Cainite Agriculture versus Abelite Agriculture

Agriculture is the basis of our civilization. Once people started farming, then storing grain, they were able to monetize goods and have money based trade. Their life became structured around seasons and time based planning became important. People organized as larger groups with hierarchies. In the pastoralist mode of life, time is important too, but the clock is kept by herds of animals and the flow of those herds north and south. In the farmer's life, the clock controls the activities of man.

The pastoralist's reality is reality. They are in it all the time. Their time orientation is more immediate. There's no concept of investment, just barter--value for value.

The agriculture city's reality is really an internal, toy-model version of reality that's based on measurement. A certain amount of land will produce a certain amount of grain and feed a certain number of people for a year. The model drives the activity of the people. The people beseech the gods to make reality conform to their hopes for the model. The people's time-orientation is forward looking and wait-and-see. It's credit/debt based. It is risk/gambling based.

The empire parasite emerges from the risk and gambling aspect of this type of agriculture. To reduce risk of catastrophe, agriculture needs to be practiced over a large area. The inner-world toy-model starts to spill into the outer world too in the form of infrastructure, like grain storage.

The problem with agriculture is that the inner-world toy model is simply incorrect and is fundamentally paradoxical. People like Masanabu Fukuoka  started to point this out in recent decades. The productivity of a given area, when left alone will be higher overall than when it's managed for agriculture. That is, the amount of solar energy that's converted to life will be higher when it's left alone.

I can see this in the forest that's on our property, and is connected to about 1000 acres of park woods. This forest supports a fairly large deer herd, turkeys, and countless small mammals like squirrels. When it was first settled it supported even more animals and huge stands of trees. This area used to support elephant sized mammals and giant bears.

Fukuoka tried to come up with a type of agriculture that was between pastoralism and traditional agriculture and it appears to be at least as productive as the traditional mode of agriculture. Fukuoka attempted to duplicate natural processes of planting by randomly throwing seeds around rather than planting in rows, for example.

Much of traditional agricultural practice is oriented around maximizing the time and energy efficiency of planting and harvesting. This is really because our time-orientation and the domination of our consciousness by the toy-model of reality that's described above.

It's possible that the risk and gambling associated with traditional agricultural practice is just a side effect of this low-fidelity inner world model.

One of the current attempt to solve this problem is to make the toy model more accurate. That is, by collecting more data and using a computer to run the toy model, it can be made to "work better", that is, to reduce risk and energy inputs. The yield per acre can be higher.

The permaculture method to solve this problem is to shift the practice of agriculture into a more nature based mode. For example, no-till methods of farming corn in Ohio actually improve soil year over year. The difference in the way of thinking is illustrated by how Fukuoka came up with his methods. He "saw" them after a long illness. They really came to him in a vision, rather than through research projects. Then he went out and attempted to practice them and learned through experience and observation.