Georgia Investment Network


Recent Blogs


Pitching Help Desk


Testimonials

"I'm very impressed with the level of professionalism of this network. I registered my request over three months now, and the response has been overwhelming; beyond my expectations. Although I have not closed any deals as yet, I'm still very hopeful. Keep up the good work!"
Verona Mustagal

 BLOG >> Recent

Obtain A Yield [Agriculture
Posted on April 29, 2015 @ 07:48:00 AM by Paul Meagher

The third of 12 Permaculture Principles is to "Obtain A Yield". In previous blogs I discussed the first principle Observe & Interact and the second principle Catch & Store Energy.

The imperative to "Obtain A Yield" is probably obvious to most people visiting this site, but there are many subtleties.

For example, you might create a beautiful garden and feel you have obtained a yield simply from the beauty of it. That is certainly one yield. From a practical perspective, however, you have not obtained much of a yield if you are not also going to eat some of the food produced by that garden. Many people do not obtain a proper food yield from their garden. They might not know how to cook or prepare the food in a way that makes them want to eat it on a regular basis, they might not know to preserve their food for storage, they might not be able to handle the abundance the garden produces in a certain window of time, they might be too busy to harvest, or they may simply be too lazy to harvest when the fun of planting and watching them grow is over. In order to obtain a yield you need to be able to manage the abundance that nature provides (i.e., catch and store energy) so that you can subsequently obtain a yield from that storage. Obtaining a yield requires managing the full cycle properly.

Yield is also more general than money but certainly includes it as one of the valued outputs of a production system. If you do not obtain a yield that is sufficient to maintain and improve your system then that system will not be in existence for very long. The need to obtain a yield is basic to that system's continued existence. The yield of the system can be money, social capital, natural capital, fitness, beauty, etc... So when designing a farm or garden we should be conscious of the need to obtain a yield from that landscape, the types of yields we might be looking for, the and the full cycle required to obtain these yields.

I was recently listening to lectures from Bill Mollison's 1983 Permaculture Design Course. Parts of it are hard to follow and a bit boring to me, however, there are parts that blow your mind with possibilities for obtaining yields. Raising Anacondas for meat, farming snails, Chinampa systems, and "City as Farm" are some non-standard examples he discussed that come to mind. Bill (the co-founder of Permaculture) talks about many different production systems and the various yields they can deliver.

The "City as Farm" system is quite interesting. He discusses the case of a fellow from Melbourne, Australia who made a business out of getting people in the city to grow chestnuts for him for a price of $ 3.00 per lb. This fellow noticed that there were many chestnut trees in the city that were not obtaining a food yield for their owners. Some chestnut trees can be very productive, producing as much as 1500 lbs of nuts on one tree. So he contracted with these home owners to buy their chestnuts at a price of $3.00 a lb from them and enough home owners agreed to do so that he had a viable business. This chap went even further and also started to propagate chestnut trees and gave away the grafted chestnut trees to home owners who would agree to grow the trees in an organic way. He offered them a guaranteed commitment to taking their product (if he was still in business). So he had a plan for how he would grow his business further by giving away propagation material to his growers and creating harvest contracts. The "City as Farm" follows a pattern that Bill Mollison called the "Gleanings Model". You start by gleaning what is available in your city in some abundance that is not being utilized. You then form a company to organize people to supply you with that resource. You then figure out how to reproduce the resource and give the knowledge or propagative material away to the same or different people to produce more of the resource. In this way you can have a "City as Farm" for many different types of products. The urban farmer Curtis Stone (blogged about him in Lean Urban Farming) is using a gleanings model to obtain underutilized yards from home owners to grow his food crops. I don't think he is educating or assisting those home owners to grow crops themselves, but that might be a future avenue of growth for him if he has sufficient market for the produce.

Another part of the "Gleanings Model" is that people can make a "living" by supplying you with the resource. If someone has a couple of chestnut trees and collects 2000 lbs of chestnuts, then that is $6000 in the families pocket. That money will pay family bills for a few weeks or a few months depending on your lifestyle, but the important point is that you are making a "living" of that tree for a non-trival amount of time and that will make you want to participate. The "City As Farm" is capable of offering many "livings" to many people and you could measure the yield of the system by the number of "livings" it produces.

In conclusion, once we have applied the principle of catching and storing energy, we are ready to draw down the value on those storages in the form of various yields. We can model this situation with "Stock and Flow" type diagrams where various inputs contribute to the formation of storages and various yields come from those storages as the value is drawn down. In the vineyard example below the inputs contribute to building up vineyard storages from which various yields can be derived. The width of the pipe leading into the storage represents the amount of work invested while the width of the pipe leading from the storage represents the amount of that type of yield. Because my vineyard is still young, my grape berry yield is not expected to be largest yield this year, instead the greater yields will come from the vineyard as an attraction for guests to stay at my farm accommodations and also the health and fitness that vineyard work promotes. This is a starting point for an analysis of vineyard yield and I expect it to evolve over time.

