Video · DW Planet A
Permaculture — the farm that pays for itself
Original title: “Permaculture: Producing food without destroying the planet”
A dry, sandy patch of ground 1.5 hours from Berlin. No tractor, no pesticides, many crops. Seven years later it out-earns the average industrial farm — 80% of revenue is profit.
From
Feeding people means big plots, one crop, machines and chemicals.
To
A small, well-designed, self-sustaining system feeds people — and keeps most of what it earns.
“You can't feed the world on one euro carrots, because it's destroying the world.”— Falk Gärtner
The story
A dry, sandy patch of ground 1.5 hours from Berlin, with no tractor on it. It out-earns the average industrial farm.
The playbook it ignores is the familiar one: buy a huge plot, plow the earth, plant one crop, fertilise, spray, harvest — then buy a bigger plot and do it again.
Seven years ago Falk Gärtner quit his job in advertising and bought this instead. Coarse sand and small stones; the water went straight through it.
But you cannot out-water sand, and industrial irrigation was never an option here. So he read the landscape first and dug a swale, packed it with logs and biomass, piled the earth into a hill beside it, and turned the trench into a sponge. The paths between the beds got the same treatment under wood chips.
Therefore the ground began holding what fell on it — and he never tills, so the topsoil keeps its minerals and its own ecosystem. The fertiliser is compost and dove droppings from nearby: somebody else's waste, which is exactly the point.
Every row grows something different and is replanted up to four times a year, so one failure is covered by the rows around it.
But a farm with no pesticides has to find its pest control somewhere. So the strips between the rows are left completely wild, and the farm starts staffing itself: birds nest in the hedges and eat the insects, bigger slugs arrive and eat the small ones that were eating his salads, a fox turns up for the mice. Only the flea beetle, blowing in from the rapeseed monoculture next door, needs netting — and he budgets for losing up to a quarter of the crop anyway.
He can't compete with big field carrots, therefore he doesn't: he grows fast, high-value produce like snack carrots and sells by hand, direct to local restaurants and shops.
Then the number that reframes the whole thing. 80% of his revenue is profit. No tractor, no sprays, no seed dependency — he buys compost and seed, and that is the entire input list.
So the small, designed, self-feeding plot isn't the charming alternative to the industrial farm. It keeps more of what it earns, because a system that runs on its own doesn't have to be bought again every season.
Beliefs that shift
- Only big farms can feed us.Big farms feed us by spending the soil that feeds us next.
- Pest control is something you spray.Pest control is something you house: hedges, wild strips, predators.
- Small farming can't pay.80% of his revenue is profit, because a self-feeding system barely buys anything.
Key numbers
| Figure | What it means |
|---|---|
| 80% | Share of revenue that is profit — no tractor; he buys compost and seed |
| 7 years | Since he quit advertising and started the farm |
| 1.5 h | Distance from Berlin, off road |
| 4× | Times each row is replanted per year |
| ~16% | Average pest reduction from flower strips |
| up to 25% | Crop loss he budgets for in advance |
| 1978 | Permaculture coined by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren |
What we learn
- Design to the site, not to the plan. Read landscape, water flow and climate first. His answer to sand was a swale.
- Store water in wood. Buried logs and biomass work as a sponge; paths get the same treatment under wood chips. Buried wood also keeps its carbon instead of releasing it.
- Take only what falls. He calculates the rain landing on his property and pumps no more than that from the well.
- Waste is an input. Dove droppings, dead trees, failed harvests — "produce no waste" is a permaculture principle.
- Grow value, not volume. Unusual, fast-growing produce like snack carrots, sold direct, because he can't compete on field carrots.
- Predators need housing. Hedges and wild strips are the pest-control system, not decoration.
- Big farms can borrow the parts. Compost, habitat rows between crops, and agroforestry — trees on the field, shade included — work at scale too.
Open questions
- An 80% margin on a one-person farm: does it survive at the scale a city needs, and does it account for his own labour?
- How much land and how many hands per 1,000 residents to feed people this way?
- Which techniques transfer to our climate and soil, and which are specific to sandy Brandenburg?
- EU subsidies reward size. What would a land rule or subsidy that rewards soil and biodiversity look like?