From Garden Hobbyist To Regional Food Producer (the long term game)
Today, the only way to save our home planet is by producing what we need to live while taking care of it.
However, farming and agriculture are destroying the planet, and consumerism is stoking the fire. It seems that we are trapped, because we are relying on the very thing we need to survive that is going to cause our destruction. The solution is both radical and simple, and it is right in front of us.
We must save our home planet by creating the next iteration of gardening/agriculture in our backyards and small sites near towns.
Backyard and peri-urban small farming (both are small sites from 100m² to 1000m²) has already been proven to produce much more food per square meter and with much less energy input than modern conventional farming—so much so that we can even reduce the area of farmed land needed to feed our current population. If we garden with high agency and use a design system that leans on long-living elements like trees and perennials, it is doable and profitable.
In previous letters, we spoke all about a backyard duck flywheel that transforms problems (links at the end), like slugs, into assets. Now we are going to talk about how to transform your backyard flywheel into a regional sustainable food network, if you have the interest to start a business around it.
In this edition, in 4 minutes or less:
#1 The secret: Minimal viable garden.
#2 Permaculture Vs. Agriculture (is there a fight?)
#3 The trinity of a successful (profitable) backyard garden flywheel
The secret: Minimal viable garden.
Michael E. Gerber said in his acclaimed book “The E-Myth Revisited” that if you want to be successful in business, you should focus on building a system that delivers the outcome or product rather than focusing on the product itself.
The outcome or product is the natural consequence of the system running correctly. When people try to create a business and stop being specialized workers—like craftspeople, artists, writers, lawyers, bakers, or physicians—not having these principles is the most pervasive cause of failure, according to the author. I know this well because I studied medicine, and for me the most difficult thing is to stop selling my effort and taking pride primarily in the quality of my work, and instead create systems that run by themselves (needing only a system guardian, a steward). The craft in business is crafting the system that delivers the results, not crafting the products. That is a mindset shift that every gardener must make.
Gardening with high agency, as you noticed in the previous letter, is creating a garden that functions like a flywheel by integrating every component of the garden, which makes everything work harmoniously together to produce yield. This not only becomes easier over time but can also be done indefinitely because it doesn’t break the environment. You saw in the previous letter how a big problem like slugs can become an unfair advantage for raising ducks.
The first step to transform your backyard flywheel into a regional sustainable food network is not creating a product, but creating the system (a garden that functions like a flywheel) that produces a diversity of valuable products for your future customers (or patrons) while building soil. If it does this, each season becomes easier.
Permaculture Vs. Agriculture (is there a fight?)
The word agriculture comes from Latin:
- “ager” = field
- “cultura” = cultivation/culture (from “colere” = to cultivate, tend, care for)
So literally, agriculture means “field cultivation” or “the cultivation of fields.” It represented humanity’s shift from hunter-gatherer societies to settled farming communities, and traditionally encompasses:
- Crop production (cereals, vegetables, fruits)
- Animal husbandry (livestock raising)
- Land management for productive purposes
- Food production at scale
Today, agriculture is typically defined as:
The science, art, and practice of cultivating plants and livestock for food, fiber, biofuel, medicinal plants, and other products used to sustain and enhance human life.
So:
- Agriculture (the broad concept) includes both farming and gardening
- Farming is commercial-scale agriculture with primary focus on profit, market sales, and economic viability
- Gardening is small-scale agriculture, often focused on personal satisfaction, food security, aesthetics, or recreation
Gardening is actually a form of agriculture, just as farming is—they’re both expressions of humanity’s fundamental practice of “field cultivation.” But it seems that the aspect of “sustain and enhance human life” has been lost today, because modern agriculture causes erosion, produces food that makes people unhealthy, pollutes the environment, and worsens the lives of animals. I would advocate for recovering this lost aspect, and then add that we should also aim to sustain and enhance the life of all living beings on Earth, which has already been proposed.
Bill Mollison and David Holmgren coined the term Permaculture (permanent agriculture), which they defined as:
The conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people, providing everything they need in a sustainable way.
Permaculture design is a system of assembling a site in a pattern that functions to benefit life in all forms.
Michael E. Gerber says categorically in his book that in a well-made system (business), everybody thrives.
The trinity of a successful (profitable) backyard garden flywheel
- The golden metric in sustainable gardening/farming/agriculture is positive energy audit
- The golden metric in customer acquisition is having an audience (patrons)
- The golden metric in business is cashflow (sales)
The first step to a successful backyard flywheel, as already discussed, is creating a garden that functions like a flywheel in a sustainable way.
Anything to be truly sustainable must have a positive energy audit, meaning that over the long term, a system produces more energy than it consumes.
- Energy Input: All human labor, fossil fuels, machinery, external fertilizers, seeds, water pumping, transportation
- Energy Output: Food, fiber, fuel, building materials, ecosystem services
- Time Frame: Measured over decades, not just growing seasons
It would be a big problem to define this in practical terms if we didn’t have an available and trustworthy metric to follow: soil building. This relationship between energy surplus and soil production is particularly elegant:
- Soil building is fundamentally about capturing and storing carbon
- Carbon storage requires excess photosynthetic energy beyond what plants need for immediate survival (the same condition is met in animals, insects, etc. that in one way or another consume the photosynthesizers)
- This excess energy feeds soil organisms, creates organic matter, and builds soil structure
- No energy surplus = no soil building = eventual system degradation
This framework helps explain why industrial agriculture often fails the long-term sustainability test—it may show short-term profits but degrades the soil capital that underpins future productivity.
The second step is building an audience (patrons), or put another way, working in public - telling people who are looking for exactly what you offer about your project, but who don’t know you exist.
Your job as a backyard or small-site entrepreneur is not to satisfy your own preferences anymore, as when you were doing it as a hobby or personal project, but to satisfy the wishes of your customers (patrons). Tell stories about your project, the objectives, your motivations, and your values. Storytelling might be the most efficient way to show people what you have to offer them.
If you can communicate clearly and captivatingly all of that (stories are a great way to do this), people will find you and support you—even by paying.
The third step is to create cashflow by selling your products.
This is crucial because we need money in our current time to survive. Moreover, it is the fuel for any project. One crucial piece of information that helped me overcome my aversion to selling is the fact that selling is a value exchange. You will feel good about selling your products if you know that you are offering something with true value to the patron (customer).
If you communicate the value of your product well enough (through storytelling, for example), people will be happy to pay you and will want to continue paying you for the products they want.
Create a Minimal Viable Garden.
It is a design process based on iteration, and you, who have the spark of high agency, are the best kind of person to do it. Beyond the challenges (the site “problems”) that any site will have, you also have constraints to create within.
It must be sustainable.
It must be worthwhile doing.
It must put food on the table.
It must bring cashflow.
With a flywheel, this is possible because it is, as a system, modular and adaptable (as its components also are). Once you nail down the process to run it in a small and controllable space where you minimize your investment risk, you can expand at will. This is possible because you will be creating soil, offering healthy food or sustainable materials as products, while crafting niches for other species to thrive - which is essential to keep the Earth alive. And you will be building an asset that is also a legacy.
That is also a great story to tell.
