P. A. YEOMAN'S SCALE OF PERMANENCE (and putting things in the right places) S4 ● E97

so we've been talking a lot about putting things in the right places and back in the 50s gave us the scale of permanence which empowers us to put things in the quick places in the landscapes whether it's a farm scape or city scape yeoman gave us this scale of permanence and it was the first integrated land planning design framework and preceded permaculture all these other integrated design frameworks and what Yeomans genius was was to look at how permanent features are in a landscape starting your design work with the most permanent features the climate really dictates the plants and animal species that are relevant to our confines and we need to work within those as well as push them in the microclimatic level to you know extend the range of what's possible but really land shape is something we need to understand to divide land up into components to be able to understand water flow so our design work often begins with optimizing water for a landscape it's why I've always chosen keyline design above any other approaches because really keyline allows us to optimize water I'm out the biggest limiting factor to agriculture you know most organisms are 70% water like we are and it's a limiting factor of production as well as what will influence land prices and usefulness of land in the future more Wars will be fought over water than they've ever been fought over oil and it's obvious and water issues all around the world seven of the 10 biggest rivers not flowing to the sea year-round anymore things like this show us that there are major problems with how we distribute and manage water you know water flows in a very particular relationship to land shape it flows perpendicular to contour so keyline design also PA Yeomans work allows us to gracefully build soil whilst optimizing water in a landscape and everything in the keyline layout is parallel so it works with farming it works with fixed-width and machinery and fixed-width nets electric nets and infrastructure like portable field pens etc and then youngins propose that we put farm roads and access in relationship to water supply to catch and store water forests that we see beautifully in his farms you can read his works at the soil and health libraries online out of print health and agricultural books all of young man's books on there and bit hard to read for some people sold English but very incredible books that have been overlooked and when we put these systems in place it gives us placement for tree systems to protect these expensive systems just looking at our road you know it's these roads cover hundreds of thousands of kilometres over Sweden and they are motivated and packed several times a year and they're in the wrong place and landscapes often which just makes some very expensive liabilities when they could be collecting water harvesting it for us and keeping systems working tree systems protect those expensive systems and then that allows us to place buildings in landscapes many permaculture books refer to starting at your back door and working outwards and that's an attitudinal principle that people have taken literally and to their detriment if you are managing anything bigger than you know homestead you definitely don't start your back door and work out which you planned patterns to details and this scale of permanence is the best example of pants the details I can think of we put in the mainframe to optimize each layer of our design according to how permanent a feature is in the landscape and only then we see where fences belong and you notice soils are at the bottom of this soils are extremely easy to build on on the flip side they're also extremely easy to damage and so we don't put our focus here there's many tools you know every level of regenerative agriculture whether we're grazing livestock planting perennial systems annual vegetable gardening with no dig et cetera we can build soil using various tools and techniques but we must be building soil if we want to call ourselves regenerative we've got to be capturing carbon and putting it back into our topsoil because it's that carbon that feeds the soil food web that carbon that buffers pH and you grow things that want to thrive in those buffered PHS and it's anti compaction it's it's what drives the engine of the soil food webs and we must be building topsoil but this is the order I've worked through my design work for nearly a decade now and there's no better way to approach larger landscape design in my mind anything smallholding or bigger this is the pattern for how to organize permaculture design and it's something that really rubs off clear with our hot course participants and we see some great design work that's practical and doable as a picture of PA Yeomans farm you Barney in Australia just outside of Sydney and what's going on here this is a dry climate 500 550 million or something and he was able to keep his key line irrigated pastures green when other people went yellow and grasses were going oxidize and about 400 hectares and two people could irrigate this in half a day with no pumps or electricity and you see here keyline dams placed in the correct place in the landscape but what's interesting here is all the lines you see around the landscape now these are all developed by farmers with you know farm tools bulldozers excavators these are large earthen dams 700 million litres of water is stored in earthen dams now this is a dry climate in Australia where water harvesting