PERMACULTURE FARM WHERE SWALES ARE BANNED S4 ● E33

a lot of people get confused when they discover permaculture in here about things like swales and contour lines and then keyline design we were very impressed by keyline design for the last decade in our design work so I want to talk to you about what's going on behind me and some of the observations I've been making with the wet weather recently many people hear about things like swales these are uncompacted ditches dug on contour to catch and infiltrate water runoff that you know misappropriate is all over the world I feel like in the permaculture movement by people that probably have a lack of understanding of hydrology and of geology and when you change the shape of the earth it will influence water because water travels at 90 degrees to contour lines perpendicular to contour lines but when you change the shape of the ground you're creating very permanent change that could lead to problems that are unforeseen and the future and what we're trying to do our farm is evenly distribute water across the landscape which is why we favor PA Yeomans keyline design framework it's both an exquisite design framework for putting priority onto the things that the most permanent in landscapes starting at those places in our design work and going down to the areas of the lease permanent things like soil very easy to build soil though easy to destroy soil to but the tree lanes you see here are not on contour some people have mistaken them to swales or contour plantings but they're all falling off contour the basis of keyline cultivation patterning is that you create lines that fall from valley ten toes towards ridge centers now it's a bit more complicated than that but you know we do a week-long intensive training in keyline design and i've really laid it out in my book and broken it down what we've done here because you can't just pick it up in a short video like this it's been really misunderstood all over the world I think and this besides myself has one or two other professionals working with key line design in Europe and I think there's been miss publications and a lot of misinformation spread around the internet that doesn't really help with understanding this exquisite design framework it's a hold of a design framework in itself you know and we integrate it with Kili air with permaculture design as well as holistic management because they give us all the tools we need to design to you to prove farmed in my mind all these three lanes are putting this cultivation pattern that falls towards the center of a Ridge and what's interesting then is you're changing the hydrology you're you're pulling a key line plow along the same patterning between these rows but also planting trees on these rows - now there's a misconception that we're moving water toward the valley as Palma Valley towards a ridge shape and that's not strictly true what's happening when you pull this non inversion rigid time plow through the ground you're exploding the subsoil and when you explode the subsoil air and water can infiltrate into compacted soil so before we use this tool we came around the farm and we took samples in every one of the fields with a pen a trauma tur and that's a tool you push into the ground and it measures the compaction power as well as the depths that you're pushing it in the ground so you can visually read the state of compaction on the ground because plant roots can't penetrate below 300 psi and so we found a layer of compaction at about 22 centimetres where they used to plow each year to grow wheat here with a horse and so grass roots can really penetrate through that so we knew we wanted to pull a keyline plow through as a strategy to mechanically kick start the process of pasture regeneration and then use our animals in a holistic plan grazing setup to really start making the grass work and express its physiology we've now got roots going down to like 40 50 centimeters and this year we might pull the Cutler plow through for the third time reaching a depth of 40 45 centimeters which is pretty deep but I wanted to show you this observation because we're now in the middle of a ridge that runs down top field if you're familiar with a map of the farm this is the sort of center of this shape now we've got water sitting on the ground here which is never done before in history now I predicted this would happen when we first pulled the keyline plow through because we're water that's sitting on the ridge shape what is raining or precipitating on the ridge shape is sitting there much longer it still flows off the land in the same s-shaped curve that water always flows in but it takes a lot longer to do that so it's not so much we're moving water out of a valley shape towards the ridge shape it's more that the water landing there sticks around a lot longer and I predicted we would get wet spots here my concern is that it would it could lead to destabilizing the gravel roads here however I've already considered a way to deal with that and so my plan would have been to watch it and then to put little pocket ponds if it was a problem it's not really a problem you get a bit of standing water here in the early spring but as soon as growth kicks in it's you know it's covered up again really fast so it's not a big problem for us but it's an interesting observation I anticipated what I thought would happen and it turned out to be the case besides the Romans geometrical topographic planning of farm landscapes he also gave us the scale of permanence with relating to how to prioritize and layers of your designer that were according to the permanence of those features starting with the climate which control the species that you'll be using in the limitations on that fund and then designing water first because water's a very permanent feature in the landscape and you can't really change the way water flows through a landscape unless you change the shape at the land that's why we favor keyline plowing as a strategy for evening out water distribution across the landscape it's not that we're moving water from one place to another it's more that we're evening out water allowing it to sink where it lands it's why we don't promote things like swales we've never used them ourselves I've never actually seen them implemented in a way that I thought I could I couldn't get the same result cheaper and lower risk there's a lot of problems associated with digging swales or permanent water features and they will be concentrating water into a very small the landscape for a long time and they've often led to landslides and other problems that aren't talked about so much personally I always say the