Keylining Pasture with a Sub-soiler

okay here we are subsoil in the pasture out by where we put in swales and you can see what this looks like is about every four feet Jim is cutting in a slit about 18 inches deep with the sub soiler and what that does is introduces oxygen and water into the deeper layers of the soil so that you literally start building compost from the bottom of the trench up Sir Albert Howard one of the founders of organic agriculture a big proponent of subsoil and we've seen it done in practice and after a period of time you can start turning clay into loam just by getting more water and and oxygen down into the lower areas it doesn't matter that there's quite a bit of clumping going on because this is pasture it'll all settle out it'll get trampled in eventually but the the best part about this is that as you can see on these hillsides when the water starts sheeting down versus whales catch it and whatever gets over the swales starts hitting the slits this is actually called key lining and the water as it goes down the field fills up the slit raises up fills up overflows goes to the next one and so you are literally slowing all the water down that's wanting to race off out of your field and you keep catching it in these these key lines and sinking it into the ground even further I'm going to try to get a shot of what it looks like right at the back of the tractor as Jim's going another way to do this with a key line plow you need a bigger tractor because you've got more shovels going on with a key line plow you also have like a little squirrel cage that works up the clods and straighten and levels them out so here you go ah paradis subsoil een in action it's really all it's doing is cutting a slip down in the ground you see there's a shovel the shovel gives a little lift and that's why it gets this whole field here it's something that should be done like every year and should spring here it's a great time to do it we're going to start getting spring rains and now we're going to keep catching more of the rain and sending it down in the ground I'll come back out here later and show you how well it's working as the as the grass out here is going to pick up like crazy so very simple practice when I first ordered this at the local implement dealer they had no idea what a sub soiler was what it did they knew nothing about it and as far as I'm concerned as far as what I've heard what I've read this is really a pretty pretty critical thing to be doing certainly in pass if your pasture in animals you got no reason not to do this you have every reason to do this so there it is subsoil in look at all that water we're going to catch and sink into the ground used to runoff now it doesn't run off anymore you should do this too a great day

Channel: Anathoth Community Farm

Views: 24,074

Rating: 4.9189191 out of 5

Keywords: sub-soiling, permaculture, building soil health, agro-ecology

Id: 4Z7svSVteIo

Length: 4min 23sec (263 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 19 2015