Abstract
Even though sustainable agriculture has received increasing attention in the last decades, the so-called permaculture movement remains underresearched. Permaculture movement uses an agroecological design system for creating sustainable human settlements in general and a framework of mimicking natural ecosystems in particular.
In our research we tested the possibility of an integrated assessment of permaculture ecosystems with the concept of ecosystem services. Ecosystem services framework seems to be suitable in answering two key questions; first, what kind of ecosystems is permaculture creating and whether they are closer to natural ecosystems (i.e. woodlands) or conventional agriculture, and second, with which services exactly do they provide us with? To answer these questions, we first developed a method how to easily measure the regulating, provisioning and cultural services.
We studied 9 permaculture farms and interviewed their owners. In our research we decided to combine quantitative methods (for measuring the regulating services, e.g. water flow regulation, carbon stock) with qualitative methods (to estimate cultural services as sense of place, heritage and others).
To estimate the provisioning services, we devised a specialized questionnaire. Our findings confirm the traditional belief that permaculture is a system that indeed mimics natural ecosystems, at least in the realm of regulating services.
The amount of provisioning services, on the other hand, varies a lot depending on the motivation for growing food. Cultural services provided by permaculture ecosystems are very unique and seem to be filling the gap of a deeper sense of connectedness with natural laws.
In the time of the Anthropocene and degradation of most of the ecosystems permaculture methods should be explored and applied more frequently because they are a promising way of how to restore and regenerate the regulating and cultural services provided by agriculture that have been overlooked in the last century.