is packed necessary for irrigating pastures year-round that's not a concern we have here but the design is what interests me here here is land form telling the designer where to place water where at once together naturally then placing roads to act as overspill so these roads have cuts on the inside that act as very passive over spills cut to a very shallow grade maybe one to two hundred one 400 billion water from one down to another all the way around and landscape and then what Yeomans had done is put locked pipes through the dam war on contour so these little ditches on contour he could open the gate valve and flood these and because they were precisely on contour they would flood over and across their entire length and then passively irrigated the pasture below and this is a wonderful gravity based long-term resilient system and then he would put tree systems on contour to protect those expensive Road and infrastructure developments and then applied this in his book the city forester had a design settlements where in this case these would be paddocks divided up for grazing of livestock but equally they could be housed divisions in the city plan working on gravity where all houses had their own irrigation air so water supply all of the sewage going into contour strip forests to clean the waste of the city before it left the city boundary and all infrastructure placed along roads so roads going around and landscape carrying water from one place to another or up the center of ridge lines where they're protected watersheds off on both sides of them so there was a place for water in landscapes as a place for roads there's a place for things like sewer internet cables etc electric lines right next to the roads where utility companies can find them immediately and it's living testimony to the failure of following such pioneering thoughtful land design is the you know this is 70 years ago and yet we have the problems like we see in our fields today so here's one example roads in interesting places they come along with a big grader and they motivate these roads and then they pack them again but this is after one rainfall event and it's just interesting yesterday we were talking about you know placing things in the right place in the landscape but when you consider how many you know Sweden is full of these kind of roads and the road becomes the stream when it rains and a lot of soil is new downhill is ultimately going into our streams and into the legs but it's a huge cost leg roads a massive cost and liability if they're not in the right place in the landscape because of the sheer amount of effort to replace the materials and also to come along and gray them pack them again up here is a classic example of people not understanding maps or just not focusing their full attention on you know what they actually working with so when we came to the farm here this house is a rental house that's owned by known and owns all of these and they had a lawn up to approximately here and when they installed a fiber optic what was interesting they you know as a gigabit a second internet being installed here's the box for it here that leads to these houses but they actually were the first company I saw that had a map that showed this was part of her field and yet because it was a cut lawn and in just grass our fence wasn't up at this point they just looked at the ground and not the map and installed the cable here so when we pulled our key line plow through the ground here we cut the cable five times I wrote about this in the book is it's all about placing things in the wrong place but having seen that company's map I realized that we actually own this lawn and so I requested permission to dig up the cave was this hole is still here because we've never filled it in but we also broke the cable four times up here and the company yes a couple of thousand euros to fix that but I requested permission to dig it up myself because I wanted to know if I was liable and turned out that they were all buried 35 to 40 centimetres deep which it's not good enough it was contracted to be 70 centimeters in agricultural fields but what's worse is I have a cable now sitting across here and then rather than follow the property line it kind of randomly cuts across the field and it's just sloppy you know there's no excuse for it I would my to be honest my purse job here coming down the fence when we got to this place it's kind of revelant follow the fence line they've cut the cable straight across here again like in the middle of a field agricultural field just like up at the top where the greenhouse is it's too shallow you know and it's just savings cost savings it's laziness you know these are long-term investments that are being put in for the benefit of the community and you know it's a written contract that it must be a certain depth and for good reason you know it's most people are not doing anything with their soil even thirty five forty centimeters deep but it's not good enough to write a contract for seventy centimeters and then put it in in the wrong place you know we agreed that it would be on the fence line but not deep enough you know it's creating hundreds of years of problems by a little bit of money saving it's not worth it I would love a job as a property divider I would love to use the yeoman scale of permanence to divide landscapes up into useful tracts of land what happens here in Sweden like many countries is that properties get cut up and divided so when we were looking for a farm in the first place