Recharging A Well part i - John Kaisner The Natural Farmer

hello I'm juggernaut and you're watching the natural farmer [Music] [Music] okay so in this video we're going to travel to a different town it's a village one of the villages that the NGO that I work for has adopted here in India it's about seven hours northeast of here where I am now in Kerala and at the demonstration farm we receive between two and a half and three meters of rain a year the place that we're going to they receive 82 centimeters a year so it's about one-third the amount or less it's in what they call a rain shadow which means that there's a small mountain range kind of hill range that pushes all the weather up dumps the rain on the far side and it comes across on the side that we'll be working on so they don't get as much rain as the other side of the mountain does rain has been down over the last 20 years see it all over the world actually and farmers are still waiting for the rains to return to the way that they were that's a pretty common reaction for all farmers myself included but part of the solution is to just accept the conditions as they are now and to move forward this kind of I don't want to put too fine a point on it but this kind of wishful thinking syndrome a little bit in terms of rainwater harvesting it needs to be set aside and move forward with the conditions as they are today because otherwise people won't take action they'll just wait for things to miraculously resolve themselves even though there's more and more degradation happening on the planet okay in terms of nature so that's a very important point okay so I want to stress that the other part is that we are very grateful just to have a farmer to cooperate with us because we asked a number of farmers and many seemed quite hesitant understandably so we move a big piece of equipment on their land the land is like their child it's very sacred and it's a responsibility that we don't take lightly okay all of that being said this farmer agreed to work with us so as you'll see in the video we find the contour we set up a trench the trench is connected to a pond and the pond is located right next to the farm as well okay so I think that's all I need to really say an introduction this is going to be a two-part video so the first part of this video is going to strictly focus on the caching of water the rainwater harvesting a groundwater recharge aspect that happens and then the second part of the video will focus on the food force that we plant up so this will be a two stage kind of filming here so this is part one here okay so this is just a little drawing of basically what we did so the farmers well is located here okay it's a huge well they're kind of well that you walk down into I can show you that footage right now so the goal is two or two goals one is to recharge this well and two I'll show you what the different pencil is to stop the land from falling into this seasonal River because there's a seasonal River here and all the water is flowing down down down down down it's eroding his land on this side okay so there's two goals recharge and stop erosion the neighbors trees are like along here basically this whole kind of area of trees okay this is the neighbor there is a ravine where the water accelerates it goes down kind of into a ravine here we're not going to take care of that yet we'll take care of that on part two of this but our plan and then there's a there's a path that runs here with our farmer or some fields back here and the field the main experimentation afield is is here okay and there's like a little berm here okay that's already exists so what we did the little flagged stakes are the contour that we ended up finding right here so there's a big trench so I'll just draw this trench and the trench kind of bends this way and then that kind of feeds into this pond that we make here okay like that okay so then the earth berm is on the backside of this it kind of comes around and gets a little bigger and then it gets smaller and smaller and smaller so here's the earth bar back side of the pond firm okay then this is where we harvest water this is water harvested all along this contour trench okay so it's like a big arm that reaches out and it grabs the water as the water is coming down the water always goes perpendicular to this trench so it grabs the water coming that would normally erode this whole area we're grabbing it and we're putting it in this pond and when we put it into this pond this pond naturally percolates toward the well because this is downhill and as this subterranean water fills in this area it will go into this well and recharge the well so that's the first part the second part is this perimeter trench now the farmer said that occasionally there's a truck needs to come through here for harvesting purposes so we left this open for now but we made another trench basically here and another berm basically right at the edge okay this is a berm earth berm and this is also where we harvest water [Music] so then the idea is that he's got nitrogen-fixing trees here okay they're currently here so we keep the nitrogen fixers here in this kind of zone okay because they keep this from a road and down into the seasonal river but in addition would basically are going to plant a long line of mango trees on here so these has become the new mangoes the short-term benefit is that these mangoes provide food provide fruit they harvest the water from this trench and then we also provide a series of trees in a form of what we call food forest here not on this back side of the pond I don't want it to erode the contents of the pond sometimes when you plant the fruit trees on a pond bank it will make it leaky pond so you don't want that we're basically going to have fruit trees here so we have water harvesting we have soil conservation we have a crop and form of fruit trees and then he can cultivate this area as he likes and he can cover cultivate this area as he likes so that's the basic breakdown of what we're doing at this man's farm level okay and now my level is still little bit same okay check that it's okay check it this is low now it's correct okay same same - correct or stick [Laughter] cameraman okay so we're at the end of the day and basically we have staked out juggernauts field we've taken I'd say about a half an acre he seems more and more open to the idea so we're pretty excited about that but all along here we've basically run three contours one two three and the plan is over in this area is to put a pond that's connected to a swale so the Swale will catch all this water running across the land and it will fill the Swale and dump it into the pond and then there'll be an overflow it'll go down into the next whale so you want two ponds this upper pond because it's the closest to the well so we always want to catch water closest to the well now it's not in a perfect situation the perfect situation would be having the land come downhill and then the well at the bottom of the hill and then everything you catch will automatically just gently go into the well we are in the proximity of the well we're gonna we're gonna harvest water that will go to the subterranean levels near the well and it will recharge it but it's not a perfect situation for recharge but we're gonna have to work with what we have and then the second pond we're aiming for is back over here so if I walk around this is the downhill