Permaculture Keyline Water Systems: Tom Ward @ Wolf Gulch Farm

first come the birth you got to take care of it and come to people then which is fair share of it as I fall the earth and you disciple y'all to help design a world better for you and everybody now we're working on a farm on the edge of possibility this is the edge of what can be done good morning my name is Tom Ward I'm a permaculture counselor I help people design their landscape this is wolf Gulch farm and the family at Wolf Gulch the Powell's and I put this place together starting in the late 90s 1999 and this is the siskiyou mountains and that back Ridge Dutchman's peak the Pacific Crest Trail runs along it is at about 42 degrees latitude it's the Oregon California border and we're standing here at about 2,600 feet elevations and right now we're looking at what was done about 12 years ago when we built this place and now we have an operating farm it mostly grows seed crops and CSA vegetables and feeds to people who live on the farm and the whole thing is laid out in keyline principles which is an Australian method of of soil management and of water management and of looking at the landscape for its patterns and we're now going to go for a tour and look at the system well here we are at the takeout point we call this the spring this white pipe feeds everything and this watershed above us runs a mile or more up to the ridge and has lots of different heads it's way more than a square mile and the water just sinks in and sinks in all the time and it last it comes up and right now we've got water running this is a system that mostly runs underground this Creek desculpe and here it's at the surface and we're skimming we're just taking some water off the top of a bigger flow and you can see that we've got water check out this cottonwood tree this is the barn Pond we call it and it's exclusively fed from the roof of this barn with these downspouts it's also water that's at the top of our agricultural system so it means moving water out of here down into the greenhouses or down into other systems is fairly straightforward this is an open place in the pipe system that runs over to the Egyptian I call it an observation port I think it's really important to have locations where you can see how your water is flowing and how much water is flowing and so the spring which is up in the main Gulch here which is the first place water appears on the surface in the spring is where our takeout is and basically a pipe runs all the way to this pond and this pond is basically a big transfer box it's called the Egyptian because we really admire how the Egyptians really got their stuff together so we're honoring them here and then from here we have a big overflow pipe as well as the spillway that goes down and is buried and feeds all these different drip irrigation systems in all these different fields so this is kind of the heart of our system and then we had to line these ponds even though it's good Adobe clay because the water situation got so dying and this pond liner allowed us to survive the drought and keep farming there's a valve on a big six-inch line right here and that valve is at the end of a pipe line that runs up to the Egyptian pond so that's a dam face now I'm standing in a key line canal this key line canal is for flood irrigating these production fields you put you put a flag in it's called which is a temporary dam made out of fabric and then the water you release out of that big valve comes roaring down in this big open ditch and then flows gently over the edge of the ditch and saturates the ground sinking into the ripping lines that we made with that plow and this is a key line plow and it has big deep shanks so calling it a plow it's more of a sub soil Ripper this field that I'm walking into now this is a green manure field this is how we do absorption of carbon into the soil because all of this will be filled in and we'll act like composting on-site and here we are moving over into a major hedgerow without these hedgerows even with our careful irrigation this whole landscape would dry out in a hurry during the day dry hot winds roar up through this farm at night cool breezes come down through the cool breezes sink and are channeled by these key line irrigation canals and then the coldest air is drained off instead of through the crops so there are some advantages to mountain farming that have to do with drainage that have to do with pressure in your water system and back of me is the herb garden the vineyard over here these two locations are in the hottest part of this whole valley well this is West here's southwest this is a southwest facing slope and then over on this slope over here is almost the opposite of the grapes and the herbs you've got a northwest facing slope it's cooler it stays cool in the morning and that's going to be a fruit orchard you can see where the mulch is down to protect the new trees that have been put in upon this slope in between these big long swales our winter grain terraces dryland farming and just below each of the swales are lines of walnut trees so this is agroforestry in the making and we're able to irrigate those crops because of the Egyptian because these are still below the height that the Egyptian pond is at and we can run drip irrigation over to all these trees were establishing this pond the red shale pond it's right now pretty much full and it is almost 12 foot deep 14 12 foot deep it holds a lot of water this is what I call a heroic pond especially when we put a pond liner in it when we first built this pond we did test pits we found good clay but when we got the bulldozers in we hit rock at the far end of this pond and that rock turned out to leak even though we patched it with clay so we ended up putting in a big pond liner this is an awesome swimming pond and the kids are down here all the time that's the main valve array a great big eight inch pipe that runs straight through the dam into the pond and then below this pond is our best production fields these are the fields that have really been in high production we've got water for sure through the whole season because of this giant reservoir and we've got really good pressure and this whole thing is also laid out on key lines everything collects cold air and collects storm water and all these systems eventually are collected and flow out of our farm fields down next to the end of this granary line of black Oaks but down there in the bottom of Wolf Gulch you see the face of a dam which we call the maple dam because there's maples and back of it that is a giant dry pond that only fills in a flood year and it is our silt trap and everything past that is downstream into the little Applegate River and then down the little Applegate River into the Applegate River and down the Applegate River pass Grants Pass into the Rogue River and then ultimately out to the Pacific Ocean these river systems coming out of these incredibly complicated geological formations of desist cues and this is our life we're keeping it as pristine as possible hoping that someday the salmon will return and fertility will return to this landscape so there's a really big picture farming on the edge we're having fun and we love what we're doing and isn't it beautiful check it out glory keeps us happy nice to meet you you

Channel: Andrew Millison

Views: 286,398

Rating: 4.8431373 out of 5

Keywords: permaculture, keyline, farm, tom, ward, applegate, siskiyou, millison, resilience, survival, sustainability

Id: rhATikyzLOo

Length: 10min 42sec (642 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 27 2012