we looked at many properties that looked really good on paper like beautiful buildings big amount of hectare is no cost and then you look at the map and it would be like a three kilometer strip of land a hundred metres wide they totally unusable except for monocultural forestry or something like this and it's barbaric you know same goes in other European countries I've got friends in Portugal that have problems where when the owner of the land dies the property split up into multiple parcels and then nobody knows where the brother lives anymore and you can't move forward with these things but really we need to be dividing landscapes up into useable landscape units like usable properties that people can live on and make a living and that's my dream job I've always had this plan I'd love to write a book when I lived in the UK I thought I'd write a book about a key line plan for the whole country how the population would be distributed around the landscape if it was designed to run on gravity in an efficient way and I you'd be a really cool project but I'd need some collaborators to do that because it's a big one but then I thought well why not just scale out to Europe and include the rewilding of Europe and reintroduction of Oryx and woolly mammoths while we're at it and just have a painting a picture of what the future of Europe could look like it's a very ambitious project but it's the sort of thing I find very tantalizing and I might go with and just coming up to check the birds they're really nice we had no problem separating the birds on slaughter day and the team that were on field selection said it was actually a lot more peaceful and they didn't do any penning they just walked in and picked up the birds they wanted to select and it's very low stress and we just like the system it works so much better I think and yeah it's the model for how we're going to produce boilers in the future we've got some metal ducklings today and we've got a bunch of little Muscovy is coming we're gonna start trying different feed ratios for raising pasture Damascus they're one of the best pasture ducks you could possibly do so we thought they were chicks but we've been weighing them they range from one point three five to two point four two and Musketeers have a big weight difference between male and female we haven't decided if we're gonna run them in pens like this or in net setups and we're just gonna do some feed trials because we've not raised them specifically as meat birds and the musk of these are probably one of the best pasture duck species they have a much better and capacity to turn food to meet as it were than some of the other ducks and they're the only unrelated duck to amana these are South American tree ducks not for the mallard water depth and they've I've read some controlled studies in sort of conventional AG where these were deemed to be the best converters and quite a big difference between male and female compared to other species but a really high carcass weight 74 to 76 percent neither way and so I'm interested in these as a pastor but they're good foragers and yeah I want to see how they do so we're gonna work out a feed schedule these birds were eight weeks old and eight weeks they should be but weighing between 1.7 and 2.3 live for the female and male and that's about where they're at and these have been sort of foraging free roaming in their farm nearby but I want to just get some breeding pairs together and we have a Drake from previously so we might start breeding it must do we can have 195 eggs for you and so we could start our own little breeding cycle with some of these perhaps but I want to raise them up for me to think about processing you typically need a wax tank for the efficient feather plumage removal and these birds have much less feathers than water ducks and that's it's to get off that's partly why to have a higher conversion so just the ones that mean you just came out this is taking life is to draw moisture up to the to the stuff so you do get really heavy fruiting from the wind when when you wait so time to inoculate mushrooms we have got one of the six month strains of Polston with shiitake some blue oyster and some pearl oyster that's a sawdust spawn and we're putting all those into birds today and then we have turkey tail medicinal mushroom and a bunch of phoenix oyster which is an edible Indian style oyster it grows on pine and conifer we like it turns first into food so we're using angle grinder adaptors can't feel the forest plugs we don't normally do plugs who normally do sort of fun these are the thumb inoculate is that you dig into sort of spawn to not let the mouse and some cheese wax here keep the moisture in for to keep moisture in as the mycelium starts running we prefer saw the spawn because it runs quicker it's more economical you can get a lot more logs out of it but this is the way these species came so decided to do some more logs so the dowels this is Beckett ah so medicinal mushroom no this is Phoenix I see we don't usually do plugs because the plugs only just fit in the hammer in the middle now with the size angle burn a bit that's deployed and that's the pain that takes a long time compared to for this one but after that they fit in quite nice and then they just need waxing [Music] [Music] okay when you're doing because they're [Music] so much quicker than using plugs and we better use of the spoon gonna try and propagate some of mr. stomachs is lovely to me is closer per area we can't get any of this stuff on the outside which