The 12 Principles of Permaculture

A little while ago I wrote about food forests and how they work. Today I’m going to dig a little bit deeper into a related topic. I’ll try to keep this pretty straightforward and easy for those of you who are new to this to understand!

If you’ve ever looked into sustainable agriculture, organic gardening, or food forests, you’ve likely run into the term “permaculture” before. In a nutshell, permaculture is a design science that uses natural systems to create agricultural systems.

History

This design science is a combination of natural garden practices, observation of natural ecosystems, traditional and ancient techniques, and modern ecology.

Bill Mollison (the father of modern permaculture and coiner of the term) says that the word “permaculture” is a portmanteau of the words “permanent” and “agriculture”. The idea is to create an agricultural system (a garden, farm, whatever application) that can improve itself and become lower maintenance over time.

This is different from the modern way we do agriculture. The miles and miles of corn or soy we plant that depletes nutrients from the soil, causes dustbowls, taints our water supply, and is prone to all kinds of drought and disease issues.

An ideal permaculture system actually builds soil, adds nutrients to the earth, prevents erosion and runoff, and is resilient to drought and disease.

The 12 Principles

There are 12 underlying principles that can guide a person in creating a system like this:

1. Observe & Interact

This concept sounds fairly straightforward but can be very nuanced.

Observe your surroundings. Everything from where sunlight falls at different times of year, where snow tends to pile, where rainwater tends to sit and move, to what kinds of wildlife live in the area and what plants are already growing naturally.

Interacting with your site can be as simple as planting a mix of seeds to see what sprouts, walking the site often, feeling what areas are cooler or warmer, or mulching over bare soil that you see.

Most permaculture experts recommend observing your site for at least a year (to see it in every season) before making any major permanent changes to the landscape.

2. Catch and Store Energy

Catching and storing energy for present and future needs is the first step to kickstarting any permaculture system.

This could be making use of sunlight plant life, catching rainwater or overflow to use, creating a windbreak to insulate an area, collecting seeds from the site, or even collecting fallen debris for mulch or compost.

What’s important is to collect some kind of resource for present or future use. It’s also important to focus on what already exists on your site rather than bringing new materials in. In the long term this will create a closed loop which is the ultimate goal of any sustainable and resilient system.

3. Obtain a Yield

This is the first big win. Get something out of what you’ve caught and stored!
If this is a harvest of vegetables great. If this is fiber plants or wood, then great. If this is meat then great.

The important thing is to get something so that you can refine the process later on.

4. Apply Self-regulation and Accept Feedback

This means you need to watch how your actions impact the site and change how you do things accordingly.

If you have tried planting something that seems to not do well, try something else. If you’ve tried to make a pond or irrigation ditch and it flooded part of your yard, then you might need to change something.

This is a process with an emphasis on continual improvement! You will mess up (been there) but you will learn from it.

5. Use and Value Renewable Resources and Services

Examples of renewable resources could be: water, sunlight, organic matter (leaves, wood, plants, manure etc), seeds, bacteria, even airflow.

Renewable services would be things like: composting (bacteria break it down for you) wild animals that provide fertilization for your site (deer or bird poop), natural pest control, or pollination.

Take advantage of these! I strongly recommend keeping a journal of all of your findings and observations over the years.

6. Produce No Waste

This idea is similar to number two (catch and store energy) but with a focus on using the energy that your system has started creating.

So rather than have a byproduct (fallen leaves, manure, wool, vegetable scraps) we now will use it instead of letting it go to waste.

Leaves become compost, manure becomes fertilizer, wool can be mulched, scraps become food for our animals.

7. Design From Patterns To Details

This is the first major part of the “design” in “design science”.

Designing from patterns to details means to start with the bigger picture of observed patterns and work down to the smaller details. These can often be sorted into two major categories: functional designs, and aesthetic designs.

Let’s look at an example:

Observed Pattern: The people on a site tend to visit some areas more than others.

Designed Solution: Arrange everything in zones. The first zone is the most frequently visited part of the site, the fifth zone is the least visited part.

Another example:

Observed Pattern: The water tends to flow away from a hill causing erosion.

Designed Solution: Build a number of pools along the landscape where the water tends to flow to allow it to slow down and soak into the soil.

An aesthetic example:

Observed Pattern: Water flows all in one direction to where my garden is.

Designed Solution: Make the water branch off into smaller streams like tree branches to spread the water out more.

8. Integrate Rather Than Segregate

This refers to having elements of your system work together rather than keeping them separate.

For example, don’t plant an acre of all one thing. (A monoculture.) Instead plant an acre with a dozen different crops all incorporated together.

This is a fundamental of the designs we see in the wild too; rarely will you see only one species in an area.

This could mean having the animals in your system be part of the composting process (chickens are naturally prone to do this) or keeping your livestock in a wooded area with fruit trees rather than keeping them in a separate area.

There are many benefits to this particular principle!

9. Use Small and Slow Solutions

This is simply the idea of making smaller incremental changes to your system rather than drastic changes and quick fixes.

This is a huge pitfall of modern agriculture. All they do is rely on the fastest and most drastic fixes possible. While it may seem at the time like it works, more often than not it causes long-term issues that are very hard to remedy.

Taking the slow and smaller route over time will offer more resilience and adaptability to your system.

10. Use and Value Diversity

This principle is similar to number nine.

The way the natural world was designed to work emphasizes that greater diversity leads to greater resilience, and the lack of diversity leads to more problems. (There are exceptions of course.)

Some examples of this are how apples don’t grow true to seed. Every apple tree adapts each individual seed based on what the environmental pressures are so the seeds have a higher chance of surviving. If they were all the same, they would quickly die out.

Dogs with mixed genetics tend to have fewer problems and better temperaments. Dogs that are purebred tend to have major health issues.

Humans with a more diverse genetic background have improved health, and people with small gene pools tend to have genetic disorders and deformities.

Diversifying your retirement accounts has a higher chance of not losing money in the long term and investing all of your money into one stock is extremely dangerous.

Some examples that pertain to your site could be: allowing successional diversity (natural succession will bring a greater diversity of plants and animals over time), diversity in your food crops, diversity in variety of crop (have multiple types of apples for example) or even role diversity (plant for pollination, nutrient cycling, food, fodder, fiber, habitat etc)

Notice the biodiversity in your site and take advantage of it!

11. Use Edges and Value the Marginal

Edges of ecosystems have the greatest biodiversity because it is where two small biomes meet. Take advantage of the fact that you get maximum diversity from the edges and margins!

Use the edges of ponds, use the perimeters of your site, and the small out of sight spaces. Think of how you can utilize them in your overall design.

When you design, try to create as many edges as possible.

12. Creatively Use and Respond To Change

This final principle is mostly about accepting inevitable changes in your site and responding accordingly.

Remember that your site is a living organic ecosystem and not a machine.

It’s a beautiful part of the world’s design that it changes and shifts over time.

A practical thing to do is to plan for ecological successions. Every ecosystem will go through stages of death and regrowth. Know when it’s time to let go of a tree and cut it down, or when to drain and move your pond, or how to make changes when a new pest comes to town.

Find ways to mitigate failure, but to maximize improvement.

I’ll try to hit each of these principles in more depth later on, but hopefully this was a great primer on the principles of permaculture systems.

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