Experience? Well yes, but that’s something that you can learn along the way. You don’t need to be the World’s best Graphic artist or AutoCAD genius, but you do need to be creative, have an eye for landscape patterning and a PDC in hand.

I just finished my first Permaculture design commission and I was hoping to share some of the process with you. Within the 11 years of experience with my own landscape design firm, I rarely put pen to paper with design. I found success even while employing experienced people to draw plans and document. My job then, like now, is main-frame design. I leave the finer points to specialists.

Your job as a designer is to know the process. You have the contacts in place to co-ordinate, instruct, manage, and even educate, if the professionals you engage are not permaculture systems trained.

What’s the process?

The process is the series of events that you will need to successfully master over time and refine to suit each client. Don’t think just because you’re now in the realm of the Permaculture world, full of ethics and good will, that people’s attitude towards paying money for your services will change, or the value they place on your time. I spend a lot of time speaking with my clients on the phone before I even think of getting out of my office chair to go and see them! (Mind you that office chair looks over the Pacific Ocean, and that’s hard enough to leave!)

Google map with topo map overlay for property.

The reason I question my potential clients so much is to look at some basics: 1) What’s their vision? 2) How do they plan to implement a permaculture design once the design is completed? 3) What do they think it’s going to take to achieve their vision? You can go and spend thousands of your clients dollars on reports, colour plans, graphs, and yet a client may still look at your work and won’t be able to find north on the map.

In my experience, it is easy for clients to have grand visions of what it means to live a sustainable lifestyle. Many have romantic ideas about growing their own food, reusing their waste and building compost without considering that yes(!) it is a lot of work: it’s going to take maintenance! I often refer my clients back to question three from above. “What do they think it’s going to take to achieve their vision?" "Oh that’s easy, we’ll just plant some veggies in the corner and use the water from the water tank". Stop!!! At the moment a client says “Oh that’s easy” that’s a warning bell that the clients you’re dealing with don’t understand the undertaking or commitment of what they are dealing with…. and your backside has not event left the seat yet.

The vision they expressed to you was one of abundance. They saw food growing from every corner of their property, water harvesting systems, and miles of food forest and animal systems. Yet, a realistic and practical maintenance schedule wasn’t a part of their vision. Home renovation and landscape gardening TV shows that flood our screens sell the easy 30min crash course of how to construct a garden. From that, so many feel capable and experienced enough to chuck in a garden. The television’s easy sell often misses the accounting related to the cost of design, cost of project management, labour and the amount of people behind the scenes coordinating the process. So often their vision doesn’t match the reality of implementation. As a designer, it’s your job to look at the process and find the best process to suit the client’s needs and, most of all, the client’s time & budget.

It is encouraging that we’ve seen a popular trend in going "green" or "sustainable" these days. Yet, whatever the trend may be, you’re going to get calls from people that have the money to do great things and have all the good intentions but very little of the design skills needed to make a practical system work. If they don’t understand how permaculture systems work and how to use them, it is your job to look at the process with them. There is an education element in that process that will allow you spend time with your client. You can show them how their plan will evolve and come together, realistically. I find it helpful to remember the small steps. Humans are very funny creatures. You don’t want to scare clients away with over-the-top architect plans or overly complicated specifications. These will be the parts of the design process that you will need to break down for your clients and incorporate into your plans: reports that you will receive from the consultants you engage.

Once you’ve worked with your clients to articulate a comprehensive vision, how do your clients plan to implement a permaculture design once the design is completed? Well, if they say to you “we plan to tender it out, get it installed by professionals and have a gardener look after it”. That’s fine and that will happen, but the questions you have to ask your self are: Are you cut out for the massive commitment to do the planning to a standard from where a contractor can pick up the plans and give the client a price to construct based on your plans? Could you set out a bill of quantities? Can you draw scale technical plans?

Your client may express "We want to install it ourselves!" O.K.! But even if they install it themselves, do you know the construction process to document for your client to follow? Will you need to do site visits during the design process? How do you move forward as a designer here? So this is where you need set out what your skill level is; how you could service this client without biting off more than you could chew. Are you capable of setting up a process by where you consult to your new clients, get the vision, and engage your technical professionals? Do you know how to find professionals that have the skills to put full landscape architect designed plans together with your permaculture main frame experience (water, access, structures)? Can you engage a horticulturalist, engineer, drafts person, etc?

These are very important questions we as permaculture designers need to ask before we leave the chair and get our minds around the design process. That’s just the first phone call! A good use of a website in this process can show your potential clients how you work and what services and processes you follow to get them a result. I have found that putting prices for types of design work, like consultation, looking at sizes of properties (urban – suburban – small farms – broad acre) and giving clients prices on deliverables within each design size works well.

Google map overlay with proposed design systems placed as a concept

I have included some concept pictures of plans throughout the process on this first commission. I used Google maps to place a contour map overlay over the Google image to give me very rough idea of how the farm looks and where I can start looking at the big three (water, access, and structures). It is wise to never fully trust a contour map unless you have had a surveyor on site with a highly detailed topographical plan. Being on the ground with a laser level for a day will save you in the long run. Whether a small urban garden or a 500 acre farm, walking the site step-by-step, meter-by-meter, is the only way to do it.

I use a very simple program – Microsoft Paint. I know of others out there using Google SketchUp and other programs that allow more flexibility. You can see where I mark, using different colours, elements that would be used as the base of the concept. I then print out the Google map on A2 size paper. I then use tracing paper to draw in property lines, and contour lines. I mark the swales, dams, farm tracks, roads, swale crossings, and then structures. While on the property the whole day is spent with a measuring wheel in hand looking at revegetation areas and pasture cropping. You might say, “Why don’t you just use a scale plan to mark them out?” You don’t know the farm until you walk them and take notes on what each area is and what it requires. I then, again on the tracing paper, colour it with different markers to show swale trees, bamboo, gabion, fences, rock outcrops for non workable land, etc…. Then once I have enough detail (and you will only know this once you hand it to your AutoCAD genius or in my case a graphic artist, if they can look at it and make sense of it then you job is done), then you end up with what I have shown in the site plan Master Plan.

I like a graphic artist’s finish. It looks more natural in its application and more detailed. On a scale of 1-10, 1 being very basic and 10 being very detailed, this master plan would be about a six. If my approach interests you, I’m setting up (Landscape) Permaculture Designing Courses next year in Victoria, NSW & QLD.

These courses will spend time looking at the steps of consultation, designing, drawing, pricing your time and quoting while also focusing on business management and how to get yourself started. The details are listed below.

The Aim of the Program:

I’m committed to training creative, confident and professionally superior permaculture designers. On completion of your course you will be entitled to design within the permaculture field, fully competent to undertake the following tasks:

• Creating sustainable, functional permaculture designs. (Permaculture design is a system of assembling conceptual, material, and strategic components in a pattern which functions to benefit life in all its forms. It seeks to provide a sustainable and secure place for living things on this earth. Functional design sets out to achieve specific ends, and prime directives. Every component of a design should function in many ways. Every essential function should be supported by many components.)
• Designing concepts and plans for urban, rural and aid projects with water, access, structures.
• Producing concept plans, planting plans, and site maintenance schedules.
• Preparation of concept drawings for land re-contouring and retaining.
• Preparation of construction and working drawings for hard landscaping items (not requiring specialist engineering and when permitted by law).
• Managing the contractor bidding and the installation of the design on behalf of the client.
• Running a professional permaculture design business.

