The variance in descriptions comes basically from the fact that some people watch breathless documentaries, and some people get their hands dirty.

There's also confusion between "growing your own" and "growing for profit". To grow some of your own food is not difficult. But if you add up the hours spent and price those hours at whatever your full-time job's rate is, unless you have a really shitty job you'll find your food bill is pretty high for those things you grow. You see then that your labour is less productive in hours spent vs kilograms harvested compared to a conventional farmer, warehouse and market all together.

If it was your spare time and hobby and you enjoyed, then naturally you price those hours spent doing it at less than $0 an hour (ie you would pay to do it, rather than expect to be paid). If it's producing food for others at profit, the equations become different.

Just think of it this way. The bloke mentioned "50 days a year, mainly harvesting" as his work for the food. That's about 25% of the working days in a year, or equivalent to 25% of income. Most Westerners spend 10-15% of their income on food. So we immediately see that it's more labour-intensive.

Wild claims are made for all approaches to doing things, whether in a garden or a factory or a classroom or whatever. When you actually get your hands dirty doing things, you find these wild claims don't really stand up.

Permaculture is a philosophy of design of gardens, housing and so on. The philosophy is that we should work with natural processes rather than against them.

For example, if you're in a low-rainfall area and want to grow things, you may decide to put in bores to an aquifer and some water pumps; this is working against natural processes, which is why it takes a lot of energy. Alternately, you might decide to dig a few swales where the limited rainfall can collect and be stored; this is working with natural processes (digging a bit and then letting gravity do the rest), which is why takes little energy.

This can be a process of literally years.

What it comes down to is that unless you're going to live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, to produce anything you must spend either effort (labour) or resources on it. If we drop one we have to increase the other.

For example, the guy on the tractor is getting rid of effort, so he must consume more resources (fuel, etc) to make up for that. On the other hand, someone with pasture may decide to reduce resources (artificial fertiliser, resowing the grass each year, alternating with clover to build soil nitrogen) and so must spend effort over a number of years to get the right mix of grasses and legumes so that the pasture is self-sustaining.

The biggest part of the "labour" in permaculture is simply observing things. For example, in my own yard I have two Japanese maples. They are less than two metres from each-other, but one is thriving, and the other dying. Why? Well, one is against a wall and sheltered from direct sun, the other is in the open. In southern Australia we've had a hot summer. The wall shaded the tree, while the bricks behind it released their heat overnight. Below the tree were a few plants which shaded the soil and kept it moist. So the shaded wall gave the tree an even temperature without heavy sunlight, and the soil was kept moist. The other tree just copped the full sun then froze at night and the soil dried up.

But it took two months for me to be able to see this happen. I had to observe and think. Now combine that with a whole field of plants, seeing how they combine to help or hinder each-other, how the soil over here is good for this plant, but the soil a metre away kills it, and so on.

Likewise when at one site I had heavy clay soil, and wanted to turn it into the "light friable loam" we always see in gardening tv shows. I had to plant legumes to break it up and add nitrogen, make and dig in compost to add organic matter, and so on. This was working with nature, and so it took effort (labour). I could just have bought some soil and fertiliser and a rototiller instead (resources).

The permaculture-designed garden will often produce very little in the first year or two, until the observations come in and can be related to each-other, and you can figure out which natural processes you can tap into to get you what you want. After that production will pick up and yield/ha exceed conventional systems.

If you've an hour and generous broadband, you may be interested in the BBC documentary A Farm for the Future. There you'll see that the soil can be enormously productive with little or no fossil fuel inputs, but it takes years of work and observation to achieve this.

Less fossil fuels means more labour. But I don't think this is a bad thing. In the West where obesity threatens people's happiness and lives, walking or cycling instead of driving is good, not bad. When food is overly-processed and makes us sick, growing some of our own is good, not bad. When millions are unemployed and miserable, having them employed growing things would be good, not bad.