The Small Farm Future Blog

Farm Scale Polyculture

Posted on January 16, 2012 | No Comments

As mentioned in the previous post, I attended the excellent Oxford Real Farming Conference  a couple of weeks ago. I gave a short talk at it on farm scale polyculture, and I promised I’d post something here about what ‘polyculture’ is all about. In a nutshell, the idea is that instead of growing single outputs or ‘monocultures’ (a field of genetically uniform wheat, for example), it often makes more sense to grow multiple outputs or ‘polycultures’. In my talk, I tried to address some of the many different dimensions of polyculture and illustrate how we’ve tried to implement them at Vallis Veg, with varying degrees of success.

You can download my talk here  – it’s in the form of a PowerPoint file, so you’ll need PowerPoint to read it. At the conference I simply spoke to the pictures. Here I’ve annotated them very briefly to try to convey what I said, whilst naturally losing much of the detail.