What you will learn?

The Permaculture (Landscape) Design covers every aspect of garden and landscape design as well as other topics concerned with the setting up and running of a professional permaculture design and consulting business. You will learn things a professional permaculture designer needs to know.

1. Project Assessment: You will learn how to talk with the Client about their concerns, assess the potential of the site, ascertain the client’s needs, suggest the best course of action, and give a written quotation for design work.
2. Site Survey: You will learn to measure a site, including surveying ground levels, and use this data to draw an
   accurate and useful survey (base) plan.
3. Concept Plan: Showing a ‘bird’s eye’ view of the proposed design, this drawing is the starting point in the development of a new garden. You will learn to create exciting and functional designs and present them to your clients as attractive concept plans.
4. Planting Plan: You will learn to design the planting scheme to complement the new design. Preparing detailed
   planting plans and schedules are covered for your climate.
5. Hard Landscape Construction: You will learn about hard landscape construction and materials. This will enable you to design viable permaculture hardscapes and structures to enhance your designs.
6. Ground Contouring Design: You will learn to recognize a site’s greater potential through re-contouring, and how to produce concept plans detailing the new ground levels, swales, dams and house pad levels.
7. Running a professional design and consulting business: You will learn all the aspects of running your own business in a professional manner. This includes dealing with Clients, effective communication, getting new business, industry protocols, working to a Client’s budget, bidding and tendering, and writing technical specifications.

How long does it take?

Intro Design (intense 24 hour) courses run over a Fri – Sat – Sun weekend will cover all the areas and give you a basic idea of design to get your business started. There will be one teacher plus two teacher aids per course. This gives the course a very personal touch and attention to detail.

Full Design courses (96 hours) will cover the process in depth and home work set during the week. The course is run over 1 month, 3 days a week. Fri, Sat, Sun for 12 days. There will be one teacher plus two teacher aids per course. This gives the course a very personal touch and attention to detail.

Course Cost

• Intro Course 24hr 3x 8-hour days = $295 per student, limited to 30 students.
• Full Design Course. 96hr, 12x 8-hour days = $1250.00 per student limited to 10 students.

Program Content

This is a brief outline of the main topics included in the program. The course material informative with many pictures and diagrams used to illustrate concepts. You will be taught and encouraged to think and solve problems.

• 24, information-packed study modules covering all aspects of professional Permaculture design.
• 3 relevant, hands-on assignments reflecting the actual work done by Permaculture designers.
• Several useful portfolios to aid you in developing your designs.
• 3 full, real-life permaculture design projects (no installation is required for any projects).
• several small urban design projects (no installation is required).
• continual assessment and feedback to keep you informed of your progress.

The Study Modules

1. Course overview; Equipment and Materials; Drawing to Scale.
2. Classification and Naming of plants; Plant physiology; Soil in the landscape.
3. Introduction to the different types of landscape drawings; learning to draw.
4. The design process; analyzing a site; discovering the client’s needs; introduction to site surveying; writing a design proposals.
5. Site surveying – theory and practical.
6. The drawing sheet and title block; lettering and titling; the concept plan.
7. The zoning and functional placement of areas.
8. Major permaculture design project #1.
9. Design principles and design development.
10. Solving site problems; function and safety.
11. Surveying ground levels – theory and practical.
12. Drawing elevations, cross-sections and working drawings.
13. Major permaculture design project #2.
14. Planting design; color theory, shape and texture.
15. Designing; how to choose the right plants; the planting plan.
16. Water, natural pools and ponds, swales & dams.
17. Hard landscaping materials; site contouring and leveling.
18. Retaining walls; paving and other horizontal surfacing.
19. Introduction to timber construction; steps and ramps; walls; fences and screens.
20. Decorative structures; using trees, shrubs, hedges, vines.
21. Major permaculture design project #3.
22. Natural habitat; maintenance of design; eco-friendly design.
23. Small urban gardens; functional planting; irrigation, estimating installation costs for budgetary purposes.
24. Business procedures; documents and contracts; the client-designer-contractor relationship; specification writing; the bidding process; project facilitation; costing your design services; getting started; promoting your business: final design project – an exploration of design creativity.

Expressions of interest for this course in your area can be directed to Nick Huggins at hugginsn (at) bigpond.net.au

Map of fires in Russia

As I type, half of Russia is on fire after its hottest summer on record, Pakistan is dealing with the biggest floods in living memory and Australia is still in the clutches of a decade long drought. The last decade, worldwide, was the hottest since records began, and 2010 may break the records of 1998 and 2005 to become the hottest year we’ve ever known. We could spend weeks just examining the extreme weather events going on on a country by country basis.

Today we are crossing thresholds in our destruction of nature that will make all our subsequent efforts at earth healing even harder than they ever should have been. We have removed eco-systems, and their services, to such an extent that dangerous feedback loops are in progress. Climate is fast becoming a runaway train – and we’re its passengers.

Consider the fires in Russia, for example – millions of rain-producing trees are going up in smoke, taking their carbon with it. Trees growing in the ground are a carbon sink. On fire, they’re a carbon source. The Pakistan floods kill trees and plants likewise. These will later dry out and much of it too will end up in the atmosphere. With less trees in place, flooding events will occur even more often, and the soils these plants held in place will be washed away. The arctic permafrost is melting, releasing the powerful heat trapping gas, methane, at unprecedented levels – promising even more temperature increases. Our oceans are acidifying, threatening to turn the world’s largest carbon sink into a carbon source. And so on….

The dominoes are falling. It’s like nature is shouting to us: "If you don’t appreciate the services of these systems, then I’ll remove them all entirely".

We are facing crises on an unprecedented scale. Atop the foundations of an energy crisis, a climate crisis and a soil, water and biodiversity crisis, rests that mother of all crises – a food crisis. Crops are going up in smoke or are being washed away in deluges, our precious soils with them, while world grain stores are at their lowest levels and production is in decline whilst demand is rising. Such a food crisis, in the context of today’s population levels, translates, in turn, to a social/political/economic crisis on a scale that will make the convulsions of WWII look like a walk in the park.

It’s getting ugly, yet many are still not even awake to the perfect storm that is upon us. And of the few who are, many are discussing light bulbs and hybrids, cap and trade and recycling. They’re discussing being a little ‘less bad’, not recognising the urgent need for us – all 6.8 billion of us (and counting, at a rate of 1 billion every twelve years…) – to immediately become a positive element within our biosphere. And we must move fast! (The proverb ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ really rings true when considering these feedback loops….)

There is a solution though! That being a widespread, collaborative effort to assist nature in restoring, at scale, the biological processes that have, until today, kept this world stable for millennia. The solutions are in design, and in the observation and replication of natural symbiotic systems. We don’t need just less cars, we need more biology – more photosynthesis and more life! We might not be able to have rainforests everywhere, but we can certainly have food forests everywhere! The video clips below share a glimmer of hope along these lines. It documents an incredible journey of restorative transition for a 35,000 square kilometre area in the Leoss Plateau in the north of China. It is a journey that begins with completely eroded, overgrazed land where floods were a constant nightmare, and ends in terraced green hills, flood and food stability and prosperity. And, it only took ten years.

