Permanent agriculture

The Permanent agriculture movement was perhaps the first sustainability movement in agriculture and in many way was a precursor to the modern Permaculture movement.

The phrase "permanent agriculture" was coined 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[1] at the hands of the bureaucrats of the USDA became arguably the world's first sustainability movement

and the observation that the Roman Empire's decline may have had a lot to do with the depletion of the soils

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.