I'll leave the last word on obtaining a yield to Bill Mollison who advises:

The yield of a system is theoretically unlimited (or only limited by the imagination and information of the designer).

Permalink 

 Archive 
 

Archive


 November 2023 [1]
 June 2023 [1]
 May 2023 [1]
 April 2023 [1]
 March 2023 [6]
 February 2023 [1]
 November 2022 [2]
 October 2022 [2]
 August 2022 [2]
 May 2022 [2]
 April 2022 [4]
 March 2022 [1]
 February 2022 [1]
 January 2022 [2]
 December 2021 [1]
 November 2021 [2]
 October 2021 [1]
 July 2021 [1]
 June 2021 [1]
 May 2021 [3]
 April 2021 [3]
 March 2021 [4]
 February 2021 [1]
 January 2021 [1]
 December 2020 [2]
 November 2020 [1]
 August 2020 [1]
 June 2020 [4]
 May 2020 [1]
 April 2020 [2]
 March 2020 [2]
 February 2020 [1]
 January 2020 [2]
 December 2019 [1]
 November 2019 [2]
 October 2019 [2]
 September 2019 [1]
 July 2019 [1]
 June 2019 [2]
 May 2019 [3]
 April 2019 [5]
 March 2019 [4]
 February 2019 [3]
 January 2019 [3]
 December 2018 [4]
 November 2018 [2]
 September 2018 [2]
 August 2018 [1]
 July 2018 [1]
 June 2018 [1]
 May 2018 [5]
 April 2018 [4]
 March 2018 [2]
 February 2018 [4]
 January 2018 [4]
 December 2017 [2]
 November 2017 [6]
 October 2017 [6]
 September 2017 [6]
 August 2017 [2]
 July 2017 [2]
 June 2017 [5]
 May 2017 [7]
 April 2017 [6]
 March 2017 [8]
 February 2017 [7]
 January 2017 [9]
 December 2016 [7]
 November 2016 [7]
 October 2016 [5]
 September 2016 [5]
 August 2016 [4]
 July 2016 [6]
 June 2016 [5]
 May 2016 [10]
 April 2016 [12]
 March 2016 [10]
 February 2016 [11]
 January 2016 [12]
 December 2015 [6]
 November 2015 [8]
 October 2015 [12]
 September 2015 [10]
 August 2015 [14]
 July 2015 [9]
 June 2015 [9]
 May 2015 [10]
 April 2015 [9]
 March 2015 [8]
 February 2015 [8]
 January 2015 [5]
 December 2014 [11]
 November 2014 [10]
 October 2014 [10]
 September 2014 [8]
 August 2014 [7]
 July 2014 [5]
 June 2014 [7]
 May 2014 [6]
 April 2014 [3]
 March 2014 [8]
 February 2014 [6]
 January 2014 [5]
 December 2013 [5]
 November 2013 [3]
 October 2013 [4]
 September 2013 [11]
 August 2013 [4]
 July 2013 [8]
 June 2013 [10]
 May 2013 [14]
 April 2013 [12]
 March 2013 [11]
 February 2013 [19]
 January 2013 [20]
 December 2012 [5]
 November 2012 [1]
 October 2012 [3]
 September 2012 [1]
 August 2012 [1]
 July 2012 [1]
 June 2012 [2]


Categories


 Agriculture [77]
 Bayesian Inference [14]
 Books [18]
 Business Models [24]
 Causal Inference [2]
 Creativity [7]
 Decision Making [17]
 Decision Trees [8]
 Definitions [1]
 Design [38]
 Eco-Green [4]
 Economics [14]
 Education [10]
 Energy [0]
 Entrepreneurship [74]
 Events [7]
 Farming [21]
 Finance [30]
 Future [15]
 Growth [19]
 Investing [25]
 Lean Startup [10]
 Leisure [5]
 Lens Model [9]
 Making [1]
 Management [12]
 Motivation [3]
 Nature [22]
 Patents & Trademarks [1]
 Permaculture [36]
 Psychology [2]
 Real Estate [5]
 Robots [1]
 Selling [12]
 Site News [17]
 Startups [12]
 Statistics [3]
 Systems Thinking [3]
 Trends [11]
 Useful Links [3]
 Valuation [1]
 Venture Capital [5]
 Video [2]
 Writing [2]