Element analysis

What element analysis is for

A design is made of elements: a fruit tree, a pond, a compost heap, a hen house, a path, a rain tank. Each of them needs something and gives something. Element analysis is the habit of writing both down before deciding where anything goes. It asks three questions of every element: What does it need? What does it yield? What is it like?

Bill Mollison set out this way of thinking in 1983 in a short text known as the parable of the chicken, and it runs through his Designers' Manual (1988). He called the three parts the innate characteristics, the inputs and the outputs of an element, and he drew the conclusion that matters most: permaculture does not work with chickens or glasshouses as such, but with the connections between them. The chicken itself, with its eggs, feathers, manure and scratching, is told on the page produce no waste and is not repeated here. The point of the method is what comes after the list.

When the output of one element meets the need of another, work disappears and waste disappears with it. When a need is left uncovered, someone has to carry, buy or fetch. When an output goes nowhere, it becomes a nuisance. Element analysis makes these three cases visible on paper, before they cost effort on the land. It is the working tool behind two of Mollison's rules, that each element should perform many functions and that each important function should be supported by many elements, and behind David Holmgren's principle integrate rather than segregate.

How to do it, step by step

1. List the elements. Start with those that already exist and those you are seriously considering. Ten to twenty are enough for a first round.
2. One card per element. April Sampson-Kelly of Permaculture Visions recommends writing each analysis on its own card, so the cards can later be moved around. Draw three columns: needs, yields, characteristics.
3. Fill in the needs. Water, light, nutrients, warmth or coolness, shelter, space, care, protection from animals. Note when in the year each need is greatest.
4. Fill in the yields, all of them. Not only the harvest, but also shade, heat, leaf litter, smell, noise, runoff, seeds that spread. Unwanted yields belong on the card; they are often the most useful ones once a taker is found.
5. Fill in the characteristics. Mature size, lifespan, root depth, tolerance of drought, heat or salt, whether it can be moved, whether it is evergreen or loses its leaves.
6. Lay out the cards and draw lines. On a table or a large sheet, connect every yield to a card that needs it. Count the lines. Elements with many connections are candidates for neighbours.
7. Check what is left. Each uncovered need asks for another element or for work. Each yield that goes nowhere asks for a taker.
8. Then go to the plan. The analysis says what should be connected; zones and sectors say where.

A short worked card shows the idea. A rain tank needs a roof to collect from, clean gutters, a stable base, a place for its overflow and protection from light, so that algae do not grow. It yields stored water, pressure if it stands above the beds, thermal mass, and an overflow in heavy rain. By nature it is heavy when full, cannot be moved, and lasts as long as its material. Read against other cards, the overflow becomes a need of a swale or a planting pit, the height becomes the gift of gravity to the kitchen garden, and the shade a tank needs can come from a climbing plant that also yields fruit.

An example from the world: logs under the nursery bench

On the website for Holmgren's principles, one example comes from Milkwood, a permaculture farm and teaching place in Australia. Shiitake mushroom logs are stacked under the propagation benches of a shade house. The logs need shade, moving air and humidity; the shade house, with its regular watering, gives off exactly that as a side effect of raising seedlings. Two elements that would each need their own care in separate places share one space and one routine.

The same page shows a second pairing. Broad beans follow corn: the beans add nitrogen to replace what the corn took, and the dry corn stalks give the young beans something to climb. Both examples are small, and that is their value. Element analysis rarely produces grand inventions; it finds the many quiet connections that a list of plants alone does not show.

Common mistakes

• Only the main yield. A fig tree is written down as figs. Its shade, its leaf litter, its roots near a wall and the wasps at harvest time are left out, and they are what decides where it should stand.
• Ignoring characteristics. A tree that will be fifteen metres wide is planted as if it stayed at the size bought in the nursery. Mature size and lifespan belong on every card.
• Forgetting time. Needs and yields change with the season and with age. A young tree needs water and protection; an old one gives shade and wood. A card written only for one moment misleads.
• Analysis without placement. Beautifully filled cards that never reach the plan change nothing on the land.
• Too many elements at once. A first round with fifty cards becomes a tangle. Start with the elements that shape the site, then add the rest.

Further in the TerraWiki

• Produce no waste tells Mollison's chicken and shows why an output without a taker becomes pollution.
• Integrate rather than segregate and Mollison's design principles are the principles this tool serves.
• A plant guild is element analysis applied to one tree and its companions; stacking in space and time arranges such elements in space and time.
• Typical cards: the roof cistern, compost, nitrogen-fixing plants, chickens in the system and bees and pollinators.
• Sectors, zones and the design process take the analysis onto the plan.

Element analysis at Sa Medada

Sa Medada is a slope in Jerzu, in Ogliastra on the east side of Sardinia, with mild winters and a dry season from about May to September. Some elements that such an analysis would list are already in the ground. The old olive grove is one of them. Several nitrogen fixers grow there without inoculation, among them Tephrosia, the coral tree, Inga edulis, pacay, Leucaena, Bambara groundnut and fava bean. The prunings of the woody ones are a yield that can stay on the land as soil cover; how much they give the soil where they grow has not been measured, and a laboratory analysis of the soil does not exist yet. The first tree planted in 2024, a service tree, stands on the very hot southern flank, which puts one of its characteristics, its tolerance of heat, to a hard test.

Project Eden begins with pioneer plants, ground cover and holding water. An element card that keeps its open fields open is more useful there than one filled in with guesses.