key line where it's appropriate because it's a much more gentle and intervention I pulled the key line plow through these fields twice and a couple of years later you would never know other than my grass is a lot better than the neighbors now and but something that Yeomans gave us was he wrote in his book the city forest he wrote about how to apply that whole system's design to urban developments where all the infrastructure was correctly placed in the landscape and roads in the correct place in the landscape to passively collect and move water from one place to another and this kind of whole system's thinking is something that's you know influenced my design work more than any other design approach we had some wonderful examples of bad planning here like these roads these roads go for hundreds of thousands of kilometers all over Sweden and they come and they basically rotor till the road and pack it again at least two times sometimes three times a year but this road is built in the incorrect place in the landscape from a yeoman's sort of perspective and it's amazing after like today it was two years ago now the day they actually packed the road in there there's the 50 millimetre rainfall which is a very large rainfall here and it Dougs six to eight inch trenches all the way down this road the world was basically a stream and roads can either be very expensive to maintain or they can be features that catch and move water passively from one place to another so it's a very correct place to put things in landscape whether it was treated Sims Road systems electric utility lines etc another element that's really great about keyline design is when you create these cultivation patterns on the landscape everything is parallel this fixed width which works with machineries for pulling things like a key line plow or if you were sowing crops but it also works well with animal infrastructure like putting in the fencing the electric fence that surrounds the chickens but also putting pulling along things like boiler pens where you can fit everything into a certain dimension the boiler pens are three meters wide for me is long and so in this field we have nine meter rows between the silver passing lanes and the black plastic there chestnuts here and so we can pull three boiler pens along with e it's the same in other fields we have three can run in a line in that field and four can run through front fields so it works really well with you know with basic farm procedures daily procedures that's something that you wouldn't find with swales for example because swales are not equidistant at all usually and as you have a very uniform piece of land which is not the case in most places you see the hens are starting to really explore now and they've had a nice day it's been a bit wet but there's no snow now so they're really utilizing their full paddock space now which is great to see we're going to be moving this egg 'mobile now tomorrow and they sort of jump ahead to patches and the other one keeps catching up here you can see where an egg 'mobile sat overnight and it's a high concentration of manure now it's calculated that you know if we're moving them every day then it doesn't build up too much that it's causing any problem but that would be really synthesized by the grass and given the warm weather coming it's going to go up to 15 16 degrees this week I think a wet day tomorrow and then nice weather for the rest of the week and that really will turn into a lush little patch of grass and our aim is to try and park the eggman Beals in slightly different locations every time to really spread that manure obviously they're putting manure in the rest of the field too but it's a little knack to moving the egg Mobile's because they're quite heavy in the fields can get quite wet here we get a lot of rain you want to park them on the crest of a little hill or facing slightly downhill to make it easier to move in the morning because the Rhino that we pull them with is very powerful machine it doesn't have much weight so it doesn't have the best traction in the world [Music] had a nice day just finishing up some jobs and calculating their the needs of the silos that were getting delivered soon to be able to take bog feeds and team have finished up in the loft has done a wonderful job up there and this weekend we decided we're moving out the house we're going to get the spaces set up so that everyone's got their own room space and feels really comfy here and the weather should be getting warmer for that the garden crew have been doing a fantastic job transplanting out some beautiful plaque toys today and in pretty wet weather but the gardens are looking great and tomato seedlings coming on cucumbers went in today so really excited to be getting more veg coming out of the garden now really craving like fresh nutrient-dense vegetables after the long winter but becoming on the trees leaving out that's happening with all the berry fruits so spring is coming slowly and I think by the end of the week we'll be having some beautiful weather and it'll be some of the first barbecues down by the lake hopefully that's it for today folks this big topics and you know as I said it's Key Lime designs been a massive influence to us we designed over 100 properties and several continents now and it's always a driving force in our in the way we approach design work and along with holistic management and permaculture design these three things really integrate so fluidly together as if you know yeah I think it comes out in our book making small farms work the approach that we take to design and and they're laying out of this farm that's big topics and you know it's often misunderstood so I encourage people to read up about it there's some good books out there and you can also find out a lot more in our book so thanks for taking the time to watch the videos and don't forget to share them with your friends that you think they will benefit from them and click Subscribe if you haven't already to stay up to date with the fun thanks for watching and we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Richard Perkins

Views: 273,007

Keywords: ridgedale, ridgedale permaculture

Id: Ro2J4IIJyxY

Length: 13min 11sec (791 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 27 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/xibipiio]

This is really interesting to me, great post! I seen another youtube video, can't find it right now but it was a man watching all of his topsoil wash away from berming and swaleing and creating a whole flood plain basically. Really sobering to be careful and be mindful of the full year and aware of the power of water.