Give it a watch, and, as you do, consider what kind of social/political/economic systems would be the most conducive to achieving similar results in other places worldwide. It’s an interesting mix of top-down ‘interference’ (both in terms of blanket regulations and financial investment) combined with land ‘privatisation’, and participatory involvement at all levels. It reinforces for me the need to build resilient, localised, holistically educated and politically engaged communities whose members don’t discard government, but who through greater involvement in the decision-making process (including choosing their representatives) effectively become government and self-determine to build a world based on land stewardship and voluntary simplicity. We cannot act as individuals alone, working in our own self-interest, and achieve the kind of results you’ll see in the video below. We need to work collaboratively, and sometimes sensible, holistically discussed decisions will need to be enforced on individuals who either can’t see the big picture, or who don’t care.

Further reading:

• The Development of Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration
• The World’s Largest Water Harvesting Earthworks Project
• The Biology of Global Warming

Recently I joined Nick Huggins on a farm near Wagga to see what he was up to. (Here are the details of his first visit in case you missed it.)

This time the main purpose of the trip was to repair the creek that ran through the property. The creek is nothing special, it runs half the year and doesn’t have much living in or around it. There was a lot of evidence of erosion, not a lot of soil left and no protection from flood events.

So Nick got to work, spending the week installing rock gabions and bamboo every few hundred metres or so.
What looks to the untrained eye, and the catchment authority, as works to block up the creek and stuff up the natural ecology is actually a process of fast tracking the repair that happens naturally as trees and other debris fall across the flow and slow down the water, holding back nutrient and kick starting the soil building process.

In fact the very people that would oppose this kind of work will be the very same people trying to protect it in only a few years when the endangered frogs species have returned and the surrounding well hydrated land is lush and abundant with life.

Aside from being gorgeous and having too many uses to mention, bamboo plays a crucial part in flood protection as it’s able to withstand massive pressure. Planted out like wings along side the gabions, it will drop lots of mulch, pacify raging floodwaters and catch all that eroded goodness flowing from degraded farms upstream. The result will be fast, high quality soil creation that will set the conditions for other life to come back in, such as reeds and grasses that will continue to build on the pioneer work done by Nick.

Drawing on 11 years of horticulture experience, Nick planted 160 Bamboo plants for the client that week and has taken the time to film this video to show you how to give your bamboo the best chance of survival by doing all the right things when transplanting. Enjoy!

Permaculture solutions have come to life at a Wagga Wagga farm in the midst of a heated debate over water. What Kevin Rudd Claim’s will help the Murray Darling River system and the Lower Lakes region has some farmers in the area fuming. Farmers and residents throughout the Murray Darling region have larger concerns over the Australian government’s 3.1 Billion Dollar irrigation buyback scheme. The Rudd government is reacting to reduced productivity in the area and increasing demand for irrigated water downstream. Yet, some local farmers are curious as to how the proposed plan will affect production in the area, and reports show that many aren’t feeling optimistic.

After years of drought-affected production losses, the government’s buyback seems like a kick in the teeth to some selected local farming and ranching economies. A Canberra Times article reported on an ABARE (Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics) study that modeled the effects of half of the buyback. The study was Rudd’s reaction to growing criticism about the buyback. Their report showed that between 2008 and 2011 the program would only pick up an estimated 6% of surface water entitlements. The study predicted that “larger regional centers” with a diverse economy would be less effected by this purchase and, potentially, be cushioned by the economic boost. Still they admitted, ”Some of the smaller towns more dependent on irrigation could be less resilient to a decline in irrigation,” and “The model results also suggest that the buyback will result in water prices being around 13 per cent higher in the northern basin and around 18 per cent higher in the southern basin than they would have been in the absence of the buyback.” Favoring the buyback, the ABARE study seemed to suggest that production decline was largely due to drought and not their buyback. Still, some aren’t so sure and suggest that deeper thought needs to be given to the program.

So while some residents and farmers resort to scratching a furrowed brow, others have resorted to taking the furrows to the land, with permaculture. Seeing the potential benefits of permaculture water harvesting and food production techniques, one Wagga family, The Allsopps, have taken action, and they’re seeing results. The BBC reports that a 20% drop in rainfall equals a 70% drop in stream flow, and as a long time Wagga Wagga resident, this would be no surprise to Richard Allsopp. Richard has seen the value in slowing, spreading, and sinking water on his site. Seeking advice from Australian experts such as Geoff Lawton, Matthew Kilby, and Peter Andrews, Richard has developed a ranch that is unwittingly becoming a demonstration of sustainable land management.

With the recent development of a multi-gigaliter dam connected to swale systems and several gabions using boulders and timber from his land, Richard has seen a marked difference in the health and vitality of his pastures and streams. Currently grazing anywhere from 30-40 head of cattle for management, Richard is now researching ways to continually improve the site with native tree corridors and swale planting for animal forage and stability. Seeing the success of the rock gabion installation last year, he’s also been talking with fellow permaculture designer Nick Huggins about the addition of several living bamboo gabions to slow the rapid erosion of stream banks. And just last week, Nick Huggins and I designed and installed an 800 sq meter orchard and 400 sq meter veggie garden on their site for Richard, Anna and their 3 children. “I think it’s important that the children get the experience of understanding where food comes from, … it just makes sense”, said Richard.

Near one of the older dams on the property, a fenced off area included the proposed site for the permaculture style veggie garden and orchard. Most of the veggie garden and orchard lie within the dam’s catchment on the downward slope of the cow paddock. Seeing the opportunity of the slope, Nick and my design focused on utilizing contour bank garden beds, small tree berms, native leguminous support species, and deep mulch seeded with cover crop. Our hope was to slow and sink the surface runoff from the paddock area on its way to the dam, making best use of the nutrient flow. In the orchard food forest we used a net and pan style planting, interplanted with tree lucurne and a variety of acacia species. Around the orchard we added Southwest and Southeast bamboo windbreaks which will double as a living nursery for their future bamboo plantings. A windbreak on the West side included a aesthetic windbreak of Silver Birch. At the northern end of the 4 contour beds with sunken footpaths, we added a mandala herb and salad garden which they plan to cover with a shade cloth to protect against Wagga’s intense sun and 40°C summer heat. After planting out the veggie garden and trees, almost the entire area was later covered with a cover crop of lucurne, red and white clover and then coated with a thick layer of salvaged local straw. Already decomposing, we could see the straw would create a nice start for microbial action as well as a multifunctional mulch.

While he’s received some criticism from other locals who haven’t yet wrapped their heads around how permaculture can work for them, Richard knows he’s on to something positive. Richard, also a helicopter pilot, often gets a bird’s eye view of what the land around him has devolved into, and it doesn’t look good. “I want to help show people what can be done… and I’m willing to help people do this.” And while he wouldn’t call himself a Permaculturalist, it is obvious he’s got a passion and commitment to improving his land and the land around him. Through his endeavors in permaculture design and sustainable land management, he’s seeing the evolution of abundance when others are feeling hung out to dry.

Last week Permaculture consultant Nick Huggins spoke to Anne Delaney from the ABC Riverina Breakfast radio program in Wagga Wagga, NSW. Listen here:

Nick Huggins Talks to ABC Radio About Riverina’s Water Blues

A backgrounder: Two Permaculture consultants, currently drought proofing a property in Livingstone, are calling for an end to the Australian Government’s water buy-back scheme, saying turning off the taps rather than helping farmers repair degraded landscape is selling the Riverina’s future short.

