Permaculture principle 3: Obtain a yield

Permaculture principle three is obtain a yield — here’s how it can be used as a practical thinking tool to guide more ethical marketing and business decision-making.

This is Part 3 of a 13-part series: How to Use the 12 Permaculture Principles in Business and Marketing. If you’re new to the principles, start here. Or, you can view the full series here.

What ‘obtain a yield’ means

Land-based definition

Ensure your work produces truly useful yields and rewards, such as food or satisfaction, that benefit both humans and the wider ecosystem.

Marketing definition

Ensure your marketing efforts deliver enough profit and other returns to actively support your livelihood, so you can sustainably keep doing good in the world.

Proverb

You can’t work on an empty stomach — reminding us that immediate and tangible rewards are crucial to sustain us.

Translating this principle to marketing

Where ‘catch and store energy’ (principle two) encouraged us to think long-term, ‘obtain a yield’ emphasises the here-and-now, helping ensure we have the resources we need today to stay afloat and support ourselves.

The most obvious primary yield to obtain is money — your business simply won’t last, nor will you have the ongoing capacity to do good in the world, if you’re constrained by financial hardship.

So, it’s crucial to regularly monitor key metrics such as profit and loss, service and product pricing, and profitability of marketing activities.

While financial yields are incredibly important, we can also recognise other yields or forms of value beyond money.

An excellent thinking tool is the Eight Forms of Capital, conceptualised by US permaculture designer Ethan Roland in 2011.

He identified seven other forms of capital beyond just financial — social, material, living, intellectual, experiential, spiritual and cultural (see below for more detail).

For example, taking a few weeks off 1:1 client-facing work to study a new modality might not deliver an immediate financial yield, but it does offer an immediate intellectual yield of knowledge.

As David Holmgren writes in Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability: “A yield, profit or income functions as a reward that encourages, maintains and/or replicates the system that generated the yield. In systems language, these rewards are called positive feedback loops… If we are serious about sustainable design solutions, then we must be aiming for rewards that encourage success, growth and replication of those solutions.”

How to apply ‘obtain a yield’ in marketing

To help yourself recognise yields and forms of value beyond just money, consider the Eight Forms of Capital, conceptualised by US permaculture designer Ethan Roland.

The Eight Forms of Capital:

1. Financial capital: The one we’re most familiar with: money, savings, income, investments, etc.
2. Social capital: Relationships, connections and influence with people who trust you.
3. Material capital: Physical, non-living resources such as tools, buildings and technology.
4. Living capital: Living things, such as soil, water, plants and animals. (Ethan says: “Permaculture design teaches us the principles and practices for the rapid creation of living capital.”)
5. Intellectual capital: Knowledge, ideas, skills and created assets such as content, frameworks and intellectual property.
6. Experiential capital: Real-world learning gained by doing, through practice, experimentation and lived experience.
7. Spiritual capital: Purpose, intentions, faith, karma and inner guidance.
8. Cultural capital: Shared art, stories, rituals, songs, traditions and ways of meaning-making within communities.
9. (Optional extra) Emotional capital: Your ability to regulate your nervous system and handle emotions within others and yourself.

Other forms of capital that have since been suggested as additions include health and time.

For a deeper understanding, read this explainer article by Ethan, listen to him speak on this podcast or read the book he co-wrote, Regenerative Enterprise: Optimizing for Multi-capital Abundance (2015).

You might also enjoy this permaculture and money podcast with Morag Gamble interviewing Laura Oldanie.

Laura raises the interesting point that we often use financial capital to purchase access to the other seven forms of capital. What if, instead of converting everything into money and back again, we looked for creative ways to access other forms of capital directly, for free?

What permaculture thinkers say about this principle

“Expanding our idea of yields increases the potential for us to obtain harvests from activities. Job satisfaction, play, fun, friendship, growth and learning can be valued yields as well as more tangible ones such as money, time saved and material gains.” — Looby MacNamara, People and Permaculture

“The yield is only limited by the imagination of the designer. Don’t be afraid to seek out the ideas of others as part of your process. A fresh pair of eyes can see opportunities that… we sometimes miss.” — Aranya, Permaculture Design

Other closely connected principles

The 12 permaculture principles work best as a set of interconnected design prompts.

Each offers a different lens, and the combination creates depth, balance and a tempering effect — the holistic approach at the heart of systems thinking.

For example, ‘obtain a yield’ is closely related to:

• Principle 2, ‘catch and store energy’, which encourages us to store some of today’s yields (including skills and ideas) for later use during times of scarcity.
• Principle 4, ‘apply self-regulation and accept feedback’, which reminds us not to over-harvest in ways that might damage the system’s ability to produce in the future.
• Principle 8, ‘integrate rather than segregate’, as the best yields often come from strategic marketing systems in which different tools and platforms support one another.

Ready for the next principle? Explore the full series here.

And a quick side note: this series is adapted from a lesson from inside my Permaculture Marketing course, in case you’d like to go deeper.