side now the downhill side will still put water into the subterranean levels but some of it will leak out into the ravine but we just want to catch it also for preventing erosion so we've got an uphill pond and downhill pond both of them will be fed by swale so this is the plan we'll try to take a little bit better image of this tomorrow with maybe some powder on the ground some rice powder so you'll be able to see the soil much easier you so we are ready to go here's the width of the trench we've marked it out we've got our contour we've spoken with our driver we've shown them a little drawing and have basic understanding of what's happening here okay good it's a very small trench super no problem [Applause] he'll get the hang of it that's a very small trench for him this is again some of the restraints that we're facing here in terms of possibilities doing them or not because the teeth on this tractor on this JCB are going to be problematic you want to one smooth normally and you can see that the teeth are not going to make this trench smooth so we're literally gonna have to come back and shape these trenches by hand which is what we're up against here it's the first project we're working with with these guys and so you face some of these things in the beginning okay so this area here is too steep we want to cut this down some and then we're going to shape this whole area up the mound of the berm [Applause] okay so now this trench is basically dug we have just a little bit more shaping to do but as you can see it's got a nice kind of serpentine shape gentle serpentine shape which is usually a sign that you've treated found contour and that you're not just making straight lines in the landscape okay but now we've moved to the next step over here where he's scraping off the topsoil from this pond so the JCB will slowly take the first 1 foot 18 inches of the topsoil off to place it back behind us over behind the trench here and then the farmer will put that topsoil in the land as needed you don't want to bury this topsoil under a berm it would be completely wasted because it takes many many many many hundreds of years to make nice topsoil and this farmer has about 1 foot 18 inches of this beautiful topsoil [Applause] okay so basically at this point we've got the entire area cleared of topsoil and so we go to the next step which is to make a trench basically around the outside and to angle it down at a 45 and to lift the dirt out over the edge and to make like a rim going all the way around this pond okay because remember right behind where the camera is is well and we want to hold water in this area off the trench gonna hold it and then we're gonna run a spillway over into this pond itself so you're gonna gently spill over what it gets too high so it doesn't flood this other area over here the first step is to make a make a rim around you you okay so here we are day two it's about 10:30 in the morning I think we're gonna up and running again for about an hour and a half I'd say this first trench has been dug cap dog yesterday started slowly and then the operator found his rhythm and knocked it out pretty well and then the pond I got shaped well so we have the the edge of the pond shaped now we're just waiting for a tractor to come and take the central material out and get it at the depth that we want and then take this material over this back side to do another part we're gonna help build an earth dam over there fill in a gully but then this side is you know all the water is basically moving kind of in this direction this this direction it changes a little bit as you move over the landscape this is a border trench so the idea is in permaculture assists don't let the water leave your land this farmer has lost a massive amount of land here over the years his farm used to be about another 20 meters that direction beyond our extremity here but it's all fallen into this seasonal River because it just rushes down this hill and erodes okay and then what makes matters worse is for years there are these nitrogen-fixing thorny trees here and for years people would come with big trucks and pull them out they'd dig them out and remove the trees because they wanted to use them for firewood and the farmer said yeah no problem but to his detriment because these trees have actually shown up to hold the land and he aggravates the situation by letting the people take the trees okay so now he's not doing that anymore the neighbors across the way have actually planted cacti in addition to these trees to help hold the soil so people are becoming more conscious at the fact that if you don't hold the soil it disappears in your farm literally shrinks he estimates that his farm has shrunk by about an acre he's lost an acre of land into this river this because it's you know this is these are like it's very dry here 82 centimeters of rain every year okay throughout the year it does have a monsoon about the third week in June and that's why we're doing this work now we're in the first week of 8th of May and so as a dry area or a drying area because it's become drier and drier over the last 30 years like we see all over the planet we go more in peaks and valleys in terms of the rainfall so there's no rain it's dry everybody sees how dry it is and then a massive rain comes washes everything out takes a ton of topsoil and you see these instead of there being a nice smooth curve as there is in like a more kind of monitored place with more trees a little bit more rainfall the trees start to disappear people miss manage to land and it becomes peaks and valleys very exaggerated amounts of rainfall you know flood and drought and flood and drought and you see this over and over and over and then you take on a full desert environment and it's it's flood flash flood and drought so what we're trying to do very slowly as well as we can bit by bit is to help catch water and then in catching the water you start to reestablish the ground cover and we also start to reestablish the trees and that's the goal here and hopefully if we demonstrate it in one area other farmers start to pick up on this the NGO can help different people there are government schemes there are options but this must be reversed and stopped and that's what we're trying to do here [Applause] [Applause] you okay so there's part one in this video we hope you enjoyed it well hope you learned something as always if you have any questions feel free to ask down below and stay tuned for part two of this video I am planning on going up there very soon because the monsoon has just started here in the south of India and Kerala and that usually means there's about a two week delay between here and there which would allow us to go up there and then have the rain start and then plant the saplings on the months and that's the idea is you want to get them on the bunch while it's raining because otherwise it's too hard for the farmer to maintain all those saplings so end of part one my name is juggernaut thanks for tuning in [Music]

Channel: The Natural Farmer

Views: 86,057

Keywords: The Natural Farmer, Permaculture, Groundwater Recharge, Water Harvesting, Well Recharge, Drylands, Swales, Continuous Contour Trenches, CCTs, Contour Line, Contour Trenching, Pond (Geographical Feature Category), Erosion Prevention, Ettimadai, Amrita Serve

Id: 15GGV4sIMuM

Length: 21min 26sec (1286 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 05 2015