Over 9 days, Nick Huggins and Paul David Stockhausen from the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia (PRI) are implementing a plan to turn a degraded property in Livingstone into a drought-proof landscape that will see it use less irrigation water as each year passes while still growing ever more productive.

Nick says the project is an example of how the Riverina could take the little water that’s left in the region and get back to full production.

“With a proper management plan there is enough water available to get this area looking like the sunshine coast but instead 60 farmers have been encouraged to sell their irrigation entitlements, effectively locking their land into a permanent dry and degraded state.”

Geoff Lawton implemented a series of swales 12 months ago. Paul said “A year on and the results are clear, the swales and dams are full and there are springs popping out of land that was brown and dusty a year ago.”

On the buy-back scheme, Nick said “The Australian Government’s plan of buying back water and turning off irrigation channels may free up water in the short term but it won’t fix the environmental damage caused by years of over-grazing and chemical agriculture.

“If the government continues promoting this program it may worsen environmental problems, destroy communities and could ultimately lead to less food security for Australia.”

They both believe the Government needs to look at the bigger picture and put a renewed focus on sustainable agriculture.

“Implementing Permaculture principals has turned this farm green again with relatively low inputs, it wouldn’t take much to do this across the whole region and it can only improve the situation”, said Nick.

“Over the next 40 years we need more food not less, but if we just stop using water what future does the Riverina have? They might have to shut the post office down as well!”

It’s taken a while to find the time to sit down and report on Part B of our earthworks here at Rosella Waters, near Cairns in far North Queensland. Phase I Part A was documented whilst the process was taking place. This latest update however will rely on memory and hurried notes made during the process, together with numerous photos. Large excavations such as the two large dams we constructed in part A are considerably easier to direct and far less time consuming than the finer detail work using smaller machinery as we experienced in putting in Part B.

Once again we had an excellent earthmover that came on the recommendation of the guys who did the two large dams. Sparky, as he is known, is a very knowledgeable and experienced earthmover, having spent a great deal of the last 40 odd years driving a 46 tonne excavator, building large scale dams, roads and “opening up new country”, as the saying round here goes. Now he runs a private earthmoving business and has at his disposal an 85HP bobcat and a 4 tonne mini excavator with numerous attachments. All of the following work was done with these two small machines.

The first part of the process in Part B was to construct a gabion rock wall at the very top of our system, in the gully that feeds our two dams. Previously, we had done a catchment analysis and based on the 1000mm of rain we receive per year, we arrived at a figure of 5,000,000 liters moving through it. We used this figure to calculate levels and engineer our spillways, level sill heights, the freeboard on the dam walls, trickle pipes, lock pipes, etc. The gully in question begins on our neighbour’s property. It is fed from the hill behind it and also from the diversion drains the road department puts in on the dirt road leading to our front gate. The catchment is predominately regrowth after being cleared 30 years ago with two dozers and a ball and chain. The catchment area is not a well functioning bio-diverse eco system and as such there is little water infiltration and a lot of sheet flow that brings top soil/sediment run off into our system. During the wet season of 2008 we did a small trial by hand building a rock wall just inside our fence line to get an idea of how much material would be trapped and how long it would take to fill up. After only 3 rain events, the small rock wall was fully backed up with silt 1.5 feet deep and the moisture remained just under the surface of that material well into our dry season. With that experience and the slight scar constructed at the back of the Lap Pool dam during its construction, we decided on a larger than first thought gabion, to (a) repair the damage caused by the construction of the Lap Pool dam (b) trap silt/top soil and sediment, preventing it washing through our system and ultimately ending up on the Great Barrier Reef, and (c) provide a small scale example of a solution to dry eroded gullies, that run like rivers in the wet, utilizing a “waste” product of local agriculture.

The “waste” product I speak of are the mountains of volcanic rock that many farms in the area have piled up in massive windrows. Farmers spend up to $4000 an acre to pull them out in preparation for planting avocados, potatoes, mangoes, bananas, sugar cane, etc. Rosella Waters sits right on the edge on an ancient lava flow so the farms that surround us are littered with such rocks, some as large as a car down to rocks as small as a grapefruit. We approached our neighbours up the top of the hill, who grow avocados and mangos, and who had recently put in a mass planting of new trees. Prior to that they had a 20 tonne excavator and dump truck working for a week to pull every rock out. They followed this by traversing over the land with a pickup and five workers pulling the grapefruit sized ones out by hand. Anyway, they were more than happy for us to go onto their property and select as many rocks as we liked from the windrows, which they had conveniently separated into different sizes.

Gabion rock wall trapping silt/sediment & top soil

The cost in building the gabion was therefore the time for Sparky to load up the individually selected rocks into his tip truck and then place them one by one with a claw on the end of his excavator arm. The process took two days in total and we estimate that it cost us close to $1800 to build. As we had large rocks to work with we decided against both “keying in” the base of the gabion wall into the side of the gully and constructing a net meshing to encase them in.

The volume and more importantly the velocity of the water coming down the gully in this case didn’t necessitate us doing either. Choosing the largest rocks first, we placed each one exactly where we wanted to create a firm base on which to construct the wall. It was built much in the same way as a dam wall is built, starting out wide at the base, six meters in this case, and tapering up to two meters wide at the top. The height of the gabion is nearly three meters. After placing each rock, Sparky would firm it down, swivel it around until it was firmly wedged. This in itself is more difficult than it might seem and does take time, but it is VERY important to get right. In all, the wall required 7 full dump truck loads of rock to construct. Once the main frame of the wall was complete we got another two loads of grapefruit sized rock which we have since placed by hand to smooth out the top of the gabion, thus providing a great access path across the gully that we can push a wheel barrow across, drive an ATV over or lead a goat and cart. To repair the scars at the side of the back of the Lap Pool Dam, just in front of the gabion wall, we placed some large rocks on the ledge and back filled behind the rocks with some top soil we had had set aside from the construction of the two dams. This was immediately cover cropped with cowpea and a crotalaria variety called gambia pea. All of the seed we used to cover crop was bought from a local seed merchant as seconds, which means there is a low strike rate (around 40%) but at $1 per kilo and having used the correct inoculant, we gained excellent coverage and stabilized the area. It’s important to remember that seed is the cheapest herbicide!

The next element we tackled was the overflow swale and spillway connected to the larger Mushroom Dam at the bottom of the property. We decided that after completing the gabion it would be best to start at the bottom of the system and then work our way back towards the front gate so that by the time it was all done, Sparky could load up and head off without risk of doing any damage with his machinery.

The first swale was only fifteen odd meters in length and had a level sill spillway half way along it that would spread the overflow of the system over a 3 meter wide area right on a broad ridge point, making it very safe to discharge and presenting no danger of causing an erosion gully. The construction of this small element proved to be a major turning point in our working relationship with Sparky. In the end it took the best part of a day to complete, due to a number of factors including our newfound language barrier. There were some important miscommunicated terms that needed clarification as we went: level sill spillway, back cut, swale, swale mound, swale dish, bottom of the swale dish and most importantly LEVEL. The idea that we wanted to construct something that didn’t run and was in fact perfectly level and on contour was quite a paradigm shift for Sparky, as in his words he had “spent his whole life draining landscapes” and what we wanted to do was quite the opposite.

