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“The worst ecological problem that we have on this planet, in this moment, is agriculture – not automobiles or other things – it’s agriculture. It could be the key to abundance in the future, but right now it’s the key to mass destruction. Amazonia is being destroyed for agriculture, not for the wood that’s there. And in a lot of other places as well.
Nowadays all agriculture comes from petroleum and not only because they have tractors, but it takes two kilos of natural gas to make one kilo of nitrogen fertilizer. So where are you going to get your nitrogen fertilizer?
So we have to go back to fertility from the sun. The sun, through photosynthesis, is what makes fertility, which means we have to completely change our way of doing agriculture.”

“Amaranth… we plant a lot, it works well. It is not as productive as other forms of gardening per se. But it needs nothing from outside more than the seed. The seeds you can get from your own plants. Once you get it going, the only thing we did to get it started was put in a lot of compost, till the soil down, make a good seedbed to sow the clover.
Then we sowed the first year of corn and soybeans into the same seedbed and it all came up together. And since then we haven’t gone back to put anything else in. Not compost or nothing else and it’s still as productive. Every year it’s deeper soil. The profile has a deeper black profile on the surface and it’s just wonderful. It’s rocky soil as well… but you can get a fork through the stones, lift it up and it breaks apart into little bowels of soil that indicate a wonderful soil structure.”

“So here we are off grid so we don’t have all the electricity we want, but we have what we need and we need very little. Our needs are determined by our own philosophy of life, not by advertising campaigns or minimums or maximums… and we revised those needs quite a lot.

I think the answer to the crisis we’re coming into, is going to be finding real values that we want to live with, the people we live with, and I’m not talking just about your core family but mostly about the community that you build around you, or that you create with the people that live around you, and your own idea of what is enough for you.
So, once you begin moving in that direction, you’re going to get into contact and find each other and you’re going to be creating a network and this will help everybody else to make changes.
But the first thing is to make the change yourself, begin to make the change. And walk your talk before you talk.”

Contact: Instituto de Permacultura Montsant