Keyline Design Workshop with Mark Krawczyk: Part 1

[Music] thank you PA Yeomans is the creator of the key Line Design concept he was a mining engineer and farmer in Australia and was especially prolific in developing his work in the 40s 50s 60s he's written a number of different books on the theme of keyline design and that was kind of his brainchild basically overlaying the concepts of like engineering and and surveying onto land planning with the primary objectives of creating resilient drought proofed and regenerative agricultural systems in Australia Soil and Water Management being the foundation so the scale of permanence is this Continuum of characteristics of the land organized by the things that are most permanent or most difficult for us to change and then those things that are most amenable to change and kind of most fluid over a timeline what's the thing in landing here that we have the least ability to change it's kind of the most fixed at least as individuals what the topography comes it's very high on the list but in terms of like the scale permanence it'd be the climate and when we're talking about climate we're specifically looking at things like radiation you know how much sunlight is there how is it distributed um and precipitation so climate we can't change with any degree of direct intention um as individuals here so it's something that we're going to have to respond to and if we move to our next layer on this scale of permanence that's where the topography or the landform comes into play we can't really change the fact that we're on a North facing slope or we're down in a valley bottom or we're on a steep Cliff face with shallow exposed bedrock that's something that we inherit the further along we get on that continuum the easier it becomes for us to change the least the less permanent those things are and so where a key line becomes especially relevant in my mind is the fact that because Topography is such a fixed characteristic of place we need to respond to it or we should respond to it and we ignore it at our Peril yet we see that frequently in farm planning or design in some cases there really isn't any intentional planning to design foreign keyline vocabulary would be that a ridge is any convex landform so it's any land shape that's going to tend to shed water and a valley is any concave landform and so we have ridges down in the valley bottoms and we've got valleys up along mountain ridges it's really just about the profile and the shape because it's shed water or does it receive water so we've got ridges and valleys on our hands and this would be like the spine of the mountains you know or that we call it the main Ridge of the landscape and then if you open up your fingers and look back on your fingers you have ridges comprising you know the tops of your fingers with valleys the spaces between your fingers just again ridges convex shapes valleys concave shapes um we would call these primary ridges and primary valleys and that's basic the basic construction of the geography of keyline there's a point where the profile of the land shape changes from being more Steep and convex to flatter and concave that's the key point if you have a true key point when the land transitions from being steep to flatter what's going to happen what are you going to see on a contour map that tells you where that is yeah so it's where the lines move change from being tight together to further apart one thing that the key Point represents is a very efficient place in a valley to to hold water because if you were to create an Earthen Dam in that Valley shape because the landscape is already concave like that you don't have to move a lot of Earth to store a bunch of water relative to a pond up high where you know the land's flatter or more convex you have to move a lot more Earth it's like you know on a flat landscape to build a pond it's like every shovel full of Earth out of the hole is one shovelful equivalent of water stored so with with traditional key Line Design you identify the key point in the valley and then you lay out a contour line that passes through that line so that's where you put the first flag and then the rest of the flags are all dictated by that initial starting point they're sometimes more than one key point in the same field and so what do you go on when it comes to design and that's where I tend to bend the rules a little bit because the landscape rarely follows the the oversimplified examples in the textbook [Music]

Channel: Center for an Ecology-Based Economy

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Id: 0-df_NIGUI4

Length: 5min 48sec (348 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 06 2022