to advocate the exact opposite...basically he thinks that wild plants are better because they require fewer inputs. This is true no doubt, but it also marks a philosophical return to nomadism and hunting-gathering. It is basically the opposite of agriculture. I have no problem when affluent folks buying worn out farms and turning them into clever tree plantations, but it is a bit of a stretch to call it agriculture, and he admits it will not be profitable.Meanwhile, I have never known (nor do I know anyone) who has known a modern corn crop to fail. Might be a disappointing year (under 180 bu/acre), but corn is tough stuff. I've seen it withstand winds that toppled apple and oak trees, I've seen it weather droughts that toasted perennial pastures, and it isn't planted when floods or winter weather are a worry, while all perennials need to withstand both. I am very glad to see that Shepard mentions alley cropping practices. These are what can allow a transition to perennial agriculture, and for that matter, offers greater diversity on the farm. There is abundant evidence (mostly out of the University of Missouri center for agroforestry) that many ordinary annual farm crops grow well among trees, and it is proven that most cool seasons grasses and legumes (the stuff of animal forage) grow better beneath the shade of moderately shading trees (Hickory-Pecan-Walnut-Butternut tribe, the Locusts). I was disappointed to see that no mention was made of Management Intensive Grazing (or MIG). MIG can work with silvopastural practices even better than it does in just an open pasture (the shade problem is already solved). MIG is the way to maximize the productivity of forage plants and get more calories per acre while relying less on feeding annual plants to animals.Furthermore, I am left wondering how the harvest of the diversity of crops at all different heights and whatnot is supposed to be achieved with a reasonable amount of work. I wonder if it has dawned on the author that the reason why orchardists and farmers that row crop a few species of plants do what they do not because they are stupid, but because they want to get in the harvest in with reasonable time expenditure and effort. I suppose that is what pigs are for he'd probably say. I would follow up with what are the pigs going to eat in the other three seasons? If you have enough pigs to clean up the mast/fruit crop, you will have too many pigs the rest of the time, and no you can just fatten a pig up in a month and then slaughter them. You will need to keep back some brood sows at a minimum.The truth is that almost all omnivore and herbivore animals in savanna biomes traveled around a very large area to meet their nutritional needs. Since the whole world has been fenced in or out, man has to substitute storage of feedstuffs instead..or he can plant annuals in an intelligent way an let the animals harvest it for him out of the field. And this dovetails nicely with alley cropping practice. No-till organic agriculture is a well developed method that the Rodale folks have worked out and it allows ROTATION of crops, which is a key weapon against pests. Ever wonder why orchardists spray so much? It's because, in large part, trees are perennials and the bugs that survive one year don't have to travel very far to re-infect the plants the following year. It isn't simply because any tree that has been bred up to make good fruit is weak or that all non-native trees are weak as Shepard suggests.In short, this book has many good points. It correctly points out the disaster that modern agriculture is heading into. And I immensely respect people who actually go out and do things to correct it. It's just that at times the considerable arrogance of the author comes through on these pages and as it is described it is admittedly not a viable alternative for the non-wealthy at present. I happen to think that tree crops are a viable alternative, and there are many good ways to transition to a more permanent agriculture, and that most of this information is free on the internet. Just search the terms Silvopasture, Agroforestry, Alley cropping, etc...It turns out that University of Wisconsin extension service has a bunch of videos on YouTube where they interview and tour Shepard's farm. Much can be learned from these for free. I am a bit alarmed by the fact that U of W Extension is featuring Shephard's farm like it is an actual economically profitable farm, when Shepard states very clearly in his book that it is not. Though it was worthwhile to learn about his mowing techniques and how he tries to train trees like apples into a shapes that make mowing efficient. This is the kind of practical information that is mostly absent from Restoration Agriculture.

I've read a ton of permaculture books and done years of field work. This is the very best book I've read so far. It still has flaws, like almost all permaculture books, in that it tries to show how permaculture can be more profitable than mainstream big-Ag farming, which is just not the case unless you happen upon a local gaggle of millionaire hippies willing to pay 10x the price for your products. Still it is really good. The author covers the contents of a dozen other highly rated books in just a few paragraphs, saving you a lot of wasted time and money reading long and drawn-out hippie diatribes. He covers use of livestock in conjunction with permaculture gardening/forestry to a degree I've not seen anywhere else in print. I'm super-critical when it comes to permaculture and people trying to promote it as something more profound and life-changing than it actually is, but this is absolutely a top-notch read. My only criticism is that he does some statistics manipulation to try to show that sustainable agriculture is more profitable than mainstream ag in a calories-per-input scale as well as a dollars-per-input scale and neither is true or there would be no such thing as permaculture. It would just be mainstream agriculture if it were more profitable. Still, even from a curmudgeon like myself, this is a fantastic permaculture read.

Very good book, makes the case very well and his passion shines through. I found it easy to read but with sufficient depth that it gave a good view of permaculture and how he applies it in practice.

The book is obviously americentric, but it has a wealth of information and is a good read.

Perfect

Brilliant.. a bit preechy, and take some of it with a pinch of salt, but a template for us all

It's OK, but very about US. As for the reader from Europe it was kind of issue.