The swale needed to be constructed on a steepish slope and we decided that we wanted it to hold 300mm of water in the base and have the top of the swale mound 800mm high – thus a substantial 500mm freeboard on the swale mound. The freeboard on the dam wall is one meter, so if ever there was a chance of water spilling over it would go over the swale mound first. It is unlikely to occur as we have “over engineered” things, but if it did the swale mound can be repaired with a shovel unlike the dam wall! What we soon discovered in constructing the swale was that due to the slope of the land we just wouldn’t have enough material to make the swale mound as high as we wished. The answer was to dig further up the hill from the back cut, as gently as possible, in a 1:1 cut. We didn’t want to dig too far up the hill so we adjusted the level of the swale mound back to 700mm high and with a three-meter long level sill spillway, the swale mound still wouldn’t be at risk.

First swale constructed leading off the Mushroom Dam

The data records for the region showed that the largest single 24-hour rain event in the last 30 years had been 284mm. We rounded this out to 300mm and built the spillway to be able to deal with ½ cubic meter of water per second. Together with another spillway on the swale connected to the opposite side of the dam wall, we have more than ensured the dam wall’s safety. Another safety margin we designed into the system was a 110mm lock pipe set at the bottom of the Mushroom Dam wall. The lock pipe is 27 meters long and goes right through the bottom of the wall. On the outlet side there is a butterfly valve, which can be opened wide in the event that the spillways aren’t coping. At the bottom of our system, and being our primary aquaculture dam, it also means we can drain this dam if needed. The dam also faces West, which is likely to be the direction of any fire entering our property, so in the event of a fire we have the added security of being able to drain 2.5 mega liters of water in that direction.

For ease of construction we built this first swale with the 85HP bobcat, equipped with a 1.7 meter wide tilt bucket. Time is money with earthworks, so we decided to make the swales a bucket width wide. Sparky started by running across the slope with his bucket following the back cut line we had marked out, corresponding to the high water mark of the dam. The spill was flicked down slope forming the first part of the swale mound. Once we had the basic shape and marked the position of the level sill spillway, Sparky used his tilt bucket to scrape beyond the back cut line up the slope to get the material we needed to gain the swale mound height we were after. We also took quite a bit of material from the area leading onto the dam wall, progressively cutting back to smooth out the sharpness of the cut. Sparky did a great job and we can easily drive through this area and up and onto the dam wall, giving us access to the other side of the property. The swale runs dead level at 300mm deep all the way through, from the exit point at the dam to the end of the swale itself. On the final scraping run we asked Sparky to tilt the blade slightly down slope in the swale dish, meaning that water will be predominated into the swale mound during rain events. With our first swale complete, fully seeded and earthmover trained we we’re ready to attack the rest of the design. Together with a mix of gambia pea, cow pea and pigeon pea we also planted sweet potato cuttings, aibika, cassava, pumpkin seeds, etc… giving us full cover leading into the wet. In the last few days we have started to receive our first rains in 9 months, so now we have a good base in which to begin our major plantings.

The next swale was a short one connected to the opposite side of the dam wall. It was constructed in the same fashion and care was taken again to ensure a smooth driveway leading off the dam wall for ease of access. With not much room to play with within our boundary line, the swale was extended right up to the fence line with our neighbours and the three-meter level sill spillway will serve as discharge of excess water into the creek below, and also as access to behind the dam wall and our Zone IV area of the property.

Moving further up the slope, we then tackled the 25-meter long swale connected to the Lap Pool dam. With this swale we had a few important decisions to make. Firstly it was going to be the Lap Pool’s only swale and only level sill spillway, the overflow from this leading to the Mushroom dam. The placement of this level sill was therefore vitally important as it would be the major source of water that fills the Mushroom dam and we also have future plans for structures connected to the 6m x 3m jetty we placed on the dam. We saw the opportunity for the level sill to be a feature and a potential wet/dry growing area, in close proximity to the jetty and eventual cabin connected to it. We decided to step the overflow down into a further two level sills before it entered the Mushroom dam.

The step down spillways leading overflow from the Lap Pool Dam swale into the Mushroom Dam. Jetty posts in waiting.

In this way, we slow down the volume of water, create further edge and add an aesthetic feature in the process. The level ditches are slightly wider than the level sill on the swale itself and together with generous amounts of cover crop seed, we planted clumps of vetiver grass to further stabilize the area and slow down water flow. We used the same technique on all the level sill spillways. With such an abundance of rock at hand and a couple of quite steep spillways to stabilize, we saw this as our best option. On two steep spillways, we planted out clumps of vetiver grass across the slope, starting at the top and offset all the way down. Then we placed rocks from the bottom up, starting with larger rocks in an arc, wider than the spillway, followed by smaller rocks all the way up the spillway wall face. We left a 200mm space around each of the vetiver clumps and now 3 months later we have a very stable, rock wall face to our spillways, with large clumps of green vetiver grass breaking up the brown.

Back on the Lap Pool swale we asked Sparky to dig ½ meter deep x 1 meter long x ½ meter wide ditches within the swale dish itself. These ditches will hold water for longer than the rest of the 300mm deep swale and as such become growing zones for some wet crops. We now have these ditches planted out with Taro, with water chestnuts on the edges, all of which is shaded by bananas growing at the inside edge of the swale mound.

Lap Pool swale with newly planted Taro and water chestnuts in the pits and banana on the edges.

Again the whole swale was cover cropped with cowpea, Gambia pea, pigeon pea and dotted with cassava, Aibika, sweet potato and pumpkins. The larger long-term support species and variety of fruit and nut trees are now ready to be planted. We had considered putting all of plantings in at the same time but with no rain at all for close to 9 months we decided to get cover crops and shorter term nitrogen fixers going and wait for the beginning of the first rains before putting them in. The earthworks couldn’t be put back to a more appropriate time due to the availability of machinery.

The rice paddy system was by far the biggest challenge. To look at now, it seems all we have done is push a little dirt up to make a wall and dig a couple of holes for the ducks to live near. In a sense that’s true, but the process of constructing the 1:300 diversion drain from the Lap Pool dam to a duck pond connected to a rice paddy (the overflow of which runs along a diversion drain with a 20mm fall over 20 meters, to another duck pond connected to another rice paddy, the discharge of which drops down into a 25 meter long bio-filter which is itself a level sill spillway), dropping water into the Mushroom dam wasn’t that simple! Plus, the overflow of the second duck pond, leads to a short swale with level spillway that drops down to a 20-meter long swale, the spillway of which also drops into the bio-filter before being discharged into the Mushroom dam. Phew.

The rice paddies with bio-filter below. The beach area is on the edge of the Mushroom Dam with the back side of the Lap Pool Dam wall behind it.

A great deal of gravel road base material was taken out of the rice paddy area and we used this to repair/construct a proper ringed access road, our main access road on the property. The road has now been graded correctly so that water will run into drains leading along side it directed to water storages. On the road we have placed 150mm x 50mm x 4 meter long blue gum planks in sets of two, 4 inches apart, at an angle across the road, every 10-12 meters. We first heard of this idea from Rainbow Valley Farm in New Zealand who has the same system on much steeper roads. As water runs over the road it only has a short distance to run before it drops down into these drains that run across the road at a slight angle. By not allowing the water to build up speed over the road surface the material stays on the road rather than down the bottom of the hill, with obvious benefits.

