Permanent agriculture

From RAWiki
(Redirected from Permanent Agriculture)
Jump to: navigation, search

The permanent agriculture movement was perhaps the first sustainability movement in agriculture and in many way was a precursor to modern sustainability movements such as the Biodynamic, Organic and Permaculture movements[1].

The phrase "permanent agriculture" was first used by Cyril G. Hopkins in his 1910 book Soil Fertility and Permanent Agriculture

Franklin Hiram King's classic 1911 book, Farmers of Forty Centuries: Or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan reflected the concern for the ability of an agriculture system to be "permanent", or continue indefinite. This concern grew out of the young discipline of soil science of which King was an early promoter in his position at the head of the bureau of soil science at the USDA. King and other promoters of permanant agriculture, despite their official repression [2] at the hands of the bureaucrats of the USDA became...

In this book King explores the reasons behind the amazing productivity of East Asian farms which have been cropped for generations without depletion of soils due to careful management of fertility and humanure as well as intensive cropping and crop rotation

J. Russell Smith's excellent 1929 book Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture. This book, a profound vision for a productive agricultural system incorporating biodiversity, silvopasture and tree cropping systems, displays many of the key ideas of Permaculture, long before Mollison and Holmgren articulated the Twelve Design Principles.