"David Hare-Scott" wrote in message
...

I doubt that roof/balcony gardens in the big cities of my acquaintance
(Sydney, Melbourne) are ever going to produce more than a supplement to
the
diets of the inhabitants and that would be at a great cost of materials.
These cities are looking at permanent water restrictions and great
increases
in the cost of water. Squandering tap water in this way is pointless.
Roof
water is insignificant in high rise due to the high ratio of people to
roof
area.

you might be over-focussing on roof growing, here, david :-)

sydney & melbourne have a lot of land space in people's yards. while back
yard (and balcony!!) fruit & veg growing seems insignificant, it's not
really (particularly when you consider how common it was once and (i dearly
hope) will be again. have you seen any of the designs (e.g. clive blazey's)
for food gardens in the ordinary smallish yard? it's actually fairly
impressive. considering that farming itself (on farms) isn't going away any
time soon, i can't see that there'd be too many problems anyway, but
certainly cities like sydney & melbourne would be fully capable of most
(although not all) householders growing a surprising quantity of fruit & veg
_if they wanted to_.

added to that, another of c. blazey's "things" is substituting food plants
for ornamentals (food plants being handily ornamental as well, nice that). a
tiny yard (such as i had myself in sydney, various locations) with some
ornamentals can be refigured to a tiny yard full of food plants. i doubt
that such a yard could meet all the householders' needs, but you need to
consider how much they _could_ produce. as more people make such changes, we
will know more. it's endless really - small town near here has a strip where
the street trees are fruit trees (possibly planted by householders, i don't
know). people are thinking of new ways to make gardening more vertical, to
handle small spaces. etc. i have lived nearby to food-oriented gardens in
the burbs of canberra! hence that is why i believe they're more common than
we think, and are entirely practical too. anyone could do it.

You seem to be assuming there will be a great catastrophe and that drastic
measures will be required to survive. My original question was about
whether
permaculture was a suitable replacement for broadacre farming, I am more
interested trying to find ways of not having a catastrophe.

i think the poster's point is that cuba actually had that catastrophe, but
they turned it around. in a crisis, people are galvanised. until such a
crisis, well, they're not, & until then tend not to think about the problem,
even. this is actually a problem, because things like "loss of agricultural
land" or even "climate change" don't really affect anyone in (say) sydney at
this time. they cannot conceive what the problem might be. yet, we all know
that in an unforseen severe crisis, you could starve the population out
within a week (although it actually takes longer than a week to starve to
death, of course - say 3 or 4). there's no food storage there beyond 3 or 4
_days_, it would be (relatively) easy (for an Organisation of Baddies) to
block the roads so nobody could go in or out. really!

now, i doubt that will ever happen of course, but equally i doubt the
populace even realises how vulnerable they potentially are. the cuban
situation was apparently national, so therefore a bit more easily solved by
the populace as a whole. gardening is entirely empowering, for quite obvious
reasons. what a high-density mega-city could or would do i don't know, & i
must admit it's really not my problem, so i don't have any intention of
devoting more thought to that.

It's in that ring area about 1 1/2 hours from the city centre that so much
good land is getting turned into housing estates. I agree with you and
Len
that there is a problem there. I don't see how to fix it though, do you?

get the developers on the run! g seriously, in nsw it is looking like
developers' days of doing whatever the hell they like are going to be, of
necessity, numbered. not a bad thing, that.

How did we go from agrarian economies to the present? By huge increases
in
specialisation and efficiency.

no, because the industrial revolution happened!

"huge increases in specialisation and efficiency" really only occurred in
the way that (i assume) you are thinking of, post ww2. hello, herbicides!

Sadly broadacre farming has serious unwanted
side effects and demands inputs that are going to be much more expensive
or
not available in future.

it's also not AT ALL efficient in the way (i assume) you are thinking of.
for example, backyard veggie gardens are massively more water-efficient than
a broadacre veggie farm & more able to supply their own inputs. small farms
are more efficient than big ones. sheer magnitude does not equal something
being genuinely efficient - it brings a certain economy of scale, but in
every other way is less efficient - even growth and plant health is not so
good, because it's monocultural, so you don't get the returns per square
metre that you would on a small, mixed farm. so yes, the cost of inputs is
inefficient as well, and the undesirable outputs impinge seriously on any
genuine "efficiency". someone told me recently (no idea how true it is, but
it doesn't sound "wrong" to me based on my observations) that with broadacre
farming, you only expect to make 6% over your inputs (ie. make $106 dollars
for every $100 spent) which doesn't count the eventual cost of damaging
outputs. by any measure, that is wildly inefficient & is going to have to
change rapidly.

I mention efficiency because it must be a factor in
any system of sustainable growing that replaces the broadacre farming. In
a
future of very limited resources where the per capita consumption of
resources
will have to be reduced in countries like yours and mine how can we
countenance inefficiency?

we can't countenance it now, yet we do :-)

solutions would include: smaller, more mixed farms. farms focussing on
growing crops or livestock which work in the conditions that exist, not to
continue trying to alter conditions when it can't be done. the populace
growing more of its own food (whether that means in one's own yard, or
buying locally, as directly as possible). further reducing the import sector
(which actually is quite small at the moment in terms of food, thankfully -
to not allow this to increase whatsoever, and actively work on reducing it
to near-zero). active governmental preservation of agricultural land
(including putting their foot down re expanding cities even more). proper
support for farmers - rather than bailing them out of disaster after
disaster, to aid in remaking the farming sector a bit & utilising knowledge
which is there, so that people are getting good outcomes for all, rather
than struggling on as is, inefficiently & in some cases disastrously. to
educate the public (this isn't going to happen this week - as i said the
govt wants you to buy a cabbage, not to grow one. most governments need
their heads read on this matter - they are simply _wrong_.) there are lots
of things to be done, it's a question of will, not of possibility.

two other things i was told recently by different people, neither of which i
have checked, but include as discussion points perhaps - firstly, that john
macarthur's obsession with sheep put the mockers on other peoples' ideas for
farming more suitable livestock. secondly, that a chicken farmer needs
(iirc) 20,000 birds to be considered a primary producer. (20,000!!! i
consider 20 birds to be primary production! ;-) clearly, there's a bit of
re-thinking that needs to be done. re-thinking is good.
kylie