S4 ● E56 Day 3 on Farm-Scale Permaculture; studying water and a short update

A great fun day looking at keyline design, water management and different strategies at different scales for managing water. The default limiting factor of production of all kinds. These birds are less than seven weeks old. This will be the first batch that go to smoking for the restaurant for the theatre throughout the summer. Some good looking birds. Quite a big weight range as you would expect with broilers, but good looking birds and healthy, robust, amazing leg development on these beds. Very robust. Cows and sheep are very happy to be back on our land. And the way we work our grazing plan, we're bang on our grazing plan. It's working very well. But each field has set widths between the tree lanes. So in this field we're in top field kind of east to west facing tree lines with hazel on the back interspersed with fruit trees. This is a four year old apple in very good condition, about three and a half meters tall. And then on the front we got berry fruits because they're facing south ish. And so the sun, you know, reaches everything. And so we know the way the fences are going to be set up because of the width of these tree lanes. These were 18 meters but now we've put in chestnut and the strawberry going in later this year makes these strips 9 meters wide. So we know this is about 18,000 square meters in this field. And they've got to be in here. X amount of days during this pass on our grazing plan. At this time of year it works out they need about 900 square meters per day which is a two net move followed by a three net move later in the day. And it's an interesting thing to consider like giving animals a set area and giving them smaller areas. Totaling the same area in the same day will affect animal impact in some way because they will go through every single plant taking some of the forbs and things that give them a bit more nutrition than just cherry picking all the nicest grass. But it's also just a practical way to graze through this field because the thin tree lanes but the grass is developing really nicely and they're super happy and rumens are full and happy sheep and cows. So it's Friday night for the core team. But for us we're not having a weekend. We just started studying and we've got a long way to go. And we've been going deep into keyline design. How this design sublime design system works. It's a multi part full design system in itself. It gives us a scale of permanence for organizing and prioritizing the layers of our design. Which is great for taking permaculture up to the farm scale, but it also is this whole integrated land planning tool in itself. I just find it blends really well with permaculture and also holistic management. It's also about the keyline plough and subsoil ploughing in pastures to improve aeration and water movement within the subsoil. It's a way of blowing up the subsoil from underneath without disturbing the top. It leaves a very clean surface disturbance, like a knife going through the soil. And it's just like any other subsolar. It's just built very well. We came through here last year with it and you can't really see that we've been through here at all. We just have much nicer grass and we've alleviated wet spots around the farm. So we looked at a keyline plow and how that functions and what makes it a useful tool and how you could go about making one yourself if you, you know, if you're short on cash and you didn't have access to this machinery. And we got deep into digital design and I was showing everyone how you use different digital design software to design various different properties. We looked at different contexts and settings and how we might apply this design in those settings and talked a lot about water cleaning water through biological Systems. Looking at Dr. John Todd's work and Jay Abrams, who's pioneered wet systems, wetland ecosystem treatments in the uk based on bentonite clay. It's a clay liner. It's bentonite clay sandwiched between textile, the stuff that we've used to line the pond here because we didn't have enough clay in our soil to do an earthen pond, and that's suitable for containing sewage and other industrial wastes. And you make contour strip ponds with this material. And it's the soil life, the bacteria and fungi and the aquatic and submarginal species that really eat pollutants and manure. From dairy herds to industrial factories to chicken processing plants to household sewage containment and processing. Amazing solutions. You know, the beauty of a training like this is we start to find that there are always solutions to the problems that people perceive in the world around them. It's always fascinating to see. It's the biological solutions that allow some creature in an ecological niche to express its physiology are usually cheaper, more efficient, safer, quicker to act and even productive. Producing some useful resource out of waste, essentially. And so there's always solutions. Doesn't matter whether we're applying pattern to restore dry land erosion, gullies back to flowing streams. Applying the pattern of keyline topography to distribute water evenly through the landscape, and then applying the pattern of wild animal grazing in some form in our holistic management grazing to allow grasses to express their physiology. It's all based on making soils able to capture carbon and hold water and drive production so they can capture more carbon, hold more water. In this exponential regeneration, in my experience designing, you're either in this exponential cycle of regeneration or an exponential degeneration. There really isn't any in between. If you're setting up the processes for regeneration to happen, they happen on their own and exponentially. And if you are damaging land, it will degenerate naturally on its own. So we're just up in nutfield, and these are hickory, and that's why it's called nutfield. It's savanna plantings. You can't really see them because the grass has grown up so strong. But we've got both the eggmobiles up here. Now, the drainage that we made, we just ended up in the gateway here, Putting in one drainage pipe and putting a little gravel on top and then filling it with soil to let it grass over and it's dried up perfectly. We got both the light and the heavy egg mobile up here, no problem. And we're just being careful now. It's very interesting observation we've made. We actually got stuck right here where you can see tire skid marks with the light eggmobile. Now, the light eggmobile tends to not get stuck anywhere. It's half the weight nearly of this one and this one got through here. So we must have missed this wet patch. Now, the reason we weren't aware of this wet patch is it's never been wet here before. It is wet up here where you see these sedges. And it's a sort of little valley shaped draining out here. But during this winter, they clear cut about a hectare and a half of trees that were up here. And because of that, it's changed the hydrology. And water is now flooding all the way out here. You see the tire tracks there, creating a wet