Four weeks of harmony on a South African permaculture farm
Last spring, when my girlfriend and I were deciding how to spend our five months abroad, she asked how I felt about working on a permaculture farm in South Africa. Sounds good, I said, which is what I say sometimes when I don’t really know what’s going on. We found a place six hours from Cape Town, in a region entering its ninth year of drought. Arid plains of hardy flora stretched out in every direction before rising to dramatic peaks on the horizon. Tumbleweed was rife. In the nearest town, Oudtshoorn, every tenth resident works in the ostrich industry. In 2015, a national newspaper chose to illustrate its coverage of local politics with a photo of ostriches taken from Flickr.
When the owners of the farm bought the land nearly 20 years ago, it had been trampled to death by decades of big bird activity. Nothing grew there anymore, nor was it expected to. Summer days often reached 40 degrees, and were only getting hotter. What they’d acquired, essentially, was a parcel of dust in the early stages of becoming a desert. They named it Numbi Valley, after the surrounding dome-shaped hills, “numbi” meaning “boobs” in Siswati. The life-giving bosom of their project, however, was permaculture.
At its core, permaculture is a framework for fostering harmony between our built environment and the natural world. It contains 12 principles intended to guide the design of sustainable, regenerative systems. Each is intuitive and simple in nature—produce no waste, catch and store energy, integrate rather than segregate, creatively use and respond to change, and so on. By applying these principles collectively, we can replicate the efficiency and resilience of natural ecosystems almost anywhere, from communities to cities to farms. David Cody, a San Francisco-based "permie," refers to permaculture as "an ecological theory of everything." It is one of the few concepts you can accurately describe as holistic.
Numbi Valley embodies permaculture in its most holistic form. On a plot no bigger than a football pitch, each principle works in service of growing a high volume of nutritionally dense food without waste, pollution, or resource depletion. It is a place of immaculate greenery. Every appendage is adorned with edibles: grapes, beans, bananas peaches, figs, almonds, prickly pears, pomegranates. Right after arriving, I held my first patty pan, a small summer squash shaped like the ornate crown of a whisky decanter.
In keeping with permaculture’s principle of integration, plants with mutual benefits are grown in the same bed. Beans, corn, and squash are a common companionship, in which the squash’s large leaves reduce evaporation and weed growth while the corn gives beans a natural trellis to climb in exchange for healthy soil. Further soil enhancements come from the shitting and scratching of chickens, whose bottomless pens are moved every two weeks to ensure every inch of the garden gets its fair share of avian action. On our first evening, I stood in a gourd patch and listened to the quiet breathing of our world. We were four souls in the garden but it felt like there were more.
After a week, two of the souls departed. The owners had taught us everything they thought was necessary for survival, both the farm’s and our own, and left for Morocco. We lived in a mud house made from locally sourced clay. The floor was just a bed of rocks; wildlife came and went as it pleased. Power came from the sun, and water from the ground. In the month we were there, South Africa was experiencing up to eight hours a day without power—something we didn’t have to worry about on the farm. Of course, a country with so much sun should be able to afford that privilege to everyone (permaculture principle #11: value the marginal).
We grew enough to feed two full-time residents, a part-time helper, up to four guests, several neighbours, occasional passersby, a dozen chickens, and multiple compost heaps—all in a garden you could cross in the time it takes to pee. Almost everything we ate grew within 10 metres of our mouths. There was such an abundance of food, and we were so independent of the world, that visitors couldn’t help but make jokes about a global zombie event. It’s true, we would have been fine should it come to that.
Most days we’d work between 12 and 14 hours. The first shift began at 6 a.m., with the chickens – feeding them, collecting their eggs, expressing our gratitude – and concluded around 2 p.m. as we wilted into a slumber from the heat. After an hour we’d wake up, comment on the heat, and resume our labour. We’d reap and sow and till and deadhead. We’d repair burst pipes, and shell almonds, and herd birds from out under the fruit tree nets. Everything was analog. None of it was a bother. Whatever the land asked, it gave more.
Tragically, we’ve severely limited what much of the world’s land is capable of giving. More than half of the planet's surface is now dedicated to monocropping and livestock farming, where huge tracts of land are used for singular purposes. These practices, with their insatiable appetite for chemicals and land razing, have devastated the environment. They have degraded soil, contaminated waterways, and destroyed habitats, making biodiversity impossible. Their omnipresence has also shifted our perception of the ideal landscape towards a simplified, uniform, and manicured aesthetic. How else to explain lawns? Like the cornfields and pastures of industrial agriculture, lawns emphasize human control over nature. Transitioning to more ecologically harmonious land use, then, is not just a question of design but also of humility.
Getting started with permaculture can be overwhelming. There’s a lot of literature. Numbi Valley was brimming with books, each with its own commandments. There was An Introduction to Permaculture, by the movement’s co-founder, Bill Mollison. There was Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond (tough sell, big results). There was Gaia’s Garden, which is to new gardeners what Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours is to someone who just bought their first record player.
After reading a few paragraphs of any given book, I would immediately start looking for land to buy in faraway places. This is typical of how I operate, rushing into something I know nothing about, mucking around aimlessly, and expecting instant results. Here, too, permaculture can act as a guide. Any responsible foray into the natural world starts by understanding it first (permaculture principle #1), followed by small and slow solutions (#9) tailored to feedback from nature (#4). Permaculture, like life, is not one perfect plan. It’s a bit of this and a bit of that, imprecise and improvisational, like a chef cooking to taste.
In The One-Straw Revolution, published in 1975, Masanobu Fukuoka asserts that “the ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings.” Perfection, in this case, is not an individual pursuit but a state of harmony with all living things. Though I’d felt flashes of oneness before, on the farm I was permeated by a near-constant sense of unity. For me, gardening had achieved the effect of a powerful, long-lasting psychoactive drug.
Modern society, which increasingly separates the human world from the natural world, would do well to strive for Fukuoka’s version of perfection. First, though, we need to resolve divisions among our own species. According to social ecology, most of our ecological problems stem from deep-rooted social issues, such as inequality and hierarchy. “The notion that man must dominate nature emerges directly from the domination of man by man,” writes Murray Bookchin, a pioneer of the field. Or, as my friend, Jerry, says whenever I complain about anything: That’s not the problem. It’s the humans that are the problem.
On one of our last afternoons on the farm, I was hacking at the compost heap with a machete. In six months, last night’s leftovers will reincarnate as another, different dinner. The end is the beginning is the end. It was 40 degrees out; my eyes were stinging with sweat. I went to the house to put myself in shade. Seeds from yesterday’s tomatoes were fermenting on a windowsill. Depending on when you read this, they’ll either be or have been tomatoes again. It suddenly came to me that any serious effort to prevent Anthropogenic species collapse must involve permaculture for the sample fact that nature doesn’t kill itself. Only humans have the capacity for self-inflicted extinction, and with it, the arrogance to bring everything else down with us. In the kitchen, I wondered aloud whether the world will survive. “We won’t,” Eva said. “But the planet will.”