this is what i call steeling in broad daylight.

Thanks for the reply Geoff…it will be interesting indeed to see how you make this all eventuate especially around the statement that the ‘Machinery will have to be adapted to landscape because landscape will not adapt to machinery’…reminds me of our good mate and HM mentor Kirk Gadzia saying: ‘Is the reason why we have erosion or poor water cycles because we don’t have enough swales?’ (Just the same as ‘Is the reason we have weeds because we don’t have enough poison?).

At a mechanical level that also conjures up thoughts of amazingly articulated couplings to enable turning in tight spacings without churning up the soil surface in headlands along with this farm developing its own machinery manufacturing plant. That of course is nothing new as farmers have long built or adapted machinery out of various necessities that have otherwise confounded them along the way, with these then becoming mass marketed.

My comments around layout configurations were drawn from my own long experience in designing then developing and managing larger scale integrated systems where we are attempting to fill places with as many production opportunities as pragmatically possible and did this originally using contours (up till about 1994) and were forced by the sheer access difficulties to crack a new code. That code was ultimately created by my (then) surveyor (Konrad Ensor) and I and came from Keyline.

Though we applied the Keyline geometry in a way that Yeomans had never before devised (ie applying Keyline to row cropping of integrated broadscale tree/vegetable/cropping polycultures), we were using this geometry to maintain equidistant rows of vegetation in row crop configurations and do so with the same spatial density and access provisions of more traditional rectilinear layouts. This gives us the control of water flows as occurs with contouring but overcomes the layout issues and lack of spatial density with using a contour-based arrangement.

Notwithstanding any smaller crop fields (what 50m x 50m or 25m x 25m ‘cells’ within the ‘bands’ of ‘polyforest’) will have commercial production imperatives imposed that will demand effective access for the various operations especially when scaled up.

Thanks for the reference and I being a broadacre designer have long noticed these natural patterns myself over our part of the world (SE Australia), in other environments along with more recently in places such as Extramadura where the famed Dehesa agroecologies have long been in existence. Certainly the natural shaping of these bands are close to contour and it is part of our job as designers to be inspired by this but take this patterning so much further: that is the art of applying Permaculture ethics and principles, along with adapting a range of other aligned methodologies to designing the landscapes we come to work on.

Good luck with the project and I for one will really be looking forward to seeing the design treatments that you and your team come up with….

All the best,

Darren

Banded Vegetation Patterning in Arid and Semiarid Environments, Ecological Processes and Consequences for Management, Ecological Studies 149, edited by David J, Tongway, Christian Valentin, Josiane Seghieri

Would be interested to see the practicality of such a layout where swales (being on contour) are naturally not parallel and therefore the interrow vegie alleys etc will be problematic (as there will a lot of ’stubb rows’) for the movement of cultivation, planting and harvesting machinery, which may not be a consideration on a 5ha pilot project but then on the scale up (that we of course hope occurs!) then it will become a real pain.

This is where the Keyline geometry comes in of course as following completion of a what would probably be a 100-200mm topo survey (with a total station) the designers would then orient the design such that any rows where mechanical access is conducted will have the rows end in headlands not awkwardly ending up banging into unparallel lines of trees.

This is why many farmers across the world who have put in contour banks tear them out as though they served a purpose in time for soil and water conversation but not at all for machinery access. Keyline is a superior broadscale geometry to follow in my opinion as it overcomes this issue and provides us with the best of both worlds.

Of course the most important strategy in any situation is keeping ‘100% groundcover, preferably living and perennial, 100% of the time’ such that any rainwater infiltrates where it falls increasing the water and mineral cycles across the board with the whole land surface becoming a swale in effect. The work of Holistic Management practitioners across the world highlights this and in the foothills off of the floodplains of this site, along with the hills themselves, HM Planned Grazing would work to reducing the source of the highly damaging flood waters that cause such damage along with recharging the aquifers across the whole site not after the ‘horse has bolted’…

I am gladdened by Geoff’s participation in the upcoming conference in the middle east in which he and Allan Savory are keynotes such that the two great methodologies of Permaculture and Holistic Management can come together in yet another forum.

Thanks and congratulations,

All the best,

Darren