Permaculture is an approach to land management and philosophy that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes a set of design principles derived using whole systems thinking. It uses these principles in fields such as regenerative agriculture, rewilding, and community resilience. Permaculture originally came from "permanent agriculture", but was later adjusted to mean "permanent culture", incorporating social aspects as inspired by Masanobu Fukuoka's natural farming. The term was coined by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in 1978, who formulated the concept in opposition to Western industrialized methods and in congruence with Indigenous or traditional knowledge.
Permaculture has many branches including ecological design, ecological engineering, regenerative design, environmental design, and construction. It also includes integrated water resources management that develops sustainable architecture, and regenerative and self-maintained habitat and agricultural systems modeled from natural ecosystems. Permaculture has been implemented and gained widespread visibility throughout the world as an agricultural and architectural design system and as a guiding life principle or philosophy. Much of its success has been attributed to the role of Indigenous knowledge and traditions, in which the practice itself is rooted. In turn, the rise of permaculture has revalidated Indigenous knowledge in circles where it was previously devalued.
The ethics on which permaculture builds are:
- Earth care: Provision for all life systems to continue and multiply.
- People care: Provision for people to access those resources necessary for their existence.
- Fair share: Setting limits to population and consumption so that people do not take more than what is needed. By governing our own needs, we can set resources aside to further the above principles. This principle is also described as share the surplus.
Permaculture emphasizes patterns of landscape, function, and species assemblies. It determines where these elements should be placed so they can provide maximum benefit to the local environment. Permaculture maximizes useful connections between components and synergy of the final design. The focus of permaculture, therefore, is not on individual elements, but rather on the relationships among them. Properly done, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Permaculture seeks to minimize waste, human labor, and energy input and maximize benefits through synergy.
Permaculture design is founded in replicating or imitating natural patterns found in ecosystems because these solutions have emerged through evolution over thousands of years and have proven to be effective. As a result, the implementation of permaculture design will vary widely depending on the region of the Earth it is located in. Design principles derive from the science of systems ecology and the study of pre-industrial examples of sustainable land use. Permaculture draws from disciplines including organic farming, agroforestry, integrated farming, sustainable development, physics, meteorology, sociology, anthropology, biochemistry, engineering, and applied ecology.
Source: Wikipedia contributors. "Permaculture." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 27 Jun. 2021. Web. 28 Jun. 2021.
The word horticulture is modelled after agriculture; it derives from the Latin words hortus and cultura, which mean “garden” and “cultivation”, respectively. In contrast to agriculture, horticulture does not include large-scale crop production or animal husbandry. Additionally, horticulture focuses on the use of small plots with a wide variety of mixed crops while agriculture focuses on one large primary crop at a time.
Horticulture is the art of cultivating plants in gardens to produce food and medicinal ingredients, or for comfort and ornamental purposes. Horticulturists are agriculturists who grow flowers, fruits and nuts, vegetables and herbs, as well as ornamental trees and lawns.
Source: Wikipedia contributors. "Horticulture." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 30 Aug. 2021. Web. 13 Sep. 2021.
A greenhouse (also called a glasshouse, or, if with sufficient heating, a hothouse) is a structure with walls and roof made chiefly of transparent material, such as glass, in which plants requiring regulated climatic conditions are grown. These structures range in size from small sheds to industrial-sized buildings. A miniature greenhouse is known as a cold frame. The interior of a greenhouse exposed to sunlight becomes significantly warmer than the external temperature, protecting its contents in cold weather.
Many commercial glass greenhouses or hothouses are high tech production facilities for vegetables, flowers or fruits. The glass greenhouses are filled with equipment including screening installations, heating, cooling, lighting, and may be controlled by a computer to optimize conditions for plant growth. Different techniques are then used to evaluate optimality degrees and comfort ratio of greenhouses, such as air temperature, relative humidity and vapour-pressure deficit, in order to reduce production risk prior to cultivation of a specific crop.
Source: Wikipedia contributors. "Greenhouse." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 23 Jun. 2021. Web. 28 Jun. 2021.
A vineyard is a plantation of grape-bearing vines, grown mainly for winemaking, but also raisins, table grapes and non-alcoholic grape juice. The science, practice and study of vineyard production is known as viticulture. Vineyards are often characterised by their terroir, a French term loosely translating as "a sense of place" that refers to the specific geographical and geological characteristics of grapevine plantations, which may be imparted to the wine itself.
Source: Wikipedia contributors. "Vineyard." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 6 Mar. 2021. Web. 28 Jun. 2021.
A plantation is a large-scale estate, generally centered on a plantation house, meant for farming that specializes in cash crops. The crops that are grown include cotton, coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar cane, opium, sisal, oil seeds, oil palms, fruits, rubber trees and forest trees. Protectionist policies and natural comparative advantage have sometimes contributed to determining where plantations are located.
Source: Wikipedia contributors. "Plantation." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 28 Jun. 2021. Web. 28 Jun. 2021.
