We were fortunate enough to have Irish Times columnist John Gibbons attend our last permaculture course in Cloughjordan, and he had a great write up in his column last week:

Permaculture offers one vision of a future where human ingenuity and adaptability will allow us to survive, and indeed thrive, in the age after oil, writes JOHN GIBBONS

High time agriculture got back to its healthy roots

IF YOU go down to the woods today, prepare to be surprised. A new movement is taking root that in a low-key way challenges almost everything we think we know about agriculture and our relationship with food. Last week’s column asked: how can we feed ourselves without ready access to the fossil fuels upon which conventional agriculture depends utterly? It wasn’t meant to be a rhetorical question.

The basis of all agriculture is soil. Healthy soil positively teems with life, including earthworms, fungi and essential bacteria. Mature topsoil is the product of hundreds, even thousands of years of slow growth, decay and decomposition. Within human timescales, soil is essentially a non-renewable resource.

The plough has shaped human history even more profoundly than the sword. Where for 10,000 years we depended on a delicate balance of nutrients to maintain the soil upon which our civilisations stood, the energy revolution and industrial farming in the last century saw us throw away that rule book. Full Article here