spot. It's okay. It's no major problem for us. We just got to be aware now how we enter and exit these parts of the field. This will obviously change as the young forest grows up again. But it's just interesting to see because this is happening on massive scale across Sweden with clear cutting on hundreds of thousands of hectares. And it really damages the hydrological cycle as well as spilling out nutrient and particles into the lakes and causing problems there so it's interesting to observe these little things and show people these ecosystem processes. Today we've been talking a lot about water and the bigger patterns of water in the landscape. Tomorrow we're talking about tree systems. And tree systems really regulate water systems. I've worked a lot in the Mediterranean climates where old ladies in the village will show wells and springs that have dried up. And pretty much every time I've seen that, it's the forest on the hill that's been cut down, that's led to that spring drying up and it will never flow again until the trees are put back in place. Trees are absolutely fundamental in governing water cycle lower down in the landscape. So we've been learning a little bit about tree systems, but we're going deeper into that in the coming day tomorrow and seeing how trees function in different places in the landscape and how trees are so important for managing hydrological cycles and all the different patterns we employ in farm design with different tree layouts, either to protect expensive infrastructure like roads or waterways, to protect poor soils on the tops of hills that are typically poor soil and bad for pasture or annual cropping. There's very specific places for everything in a landscape, and that's what this scale of permanence the PA Yeomans gave us really informs, has really influenced my work and it's a really potent tool that we're really sharing the things that work in our training. We're not talking strictly permaculture as it's laid out in some of the original books. We're really integrating different design frameworks that really work from our experience and from other experienced designers around the world too. I'm just up at the neighbour's land and I'm showing you some comparisons throughout the season, because this is the state of our grass up in the top of Topfield and in Nutfield before we moved in. You see it's very sparse between the plants, a lot of moss in between in places. And the grass is stunted. It really doesn't grow. It's all gone to seed now and it's not going to grow anymore. It's gone into seed production, not vegetative growth. But you can really see when you see the shots of our pasture, how radically different it is, and largely down to the power of chicken. We're having long, intensive days, but it's super fun to hear participants sharing about their projects, which we'll work on later as design projects, and building up layers of design. Eric in Mexico, we met him in Mexico before and he's come to do the internship here and he was sharing about the piece of land he's been given long term to utilize. And he's growing quinoa and different cash crops for Mexico city, like strawberry, etc. And he's working on that design and all his spreadsheets already, as well as his context. And it's very interesting to see, you know, very different plant species and climate that's familiar with, but perhaps some of the group aren't. And then straight to South Africa, where one of the participants is sharing the site they have, which is they've taken over. It's a big jump for them. They come from abroad and it's got zebras and impalas and things on it because it used to be a game reserve. And so they're finishing a gentleman's agreement and designing up their place, which was a pineapple farm, monoculture pineapple farm at some point, but wooded as well. And they're designing that up into a learning site as well as a small production farm. And then we heard from another participant who's got a long established family business in the uk, turning over a huge amount of money in their farm shop and productive enterprise and dairy, but not producing the sort of results they want on the dairy front. They're looking to, you know, innovate and find solutions to their circumstances. I'm really excited to hear more about these projects and it's, you know, it's really humbling to see people who have, you know, decades of experience with working with livestock and farming and business and, you know, still finding there's hitting points with, you know, in the commodity markets, etc. And, you know, we're going to really explore that, look at business models, look at design elements that could improve this scenario. It's always touching to, you know, to hear people share their passions and what they're up to and where they see the weaknesses are and this true clarity that comes from defining context. I know that some of them have been writing their context, some have even done holistic management trainings and have written their context. And it's this further process of clarification and developing strategies to meet their quality of life statements, which is always a pleasure to work on. And, you know, that's why we're here doing this thing. Got our new silos up. We were in class, but I think they came with a timber delivery wagon that has a crane on for lifting logs on to deliver the logs. But they kind of look like they fit the farm already. We've got some nice paint Coming. We're gonna give them a lick of green paint and putting roofs on the top. We've put in wood construction so we can put on a roof that we've already constructed. And I quite like them. The concrete, if you watch old videos, was quite substantial concrete, but there's a lot of weight on these tiny little feet. But it's built to last a thousand years. I'd say it could take five times the weight, no problem. But a lick of paint and, you know, the invested money, it's going to save us €3,000 on top of what we've already invested in it, just this season alone. So it's a great investment for us. There's a nice illustration of microclimates here on this old apple tree. It's just coming into flower on the south side, but the flowers against the wall, even the wooden wall takes quite a lot of heat. And the flowers on the wall there were finished about four weeks ago. And you get a lot of heat even on a wooden wall. That makes a lot of difference to a sensitive plant and quite a big difference to this apple tree. I'm predicting it's going to be a very good apple year this year. We had a moderate apple year last year and a poor apple year the year before. But there's been a lot of blossoms and good weather during the fruit set. So I anticipate we'll have a good fruit harvest this year. That's all today, folks. We're watching movies tonight about water systems. I'm checking in with the core team who have their weekend off. We don't have a weekend, but quick video today just to update busy days here at the farm. So I haven't got time to make so much video. Thanks for watching, as always. Click, subscribe, share the video with your friends and see you next time.