Grains Without Guilt

This course is not anti-grain. Say it plainly, because much of modern permaculture says the opposite, and a learner who has absorbed that teaching will not plant the crop that feeds them.

There is a common position in permaculture and no-till farming that treats annual grains as the enemy of the soil: that tillage destroys soil structure and soil carbon, that annual crops are a disturbance, and that the mature farm should be perennial, tree based, and grain free. The position has a true part, which is that bad tillage does real damage. But carried to its conclusion it produces a farm that grows delicious food and no calories, and that is a garden with a philosophy, not a subsistence system.

Calories have to come from somewhere

Roughly half of humanity's calories come from the grain and legume class of crops. Pelman says it, and his own published paper is blunter still: cereals, pulses and oil plants together can supply about 85 percent of the calories in a balanced diet. If a household does not grow a calorie crop, then the household's calories come from a shop, and the farm is a supplement to a food system rather than a food system.

The reason is arithmetic, not taste. Vegetables are mostly water, about 280 kilocalories per kilogram in Pelman's own table, where wheat is about 3,400. To carry an adult's 2,000 kilocalories a day on vegetables alone you would need about seven kilograms of fresh vegetables a day, every day, which is more than most people eat and more than a garden can grow and store through a winter. Grain carries the calories because grain is dry and dense. If you remove grain from the plan, the calories do not move to the trees, they move to the supermarket.

The true part of the objection, and the answer

The objection is not stupid. Plough a field every year to a depth and you burn the soil's carbon and break its structure, and a great deal of conventional grain farming does exactly that. The answer is not to stop growing grain. The answer is to grow it the way Pelman grows it.

Pelman uses reduced tillage, about ten centimetres deep, and a small tractor for two hours a year. The grain follows the legume. The fava fixes nitrogen from the air, the wheat spends it, and the two year rotation between them maintains the fertility that a bagged fertilizer would otherwise supply. The grain is sown right up under the olive canopies, which a mechanised farm cannot do. It is the same crop the industrial farm grows; only the method is different. Blame the method, not the annual.

The land hogs are the seed crops

Here is the fact that settles the layout. Pelman says the land hogs are the seed crops, wheat, rice, corn and the legumes, and not the vegetables. The grain takes the ground because the calories and the protein take the ground. That is why the staple block in lesson 303 is the largest block on the farm and the vegetable garden is a small quarter near the house. A plan that gives the grain a corner and the vegetables the field has the proportions exactly backwards.

What the grain does not give you

Grow the grain for calories, the legume for protein, the oil for fat. The grain is not a money maker. "By growing wheat, you won't save money. You'd spend more money than you'd save. Like wheat is so cheap, that's half a dollar for 1 kg." Half a dollar a kilogram is about 23 cents a pound, and at that price growing your own wheat loses cash.

Treat those figures as his account, from his own interview, not independently verified. They are consistent with the general shape of world grain prices, and they are his, which is the honest way to report them.

His labour claim has the same honest shape. He works about 96 hours a year for one adult's complete diet, roughly one eight hour day a month. But he adds the costs that offset it, seed, compost and irrigation repairs, and his own phrasing is that in terms of time "you don't really save time, but you don't waste more time either." So the case for growing your own grain is not that it saves hours or dollars. He says his own reason is that he lacks the willpower to resist buying other things when the money is in his pocket. The real value is not being exposed when the supply chain fails, which is a political argument and the argument this course rests on.