2020 Keyline Design of the Larga Field

[Music] hi my name is lucas my name is chelsea my background is mechanical engineering and mine's in global public health and we're interested in regenerative agriculture homesteading and getting into direct market meat sales of grass-fed beef my family has a ranch in northern new mexico where we raise cattle and currently our land is showing signs of compaction and degradation this video is about one method we have been pursuing in order to reverse those effects we first learned about key line design through quivera workshops the main goal of keyline design is to manage water as it moves across a landscape this is done by using a tractor to create thin channels into a landscape using knowledge of the topography of the land the creator of this method pa yeoman developed a plow for this purpose called the yeoman's plow the ideal yeoman's plow rips thin channels in the land without inverting the soil a new key line was what our land needed so last spring we applied for a grant through our soil water conservation district to key line 40 acres of irrigated pasture unfortunately we didn't get this grant so we started thinking about how we could complete this project on a smaller number of acres with a smaller budget i thought this was important to do this year as a proof of concept to show both family and future grant applications that this technique could work on our high desert landscape so in order to make it happen we reached out to our network for ideas and advice and we'll list acknowledgements at the end of the video as an outline our project plan involved designing and building a yeoman's substitute learning the land's topography via drone mapping and gps key lining the fields and seeding the field so now we'll give you a tour of the ripper and the background story and then talk more about the planning process and implementation of the project okay so this uh this is our tractor and um bootstrap together yieldman's plow that we created with the help of the seating regenerative agriculture and the makerspace in las cruces we uh essentially bought a ripper so this is the ripper that's been modified through that uh program and so we bought a ripper the main thing that we did was we got these uh tips on here which are wombat tips that are yieldman's plow wompat tips and they're they're knock-on tips that are added on there so we have two rippers on here we started with three the two bolts broke and now we have two and we added tires here uh in order to control the depth getting regenerative agriculture group came up with this idea to include an injector um we uh the vapor space in los angeles put on a 65 gallon case here they uh put on a 12-volt water pump which we discovered was a bit too powerful so we opted to use just gravity speed um david johnson of nmsu sent us some bioreactor compost which we hung inside this tent to make a compost tea and then it just fed down through these hoses and injected the compost tea right after the rip line in order to know where to run the river we have to know the topography of the land the typical approach was using a laser level but we knew that we needed to study the topography of the land to identify the features and for our key line design planning so in the beginning of the project we flew a drone to create an elevation map of the landscape to do just that after looking at the elevation map our goal became to create our design on the map and then transfer that design exactly to the fields we quickly realized that we need a much more precise map and gps system in order to transfer the design exactly coincidentally our friend mike chang had been following our progress through social media and reached out to us turns out he had been thinking about the same thing for years and just acquired the technology and software to pursue consulting on keyline projects using a mapping and gps based method so we planned a long work weekend and he came out to help us map the field create the design and then install the design this is what the field looked like before this is the contour map contour lines at every foot this is the map showing the design we drew the key lines in blue the motivation of our design was to gently move water from the valleys to the ridges via one percent gradient we used the contour lines into to inform how we drew the design the final step of the process was the installation of the keyline design using mike chang's super accurate and precise map all we had to do was walk with the gps unit along the key line mark it with paint and rip along those lines we did some in-field adjustments in areas where there were tall grass at a certain altitude but otherwise the design we drew was exactly what we wanted we're going to see a diverse suite mix in the rip lines this fall before a snowball and we'll see the rest in spring before runoff now enjoy some beautiful footage of our project thanks [Music] [Music] so [Music] do [Music] do [Music] [Music] okay [Music] um [Music] um [Music] the spinning [Music] across the leaves of grass [Music] i [Music] [Music] so you sit down think a minute it's a pretty pretty world [Music] decided to take off [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: Rio Nutrias Homestead

Views: 9,747

Keywords: Regenerative Agriculture, Quivira Coalition, Thornburg Foundation, Keyline Design, Irrigation, Farm, Ranch, New Mexico, Northern New Mexico

Id: GNbG141JuOk

Length: 11min 19sec (679 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 03 2020