Every vendor that sells something we have questions for carries a permaculture rating from 1.0 to 5.0. This page says where that number comes from, who decided what counts, and what to do if it looks wrong to you.
Permaculture is a broad umbrella and almost nobody fits under it perfectly. A farm that pasture-raises its chickens but buys imported commodity feed is doing something very different from a supermarket, and something very different again from a closed-loop operation that grows its own feed. A single yes-or-no label flattened all of that, which is why it is gone.
So the rating describes roughly what kind of operation a vendor runs. The observations and the highlights underneath it say what the number cannot: the one or two things a vendor does unusually well, or unusually badly, for its score.
When a member writes a review, they are asked a handful of questions about each thing the vendor sells. Eggs get questions about how the birds are kept and where the feed comes from. Vegetables get questions about sprays, fertility and how the ground is worked. Three to five questions each, with I don't know on every one.
Each possible answer carries a score from 1 to 5, and each question carries a weight from 1 to 3 depending on how much it matters. A category score is the weighted average of the answers given:
(answer score x question weight) added up, divided by the weights added up
A question nobody answered drops out of both halves. It does not count as a zero. A vendor is not marked down because nobody has asked yet.
Where a vendor sells several things, the category scores are averaged evenly. A four-question set does not count for less than a five-question one, because the number is describing the operation rather than counting evidence.
This is the part that matters most.
At the end of a review we show the member what the weights suggest, and the working behind it, and then we ask them to type their own number. There is no button to accept ours. The rating on a vendor is the average of what members typed, not the average of what the formula produced.
That is deliberate. A formula cannot see that a farm is three months into a transition, or that a nursery buys in one line of plants and propagates everything else. The weights are a proposal. The person who went there decides.
The questions, the answer scores and the weights were designed by Dean Williams.
They are a judgement, not a measurement. Reasonable permaculturalists disagree about whether feed sourcing matters more than water management, and any set of numbers is one answer to that. Naming who wrote them is the point: an anonymous formula is an oracle, and a named one is an argument you can have.
Rate the vendor the way you see it. That is what the box is for, and a gap between your number and ours is useful information rather than a mistake.
Then send feedback through the app and say which question felt mis-weighted. If several people disagree in the same direction on the same question, that is how we find out a weight is wrong.
Questions are answered across reviews rather than per review. If you tell us where the feed comes from and somebody else tells us how the birds are kept, the vendor now has both.
When two members answer the same question differently we take the three most recent answers: if two agree, that wins, otherwise the most recent one does. Every answer is kept, and an admin is told whenever there was a disagreement, because a changed answer usually means the vendor actually changed.
The short lines under a vendor are things members saw for themselves. They carry a date and how many people reported them, and no name. What a farm feeds its chickens is true or false regardless of who noticed it.
Nothing ticked means nobody has reported it. It never means the opposite is true.
Roughly a third of the directory is things the permaculture question does not apply to: an electrician, a welder, a water testing lab. They carry a Service rating and no permaculture rating, shown in grey rather than in colour.
That is not a low score. It is the absence of one.
Service is the average of five things members rate: Quality, Reliability, Value, Communication and Fairness. Any of them can be skipped.
It answers a different question from the permaculture rating. How aligned is this vendor with what the group is for, and how easy are they to deal with, are not the same thing, and a good answer to one says nothing about the other.
This page will change as the questions and weights change. If you are reading a rating and want to know exactly which answers produced it, open What members have found out on the vendor.