is really lovely live running mycelium I'm just gonna spread it across the room of cardboard you know poured boiling water through the cardboard yep just boiled it out and then that so that's it's sterile as it needs to be not a lot of other competitors particularly like the cardboard anyway which makes it a great substrate to use and we've grown this up so we can then yeah and it they really like the grooves and the on that cardboard because it gives it like they like to run in straight lines because they used to going up and down you know that in between the lingam trees and none of this all this would have gone to waste otherwise and you get a lot more logs than of the same way so one change we're gonna make when we go to the UK would pick up the livestock trailer we're gonna pick up some 25 meter now usual 50 minutes we use at your phone but I think with the ultimate set up the three of these pens will afford these pens and 800 beds a 50 and their 25 million that will give us good space and not be too large because they take up a lot more ground and necessary when you have to and we're trying to get the animal impact but also give them more space but keep the Nets in fairly close right now they have a lot of open space which is a potential so the predator invitation [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so in place in this greenhouse winds are setting with the fiber optic cables meant to be dug at 70 centimeters here is dug at 35 centimeters and the cable that they used to locate it should be above the wire to protect that if you're digging for example and it's laying to the side here it's dug about 40 centimeters and so we've been doing an exercise in squaring up a proposed dig circular digger that's coming and putting out strings for the pad but the path is a little bit wider and longer than the tunnel because we want to install drainage which we have these pipes here to ensure that this is well drained for the winter keeping of animals there's a lot of water coming off this roof there's no gutters yet there will be when we fit them there's a lot of water anyway generally coming down this slope so we want to be able to keep the greenhouse well drained but we've been toying with the idea of where we actually want the tunnel and we don't want it any further down we want to leave this gap above the tree line so that we can get through with the ATV or with animals etc which means we must go over this fiber-optic a little bit so we've been doing some volumetric calculations because it's mainly here that you see this big lump us all that we're gonna have to move to flatten the panel poly tunnels can be put on the slope long ways but not sideways it's not good for the structural integrity so we've been doing some basic calculations to see the amount of soil needed to be moved and making sure everyone's fully aware of how to square up the line so we dig in the right place by measuring the diagonals and we've got them to within a centimeter that's perfectly square enough we've used the laser level to look at the highest points compared to the lowest points to see what sort of soil depth we need to dig away so that we could work out how close to this cable we're gonna get to in our digging process so we know whether we have to move the proposed layout or not now it does require digging down to the level of the Y here but we want to see if the driver is willing to dig a trench to expose the cable and see if we can get it down another 20 centimeters or so because there'll be no machine work going on here ever and inside of this marker we see that will never be digging or doing anything on top of the cable we're going to have 50 centimeters there for the drainage and the tunnel doesn't even start till here so the only place that the tunnel is crossing is this little corner but then we'll have 50 centimeters off this line is the start of the tunnel and then we have staging so we're gonna have this staging all the way along both sides of the tunnel and that will serve to keep rabbits up off the ground during the winter for the meet rabbit production over the top of the chicken bedding and then in the spring it will be for potting on space we're gonna try going on transplants much bigger to produce the increase the amount of crops we can grow per year and space has been a limiting factor for us that we haven't bothered doing that but we think we can double the revenues I think we can get our Market Garden up to 75 euros per square metre and that's my little mission for myself now is to see how far we can push that and that's amazing figures first very small short season growing we worked out then even with the staging we have enough room for eight beds it'll be over 1,100 tomato plants in the intensive start we do here so we have all this ready and the tunnel frame has been started to be put together all the hoops are assembled and some of the side bars so we're just waiting for a dig in there and we have a big pile of already been very wet here recently which has been needed but we have a ten tons of gravel up here that will be laying some of the gravel on top of the drainage pipe with a bit of geotextile to keep that free and in a bit of Seoul on the top we're going to put up this greenhouse bit differently we're going to put a geotextile 50 centimeters all around the outside tucked into the ground and we'll put wood chip on top of that so we're never having to cut grass right the way up to the tunnel which is a bit of a liability row covers are coming back on now it's