Maybe this should be entitled foodiculture or better yet, practical permaculture (we can do without the philosophical ramblings that plague some permaculture texts). And now a little rambling:
Integration, rather than separation, is the productive path to understanding our environment and manipulating it to best provide for our wants and needs. However, our needs are not always valued in a commodity market, so people deviate from the productive path.
We try to understand the needs of farmers who work at the subsistence level and we typically learn much more than we teach. In this context, we’re excited about the possibilities of biochar, natural farming, aquaponics, and community seed exchanges to name a few.
The judicious introduction of simple technologies could help lighten the burden of many rural farmers. An old iron corn sheller would save this farmer a lot of pounding (He has his corn in a net and is beating the kernals off with a stick. He then lifts the net and sweeps up the kernals.)