The diversion drain leading to the 1st duck pond needed to fall at 1:300 and be set low enough in the Lap Pool dam so that it was the first water to leave the dam as it filled. We can regulate this fact by capping the end of the 150mm pipe. The level at which we set the150mm diversion pipe was 450mm below the high water mark of the dam which also corresponds to the level of the level sill spillway. That is 150mm lower than the depth of the swale and the level at which water exits the dam into the swale. As I said, setting the pipe at that level ensures we can control when the water heads to the duck ponds. We have a 30,000 L concrete water tank connected to our shed with approximately 100,000 L of potential roof catchment. We needed to decide what to do with the extra 70,000L. In a minor brain wave, we came up with the idea to pipe the overflow through a 90mm pipe down the side of the tank, under the road and into the 150mm diversion pipe with a t-piece. At the entry point into to first duck pond, we have rocked the spill and next to the 150mm diversion drain pipe we have another 150mm pipe under the road that collects all the water in the drain running alongside the road. At the end of the drain along the side of the road we have dug a meter deep silt trap, concreted the base and placed a grill over the top. This will keep silt out of the duck ponds and provide another source of potting mix from the material that does ultimately come from the road.

The main issue we faced with the levels we were dealing with was to get the duck ponds as high up the slope as we could, leaving us room to put in the proposed rice paddies. The duck ponds would end up being quite small as a result and have a 800mm slope at the back of them from the ridge road. We saw this back slope as another opportunity to be creative and decided to step this down in 300mm wide ledges to the high water level of the ponds. The end result is a duck pond amphitheatre on both ponds! This stepped area will be fully planted out with duck habitat and forage, shading the ponds in the process.

Duck ponds at the back of the paddies, connected by a diversion drain. The amphitheatres at the back of the ponds are well cover cropped and stable.

The two ponds are connected by a diversion drain that runs from 1st pond to 2nd pond, with a 20mm fall over its 20-meter length. This isn’t a great deal of fall, but it’s enough. It has meant we have been able to keep the 2nd pond up as high a possible to give us room for the paddy below. The water from the duck ponds are released into the paddies by way of gates we picked up from an old rice farmer up here. They used to grow two crops a season using the channel that leads from Tinaroo Dam as a source of their water. One of the reasons they gave it up was when the cost of water went from $8 p/ML to $18 p/ML. Now they flood irrigate sugar cane instead. We swapped the four gates for a case of beer and made metal plates that slide into the 3mm gap in the concrete gates, to control the flow of water. The same gates are used at the exit end of the paddies, to discharge the nutrient rich water into the bio-filter below before it heads to the Mushroom dam.

The bio-filter that acts a level sill, taking nutrient rich water from the paddies as well as the swale in the background at the base of the chicken tractor system, overflows into the Mushroom Dam.

The two paddies are separated by a meter wide bund and surrounded by a meter wide, meter high bund with a slight grade. All of this will become a growing zone for duck forage, mulch and some soft fruits such as pawpaw and banana. The meter high bunds, once planted out, will become a living fence keeping the ducks in the paddies during the rice-growing season. We plan to grow rice using the integrated rice and duck growing system I had learnt whilst living with Takao Furuno and his family in Japan. Takao is a social entrepreneur with the world economic forum with his rice duck growing system and has an excellent book out through Tagari publications titled “The Power of Duck”.

The short swale connected to the second duck pond drops down into a longer swale, which will form part of our chicken tractor system. This 20 meter long swale lies at the bottom of the contour chicken runs and borders the Mushroom dam. It’ll take excess nutrients from the chicken system and grow some large trees on the north side of the dam, providing shade. Due to this swale being constructed on less of a slope than the first, it was built with the four tonne excavator. Working from the downward side of the swale, the bucket cut on the back cut line and the spill was dropped to create the swale mound. Following Sparky along with the laser we ensured that the swale dish was 200mm level all along. It doesn’t need to be within a mm but it does help to make the dish as level as possible so as to get an even distribution of water along the swale in lesser rain fall events. Obviously the best way to check that level is to fill the completed swale with water and adjust accordingly with a shovel. It is cheaper to do this in your own time than to pay $100 an hour for a 4 tonne excavator to do it.

“Hairy Harry” stands tall on the island at the back of the Keyhole Dam.

The final element to put in was the Keyhole dam at the entrance to our property. We named this pond the Keyhole, as it is the key to the system that connects water on both sides of the property. The Keyhole sits on a central ridge that dissects the property and the idea was to create a small water storage in our Zone 2 area that can move water through either the system described above or to future water storages on the river side of the property, or both. We decided how large a storage of water we wanted and marked out the approximate position of the dam wall for Sparky to follow. We set a target level for our high water and corresponded this to the position of the two swales that were to direct water to the Keyhole via 150mm pipes placed under the access road. The wall was built using the bobcat, layering wetted clay followed by numerous track rolls with the same machine. Using the excavator to dig the hole of the dam, material was mixed using the tilt bucket with me standing close by, hose in hand, making sure there was the right amount of moisture to make the clay bond. Dam and pond walls are all about compaction and with enough of the right clay, a little mixing if the material is good and bad, and the correct amount of moisture, things should seal. We decided to create a small island at the back of the Keyhole as an aesthetic feature, duck habitat and for the fact that the palm we’ve named “Hairy Harry” was too good looking to lose.

Once the Keyhole was built with a 400mm freeboard on it, we set about marking the back cuts of the two swales that were to connect to it. The Mediterranean swale (so named due to quite granite soils in that part of the property) leads out towards the header tank and drops its spill down into the Lap Pool dam. It is connected to the Keyhole via a 150mm pipe, under the road with a slight 20mm drop towards the pond so as to not get stagnant water sitting in the pipe.

The Mediterranean swale connects to the Keyhole Dam via a 150mm pipe under the main access road. The level sill spills water into the Lap Pool Dam below.

The end of the pipe can be capped, if we wish to keep water in the Keyhole dam and direct any overflow via the 150mm pipe under the road on the other side that connects the Council swale to the same dam. We called that one the Council swale because its main catchment comes from a slight improvement to the dirt road the council recently graded. It was graded sloping towards our fence with no drain so in large rain events we would get large sheet flows of water moving through the landscape causing unnecessary erosion. We asked Sparky if he wouldn’t mind creating a little spoon drain 100 meters up to the neighbours gate entrance and directing that water through the culvert under our road entrance. The five meters beyond the culvert to our fence line continued as a drain before entering our property where it then becomes a level swale directing a substantial volume of water through the 150mm pipe, under the road, into the Keyhole dam and ultimately through our entire system.

Considering the volume of material we are likely to receive from the dirt road, we placed a 200mm deep x three-meter wide silt trap just inside the fence line. This can be dug out by hand when necessary. The level sill spillway of this Council swale directs overflow to a gully, which in future may become a dam or a large gabion, subject to future test holes to check for clay content.
Either pipe in either swale can be capped to control the direction of water movement through our system. This small dam feature is something we are really happy with for its aesthetic beauty and complex simplicity in functionality.

This spoon drain runs 100 meters long and will direct a large amount of water through our system via the Council swale that connects the Keyhole Dam.

For our first major earthworks the complexity involved in the design was substantial. It was quite a big undertaking, made even more so by the birth of our second son Dylan smack bang in the middle of it all. At this point I must give special recognition to my darling wife Georgie who at 41 weeks pregnant, kept us fed and watered, took all the photos and spent considerable time standing there with FRED ( Forever Ridiculous Electronic Device) i.e. the lazer level staff and receiver, in 33′C tropical heat. We took close to a year observing the site, designing, listening and talking to others, re-designing and planning the earthworks and the immediate repair work after they’re done. Once the earthworks began, concept became reality and the two can be quite different no matter how good the planning. Each evening after Sparky had left we spent time talking things over and making decisions for the next day’s work. We gave our laser level a really good working over, it has been a great investment; I don’t imagine we could have done all that we did without it.