getting much chillier there's no danger of frost yet but it's certainly cold in the mornings and so we're keeping more sensitive crops under cover now and same goes in the other North beds here lots of tunnels coming back over we're approaching the last few days of our farm scale permaculture course and there's been a really nice course with a lot of interest in projects we're still here in the last of the presentations of people's projects but a lot of lands managed by this group and a lot of inspiring thoughts and ideas just here in the chiller just looking at some of the daikon there's a new vegetable press this year and they've come really well and popular with the chefs so we've only got a few days left of our farm scale permaculture course and it's been amazing it's a really nice group turns out today we had the last of the presentations of people's properties and they're managing three and a half thousand hectares between them amongst about twenty four people or so and that's amazing it's you know it's amazing to see people being exposed to the best models out there and being exposed to like the business and design thinking that makes it all work and people really taking it on and it feels really potent I'm really proud of the people that have come here and the diligence with which they're lapping up information but also gonna be applying to their projects and it's it's exciting you know there are more and more people turning to this who have serious assets and taking on big responsible E's who are passionate about this stuff and and that's what's really going to make it work is passion determination and that sheer desire to just do what needs to be done that's that's what makes farming work I've said that million times but basically a business like this works on passion and determination and if you haven't got that then farming is gonna be a really challenging livelihood we've been talking a lot today about efficiencies of building up your own infrastructure versus buying it I've just seen this new ozzie company like beyond the chicken Caravan company that make mobile chicken shelters also they as a new company making huge scale ones up to two and a half thousand less but it's interesting for me because these you know I can build these for 1,500 euros and have 400 hens and so next year we plan to double the hens but I will build two more of these I really like the design and I've been checking out the chicken Caravan it's no time-saving in my mind it's a big expense fifteen thousand euros for a chicken Caravan that can hold this many birds and to be honest I don't actually see any time saving at all it's just a lot of money to pay off with and so I'm happy just building two more of these something we want to do is take chickens to our neighbors land next year the grass here is thick and dense and these beautiful ladies are laying it down its vegetative growth so it's not gonna kick it back you can see it she passed the tree Lane where they were yesterday and it looks pretty flattened I'm gonna walk across a tree name which I don't normally let people do it looks flattened down but this grass is ready to pop back up and we're not bringing animals in here and to November if we have any left at that point and at which point it will just be pumping then we'll have a really nice stockpile grass so the turkeys are doing really good and they're getting bigger now so we took the biggest half and these are growing on we're gonna do maybe 2/3 of these after the PBC's ended we got a bit of a busy schedule we're doing chickens next there turkeys veg boxes and then a few of us are driving to England to pick up a new livestock trailer so busy times ahead I've got a long list of jobs I need to get done now for the end of the season and a big part that's gonna be putting a bit of time every day into the online training so we'll be announcing more about that as we know it and but I may mean to release that at the end of this year and it's gonna be like nothing else out there it's gonna be really important for folks who are looking to design and get started on the right foot all that effort we've put into business management and time planning time motion studies it's really gonna help people get started in the right way which I'm seeing on the ground here more and more and it's just yeah it's very potent and exciting but I want to show you up here that you might hear there's a forestry machine going in the background I can just see it in trees over here they're taking out all of this forestry here and I've said before in previous videos these entire hillsides are round all the way into the horizon all planned to be cleared in the next four years it's going to be catastrophic to the hydrological cycle already where they clear-cut behind where the pigs are right now we have two streams that weren't there before and you know that's the way it goes here it's a big you know industrial monocultural practice these are not forest systems they're monocultural single crop systems and when you cut them all we've been talking a lot about tree systems and perennial cropping and how trees regulate hydrological cycles and you see it very clearly in Sweden when they're clear-cut it has massive implications to diversity and to the lake systems Sweden has a lot of lakes and it's a week's havoc on them this machine is half a million euros and it's only economic to run 24/7 so now timber is cut every day of the year here and this thing is it's an impressive piece of engineering I have no doubt about that I