Gardening

I've been compiling information on a few systems of agriculture.

Small Plot INtensive

There's "Small Plot INtensive" (aka SPIN) which is specialized for market production, emphasizing minimizing labor and maximizing market crops.

(Be aware that these folks are selling their system as a course, and this is a sales site not an info site. You can get the details from reading carefully and watching the videos that practitioners have made.)

Grow Biointensive

Then there's the "Grow Biointensive" method which is designed to provide a complete diet in a small space while also building soil and fertility. They have been dialing it in for forty years and now have a turn-key system that is implemented and functioning all over the world.

(These folks are also selling their system, but they also have e.g. manuals you can download for free. I find their site curiously hard to use.)

Permaculture

Permaculture could be called "applied ecology" (with a kind of hippie spin.) and a similar school (or parallel evolution) called "Syntropic" Agriculture. Both of these systems aim to mimic natural ecosystems to create "food forests" that produce crops year-round without inputs (no fertilizer, no irrigation.) The process takes 5-15 years or so but then is self-sustaining and regenerative.

For Permaculture I find Toby Hemenway's (RIP) videos very good:

There's a very lively and civil forum at

Syntropic agriculture

(FWIW, I find Gotsch's writing (in English) to be impenetrable, even though I pretty much know what he's doing. Anyway, his results are incontrovertable.)

I'm afraid I don't have a good link in re: Food Forests and eco-mimetic agriculture yet. This "Plant Abundance" fellow's youtube channel might be a good place to start, in any event it's a great example:

Growing Power

If you really wanted to maximize food production and aren't afraid of building insfrastucture (like greenhouses and fish tanks) there's the (sadly now defunct) **Growing Power** model:

They used an integrated greenhouse/aquaculture/compost system to produce massive amounts of food right through Milwaukee winters.

Regenerative Agriculture

Then there is the whole field (no pun intended) of **Regenerative agriculture**, e.g.:

This is very much non-hippie, very much grounded in (often cutting-edge) science (ecology, microbiology, etc.) and ecologically and *economically* superior to artificial methods (e.g. Brown makes money. It's actually weird that more people aren't adopting these methods faster. You make more money, have fewer expenses, and your topsoil builds up year-on-year rather than washing away in erosion.)

Miyawaki method

For regenerating native forests, not agriculture *per se*.