Now that the mainframe infrastructure is in place, a little water is in the dams and the site is green with cover crops, the system has literally come alive. From seemingly nowhere frogs have descended upon the water storages attracting ever-increasing numbers of birds. The place must look like a red-light sale at a discount store – a hydrated green oasis in an otherwise dry landscape.

Overlooking the system from the header tank. A transformed landscape.

A natural spring we knew existed has started to recharge with the water in the swales from irrigating the cover crops. It moves through the sub-soil leaking out into the side of the dam. Our hope is that this recharged system will help to keep the water level more constant in the Mushroom dam by offsetting any evaporation.

In all, the earthworks took close to two months to complete from start to finish with a total of 16 days of actual earthworks involved. With the start of our seasonal wet season rains upon us, the next three months or more will be spent busily planting, planting and more planting. We know Sparky is coming back when the wet really hits – we made a pact to sit down with a beer together in the pouring rain and watch the system operate in full flight. Through a local NRM group we are also planning an open day, for local farmers to come and see the system. These major earthworks are just the start of a great adventure in the development of our Permaculture demonstration site for the wet/dry tropics of Northern Australia, Rosella Waters.

by Abe Collins & Darren Doherty

Introduction

Keyline Design was first developed by the great Australian, P.A. Yeomans (1904-1984), in the late 1940s & 50s initially as a practical response to the unpredictable rainfall regime he found on his new property, ‘Nevallan’, to the west of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Soil Conservation, as developed by the US Army Corp of Engineers was the predominant practice of the time and for a time Yeomans was influenced by this, though soon found some deficiencies with the pattern of water flow its application expressed. Yeomans went on to devote the rest of his life to the promotion, research and development of Keyline Design and in doing so was labelled by Permaculture co-originator Bill Mollison as "…one of Australia’s greatest patriots… ".

Influenced by the likes of prominent organic agriculture figures in Andre Voison, Friend Sykes, Newman Turner & Louis Bromfield (among many others!) Yeomans has been attributed with being the 1st person to accelerate soil formation through the stacking of methods, overturning the myth that it took 1,000 years to create an inch of topsoil. Yeomans proclaimed that "…the landman’s job is not so much to conserve soil as it is to develop soil, to improve his soil and to make it more fertile than it ever was…".

The development of the Permaculture concept owes much to P.A. Yeomans, not only for its enduring and effective landscape patterning, but also for the integrated business framework that he developed over the 40 odd years that he worked in developing a myriad of enterprises around Keyline®. From the 1950 – 1970s there was a nationally (in Australia) published ‘Keyline’ magazine, authorship of articles & books, at least three operational broadacre R&D farms under his control, CSIRO support (up until 1958), a ‘Keyline Foundation’, an established international property design & development consultancy, Chisel Plow, ‘Delver’, ‘Tritter’, ‘Keyline Plow’, Lockpipe, ‘Bunyip Level’, and ‘Ag-Yo’ or ‘Yobanite’ manufacture & sales. How Yeomans managed such a diverse business model over many years is a tribute to the man’s capability and is unparalleled in the Permaculture (or Agriculture!) industry despite the devices of modern communications.

Stunned by the loss of his brother-in-law Jim Barnes, in a grass fire in 1944 on ‘Nevallan’, Yeomans brought to bear his vast experience as a mine overseer and earthmover to capture and store rainwater in large ponds (referred to in Australia as ‘farm dams’) across broadacre landscapes which "so lush and green all year round, they would be virtually fireproof" and droughtproof. Similar climate regions across the world suffer similarly and clearly the adoption of Keyline methods would be a primary form of solid-state risk management for both rural and urban landscapes alike. I commonly get requests from clients and correspondents to design both fireproof & droughtproof landscapes and fortunately Keyline provides the effective template.

According to Yeomans the "inseparable trinity of landscape design" were climate, land shape and water supply – with roads, trees, buildings, fencing & soils being the "more negotiable remainder of the hierarchy". Yeomans labeled this prioritization the ‘Keyline Scale of Permanence’ as a foundation to the process involved planning permanent landscapes. Interestingly, the loss of carbon in agricultural soils is now evident. I commonly say that Permaculture itself ‘lacks a clear decision making process’: the Keyline Scale of Permanence’ and latterly Allan Savory’s landmark ‘Holistic Management® Model’ ably provide the models for the Permaculture ‘toolkit’. These methodologies lack the integrated design principles such as those espoused and continually expanded by Permaculturalists, so combining these approaches makes obvious sense and follows the intellectual pathway led by Yeomans, Savory, David Holmgren, Bill Mollison along with Dr. John Todd , Dr. George Chan & Gunter Pauli among others.

The following article serves to outline many of these processes as part of the ongoing evolution of Keyline or Keyline Design Mark IV as I am calling it, and was developed by Abe Collins & myself for our various seminars.

Click here to download as a PDF (574kb).

We are applying Permaculture techniques to restore the landscape
in the hottest place on the planet

In December 2008 it was our great pleasure and honour to be invited to Iran to work for the Forest Rangeland Watershed Management Organisation, originally formed in 1928 (see Word doc on their work here). We were working with different departments of the organisation, like the Sand Dune Fixation Department that was formed in 1958 for the Bureau of Desert Affairs. All of this falls under the central government’s main organisation of Jihad Agriculture Ministry. We were invited to teach a 10-day Permaculture course focusing mainly on desert rehabilitation.

Permaculture course participants in Birjand in Eastern Iran

The work that has already taken place in Iran is enormous and monumental, and is probably the largest application of good desert repair work in the world. I think it is safe to say it is the largest-scaled effort in the history of the world, with two million hectares of desert project area under rehabilitation. This has been a very, very major effort and still goes on today to repair the long-term effects of desert extension and salinisation in this ancient landscape, a landscape that has enormous diversity and ancient systems with a very, deep-rooted history of human settlement.

Erosion control with gabions and tree planting

Iran has some of the most diverse landscapes anywhere, and is still geologically active from the movement of tectonic plates. Some of the most extreme desert wind erosion sites can be found here, and all credit should be given to the Iranian people and their government, who are making major efforts to rehabilitate landscapes using modern techniques and some rather unusual and innovative cutting-edge techniques for desert rehabilitation. In addition, they are implementing very traditional land use systems using the ancient knowledge of local people.

It was a very unique Permaculture design course and we shared a lot of information through dialogue, as the people that we were working with were all professionals working within the Iranian government from different departments. They took a very serious and professional attitude toward the course information and I believe they learned a lot about integrated design and connected design across landscapes, in particular with swale connections between desert features and the application of size relationship of features and soakage of water through catchment hydrology to stimulate appropriate desert and dry land ecologies to stabilise landscape. The areas that are under rehabilitation are the largest I’ve ever seen and experienced and the seriousness of real work on the ground and the numbers of people involved are the largest I’ve seen or heard of in any country. We should really start to learn from their experience, as they have been able to demonstrate success in some of the most difficult landscapes and situations on Earth.