Pasture (from the Latin pastus, past participle of pascere, "to feed") is land used for grazing. Pasture lands in the narrow sense are enclosed tracts of farmland, grazed by domesticated livestock, such as horses, cattle, sheep, or swine. The vegetation of tended pasture, forage, consists mainly of grasses, with an interspersion of legumes and other forbs (non-grass herbaceous plants). Pasture is typically grazed throughout the summer, in contrast to meadow which is ungrazed or used for grazing only after being mown to make hay for animal fodder. Pasture in a wider sense additionally includes rangelands, other unenclosed pastoral systems, and land types used by wild animals for grazing or browsing.
Pasture lands in the narrow sense are distinguished from rangelands by being managed through more intensive agricultural practices of seeding, irrigation, and the use of fertilizers, while rangelands grow primarily native vegetation, managed with extensive practices like controlled burning and regulated intensity of grazing.
Soil type, minimum annual temperature, and rainfall are important factors in pasture management. Sheepwalk is an area of grassland where sheep can roam freely. The productivity of sheepwalk is measured by the number of sheep per area. This is dependent, among other things, on the underlying rock. Sheepwalk is also the name of townlands in County Roscommon, Ireland and County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland.
Unlike factory farming, which entails in its most intensive form entirely trough-feeding, managed or unmanaged pasture is the main food source for ruminants. Pasture feeding dominates livestock farming where the land makes crop sowing and/or harvesting difficult, such as in arid or mountainous regions, where types of camel, goat, antelope, yak and other ruminants live which are well suited to the more hostile terrain and very rarely factory farmed. In more humid regions, pasture grazing is managed across a large global area for free range and organic farming. Certain types of pasture suit the diet, evolution and metabolism of particular animals, and their fertilising and tending of the land may over generations result in the pasture combined with the ruminants in question being integral to a particular ecosystem.
Source: Wikipedia contributors. "Pasture." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 15 Apr. 2021. Web. 28 Jun. 2021.
A discovery by Danny VG in habitat Backyard on 08.06.2021. Dunnock (Prunella modularis) is a species of bird. Post your nature observations of Animal sightings in the NatureSpots App, too! #NatureSpots #Animal #Backyard
Agricultural land is typically land devoted to agriculture, the systematic and controlled use of other forms of life—particularly the rearing of livestock and production of crops—to produce food for humans. It is generally synonymous with both farmland or cropland, as well as pasture or rangeland.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and others following its definitions, however, also use agricultural land or agricultural area as a term of art, where it means the collection of:
-"arable land" (a.k.a. cropland): here redefined to refer to land producing crops requiring annual replanting or fallowland or pasture used for such crops within any five-year period
-"permanent cropland": land producing crops which do not require annual replanting
- permanent pastures: natural or artificial grasslands and shrublands able to be used for grazing livestock
Source: Wikipedia contributors. "Agricultural land." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 24 May. 2021. Web. 28 Jun. 2021.
A discovery by Danny VG in habitat Backyard on 08.06.2021. Dunnock (Prunella modularis) is a species of bird. Post your nature observations of Animal sightings in the NatureSpots App, too! #NatureSpots #Animal #Backyard
In agriculture, a meadow is grassland which is not regularly grazed by domestic livestock, but rather allowed to grow unchecked in order to produce hay. Their roots go way back to the Iron Age when appropriate tools for the hay harvest emerged. The ability to produce livestock fodder on meadows had a significant advantage for livestock production, as animals could be kept in enclosures, simplifying the control over breeding. Surpluses in biomass production during the summer could be stored for the winter, preventing damages to forests and grasslands as there was no longer the need for livestock grazing during the winter.
Especially in the United Kingdom and Ireland, the term meadow is commonly used in its original sense to mean a hay meadow, signifying grassland mown annually in the summer for making hay. Agricultural meadows are typically lowland or upland fields upon which hay or pasture grasses grow from self-sown or hand-sown seed.Traditional hay meadows were once common in rural Britain, but are now in decline. Ecologist Professor John Rodwell states that over the past century, England and Wales have lost about 97% of their hay meadows Fewer than 15,000 hectares of lowland meadows remain in the UK and most sites are relatively small and fragmented. 25% of the UK's meadows are found in Worcestershire, with Foster's Green Meadow managed by the Worcestershire Wildlife Trust being a major site.
A similar concept to the hay meadow is the pasture, which differs from the meadow in that it is grazed through the summer, rather than being allowed to grow out and periodically be cut for hay. A pasture can also refer to any land used for grazing, and in this wider sense the term refers not only to grass pasture but also to non-grassland habitats such as heathland, moorland and wood pasture.The term, grassland, is used to describe both hay meadows and grass pastures.
The specific agricultural practices in relation to the meadow can take on various expressions. As mentioned, this could be hay production or providing food for grazing cattle and livestock but also to give room for orchards or honey production. Meadows are embedded and dependent on a complex web of socio-cultural conditions for their maintenance. Historically, they emerged to increase agricultural efficiency when the necessary tools became available. Today, agricultural practices have shifted and meadows have largely lost their original purpose. Yet, they are appreciated today for their aesthetics and ecological functions. Consequently, the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy subsidizes their management, mostly through grazing.
(Foto: Schwäbin (Wikimedia), Lizenz: CreativeCommons by-sa-3.0-de )
Source: Wikipedia contributors. "Meadow." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 25 Jun. 2021. Web. 28 Jun. 2021.
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