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Post by prairiegarden on Dec 15, 2015 21:10:57 GMT -5
I can't find the original video which detailed the Tamara project in Portugal where Sepp Holtzer took an area of Portugal which was rapidly desertifying, even the cork trees were dying, and created a huge lake with only earthworks, no concrete, no pond liners. The owners of the land had been told by all sorts of engineers that it couldn't be done, but he not only did it, it has brought back springs and is now rejuvenating the land beyond Tamara.
Both Sepp Holtzer and Geoff Lawton specialize in how to manage water so as to make it stay in the landscape in a useful form as long as possible, recharging aquifers and moving back and forth with swales and ponds. but it always depends on reading the land and understanding what it has to say about how to go about it. Sepp's home in Austria is on a steep mountainside but he has something like 40 ponds,most if not all interconnected. There are You Tube videos of his property. It isn't that big but it IS amazing..the abundance and diversity (including thriving citrus trees NOT in a greenhouse!)it supports is enviable.
Geoff Lawton brought heavilly salted sterile soil 10 miles from the Dead Sea back into production..figs producing in 4 months from being planted. I strongly recommend researching what they have to say about managing water.
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Post by steev on Dec 15, 2015 22:08:05 GMT -5
My farm is mostly flat as piss on a plate, so some water-storage ideas are really not do-able, no water falling/draining onto it; further, while some is clay, the bulk is inorganic glacial silt, so it drains like a sieve; that's not all bad, given that I can pump to irrigate six months (Mediterranean climate) in most years. I have much more difficult water arrival issues than Holtzer does. I strongly believe that the cure for my water issues is the incorporation of organic material for water retention when it comes and water dispersal when it doesn't and I irrigate.
Further, I avoid leaving soil un-mulched, exposed to the sun and drying wind, as I think that cooks the organic matter out of it, not to mention the water. I have a neighbor who believes in "dust-mulch" and hates weeds, so he disks his unplanted acres to look "neat"; I think he hasn't learned the lessons of the 30's Dustbowl.
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Post by prairiegarden on Dec 16, 2015 13:32:51 GMT -5
Right..water retention is about the best plan possible and organic soil with some plants or cover will hold onto it better than anything else. Tamara at least had seasonal rains to fill the lake they built.
We have the same thing happening here with farmers thinking that bare soil is the best strategy for weed control and paying no attention to what is happening to their topsoil. Here, they are also busy ripping out hedgerows of trees that farmers PLANTED to get OUT of the Dust Bowl. I was astonished when I learned..as an adult!.. it had reached all the way up well into Canada and that some of the programs that got us out of it had been maintained since the 1930s.
Then the last( and thankfully ex) Prime Minister abandoned the program which had reserved thousands of acres of vulnerable land for pasture and trees only, and sold it all off to whomever wanted to do whatever to it, and dismantled a tree nursery which had given shelterbelt trees to anyone with more than 10 acres. Amazing how people with so little intelligence for anything but how to get elected actually do get elected.
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Post by philagardener on Dec 16, 2015 16:24:43 GMT -5
Many folks have little connection to the food they eat and don't understand where it comes from (apart from "the store"). If society collectively "forgets" lessons learned the hard way, they will have to be relearned the hard way. That is why teaching about food and farming is so important!
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Post by steev on Dec 16, 2015 17:32:30 GMT -5
Back when "The Terminator" was Cali's Governor, one of the really bright cost-savings to be enacted was to terminate Cali's system of regional nurseries which maintained stocks of regionally-appropriate trees for rapid re-forestation of burned-over areas; another short-sighted action bites us in the buttocks.
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