mean it's felling 80 90 year old trees stripping them and slicing them into whatever desired length in you know 25 30 seconds of tree but that's a powerful tool to wield and you know it makes a mess of the soil as well as the habitat and water cycle here it's maddening to you know to have insight into all of these regenerative design practices and yet see you know the sad implications of not following nature's patterns I mean that's what we do here that's what this whole training is about for people is to invite people to see the world through a different pair of goggles you know to deconstruct the patterning we've been left with by friends family society institutions and start to see the world around this in terms of ecosystem processes in natural patterns I'm up here now at the we're on our neighbor's front field cows and sheep are doing good but I'm really I want to have some kind of lease on here because we're now grazing right up into their front paddocks even with the trees gone there's gonna be beautiful paddocks and I want to keep grazing these into the future because I'm willing to invest in the water pipe Network and bring chickens over here she especially with their new chicken design I think it's gonna be very easy for to bring poultry into here and run it in straight lines throughout this whole lifecycle but this ground is you know very low quality compared to ours the richness of the material on the ground is is poor compared to our land and chickens are the answer to that on the small farm you know poultry just provide this rapid boost of fertilization someone was commenting on an older video about hey we've got to acknowledge that that's imported nutrients from another farm and hey I totally agree and I'm very aware of it but while people are still willing to sell their nutrients and I'm willing to buy them and put them into my farm that's a context Realtors you know down to each of us but for me I'm very willing to kickstart this farms future because I've also made a plan to become debt-free very quickly and I'm very happy to educate my customer base to start to eat things like geese and rabbits and pigeons I've been looking into pigeons recently because I've always wanted to do pigeons the bird that will fly off feed itself come back and we take the squab for you know very beautifully textured meat it's something I'm very interested in you know fish rabbits geese pigeons these are energy efficient animals but in the meantime you know we've got a farm that hasn't had animals on it for decades and so I want to boost my fertility cycles and get my pastures going again and so I'm very happy to use important nutrients in my context if it's what I want to do it's you know a profitable way to farm all the enterprises we're doing here very profitable and so I want to demonstrate that whilst boosting up our land and then when we don't need to do those things anymore because we have a customer base that's educated to buy other things I'm very happy to switch because my personal needs are very low and but there's a lot to be said for that we've got to be pragmatic you know we've started up with eggs chickens turkeys vegetables now we've got sheep and pig for sale we'll have some beef for the reason this year these are things people eat all the time you've got to be smart you can't come in to idealistically because you're working in a globalised food marketplace and you lose if you don't play strategically and so yeah I'm very happy to take on all this land it's a way to really extend some of our productions and improve all this land but I only want to do that when I have the security of a lease and so it's a neighborly agreement we're great friends with our neighbors and they're wonderful neighbors to have but I need a bit of security to invest in a new flock of sheep and new water pipe Network etc so that's it for today folks just a quick update because we're super busy with the course I'm busy and doing evening sessions after dinner and it's you know I don't get a spare minute we've got a lot to do after the course too so I'm gonna try keeping putting videos out as often as I have been and I know a lot of people really value it so thanks for your comments and time as always you can find out a lot more in a book making small farms work however there might be a temporary gap in books for sale because we've run out of books new books are coming soon we've got thousands more coming and I'd love to hear the feedback from people around the world I know a lot of people that got a lot from that book it's written to be a very pragmatic straight-to-the-point book and that's what we're doing here and excited to update you always with the online course a lot of things are getting clearer for us and we're trying to make it very efficient in terms of time inputs but make it very personal and peer support to them we've got some great ideas coming up for that a lot of editing to do still in the meantime and I'll be posting updates in the coming months as it gets quieter here I'll be putting a lot more time into that and I'm hoping it's ready before Christmas I can't promise anything but let me know if you're interested and I'll keep you posted with updates on that thanks so much for your time and we'll see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Richard Perkins

Views: 70,471

Rating: 4.921618 out of 5

Keywords: ridgedale, ridgedale permaculture, keyline, keyline design

Id: 8coPmuWpUP8

Length: 39min 14sec (2354 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 23 2017