Sand dune leak point stabilization earth works ready for planting

Wind erosion traps planed to trees

Part of our work with the Forest Rangeland Watershed Management Organisation was also to demonstrate for the Bureau of Carbon Sequestration, which is a project in itself. They are actually demonstrating carbon sequestration because there are ethics involved, and what would surprise most people in the world is that in Iran there are very strong ethical movements to reduce the use of fossil fuels and to make a commitment to carbon sequestration and reduction of global warming. Although their country is rich in fossil fuels, they are committed to demonstrating they have ethics in providing beneficial infrastructure and appropriate alternative technology, particularly in the development of villages for the nomadic people that are still in their landscape and are moving from nomadic lifestyles to settlement. These marginal people are settled in villages built by government organisations and the government is striving to establish biological stability through the design of natural systems around those settlements using appropriate technology like solar powered street lights, solar and wind generation of electricity and large solar hot water bath houses. This is not the type of thing that you’d imagine an oil- and natural gas-rich country to actually focus on. Iran at the time of our work only had 30% of its GDP coming from fossil fuels, the rest being from their own manufacturing and production of industrial products. They are a very, very independent industrial country. In fact, it’s quite surprising to realise how independent they are despite having had two years of official economic sanctions (and actually 30 years of sanctions from western countries, particularly the USA and Europe). This puts them in a similar position to Cuba, except of course Iran is a much larger country with a larger population and a great diversity of natural resources and landscape. They do have a coastline on the Indian Ocean, as well as sharing a border with Iraq, Turkey, Armenia, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Desert re-forestation work

Wind erosion trap plantings

Despite the cost of fossil fuels within the country being inexpensive, they actually have their larger focus on moving away from fossil fuel dependence toward a more sustainable resource model. Gasoline/petrol when we were there was 10 American cents per litre, super petrol 14 American cents, diesel 1.6 American cents, Kerosene was 1.6 American cents per litre and natural gas was 1.5 American cents per cubic meter. Just about all houses throughout all cities and major towns and villages have a supply of natural gas, so nobody is suffering from cold in the winter. Some areas are mountainous and very snowy and cold, with very extreme variations in the climate, and there is an enormous use of natural gas. I believe it is 600 million cubic metres a day of consumption for natural gas alone, which is a most unusual situation.

The main project site that we worked on was near Birjand and this is out near the Afghan/Pakistan boarder in eastern Iran. Further east of Birjand is the Husein Abad Plain and it was in this district that we focused our groundwork, although the projects of the Forest Rangeland Watershed Management and Sand Dune Fixation Bureau go right through all districts of Iran. At the project site on the Hersinabad Plain we visited during the course we actually went through surveying processes, surveying contours between catchment valleys and looking at combinations of connections between swales of water catchment. These swales would catch to gabions and backflood through silt trap gabion soakage. We found we could actually increase the soakage across broad contours of landscape and generally rehydrate a larger area of soakage, and accumulate that soakage so that we could easily start to re-tree the landscape with appropriate species. This would demonstrate that through the planting of appropriate species, not always native, as there are many non-native trees that are already used to begin repair work before native endemic species can be interplanted to facilitate landscape repair. There are very hardy Chinese species that are already being used by local people in the local organisations.

Overgrazing exacerbates desertification

These swale systems would help rehydrate larger areas and start a faster reforestation, which our students readily understood. There was also an understanding that we need to re-pattern the landscape to harmonise with these particular water soakage contours and therefore readminister the rangeland, because one of the major problems is the use of rangeland by traditional people. There are still a large number of traditional people moving into re-settlement villages and they have a traditional right to grazing land. However, with the increase of population and the increase of grazing stock it makes it very difficult to re-forest areas, so large blocks of areas at the present time are taken out of pasture and other large areas are kept in pasture and are accessible to the traditional people.

Swales planted to trees

We explained how we can rehydrate the landscape on contour with water harvesting swales between landscape catchment features like gabions, very small dams and lemonier rock catchment systems, so we can then actually improve pasture between these contour strips. These contour strips would then actually become viable grazing land for livestock, which would mean a much more intricate management system. That means a redesign of the traditional people’s grazing practices, but then there would be less area needed for the same number of stock. There is a limited number of stock set by the government and each area has set limits to the number of grazing animals allowed. Although the area presently used is large, this could easily be reduced by simply implementing rehydration on contour and re-foresting, reducing the evaporation of the local rain and increasing its soakage, first through reduction of evaporation through soakage as well as through shading of the trees, then the reduction of wind evaporation and also wind erosion by those contours and tree belts. Reduction of evaporation would thus occur in three ways:

1. through infiltration of soakage
2. through shade
3. through reduction of wind

Net and pan water harvesting

This is a standard procedure in desert design systems, using permaculture as an integrated whole landscape design and linking features together. This was a major change to design patterning for the students in their professional positions, and the use of a diversity of pioneer species, and an increasing diversity as landscape recovers, allows the biology and the ecology that we are establishing to actually become more and more diverse over time. There then comes an opportunity to go back into native forests, native endemic productive forests and enhanced native endemic productive forests. Thus, by bringing in productive species that come from climate analogues around the world, we can begin to globally identify similar climate landscapes and pattern systems in like manner.

Gabion silt field

Oil residue and seed sprayed desert sand dunes

We then looked at the traditional systems of landscape features put in over centuries, or even thousands of years, particularly drainpipe overflow. These surplus water drainpipe systems are traditional in Iran for gabions, so gabions can be flushed and overburdens of water can be drained quickly and soakage can be moderated in silt fields behind gabions. This is a unique technique that can increase production in small areas of silt fields behind gabions, thus creating enormous production of wheat and other crops in these soakage systems. This was explained to us and we shared this technology between each other. We also looked at the spraying of oil residues and oil waste products over sand dunes which is a system proposed by Bill Mollison in the first Gulf War in Kuwait, where oil wells that were destroyed and were causing a lot of pollution across the landscape. These oil residues and surplus oil waste products can be used to spray sand dunes after they have been seeded to rehabilitation species and pioneer sand dune stabilisation species.

Bulldozer towing oil/seed spraying equipment into position

This is a system that’s used extensively in the most damaged and most unstable sand dune areas of Iran and has proved to be a great success. Despite being a little more expensive than a lot of the other techniques it has worked extremely well. It was wonderful to see an idea that was proposed by Bill Mollison actually in action and working – an idea that a lot of people were very critical of at the time and said was an extremely radical idea. As the Iranian experts pointed out to us, the oil and oil residues are really only ancient fossilised forest products anyway. They are fundamentally broken-down forests, and to re-apply them back on a surface that is eroding to establish new forest is quite an ethical thing to do.

Geoff instructs course participants in compost-making

We also looked at how we could stimulate and increase soil fertility rapidly through soil biology. There was a lot of discussion about the quality of compost that can be produced, and how that can be measured by looking at the organisms suspended in water so that they can be analysed by their diversity and quantity with a microscope. We then discussed the work of Elaine Ingham and the Soil Food Web and explained how you can stimulate microorganisms with oxygenated compost teas. The stimulation of soil biology could be achieved over a large area with a small amount of compost oxygenated so that the soil microorganisms breed rapidly, and then inoculating the landscape through spraying. This was something that was of great interest, and at the project site of Hersinabad Plain we actually had one practical session where we made a fast aerobic compost and explained the basic principals of compost production. This is something that we would like to help the Iranians extend and promote so that they can speed up the recovery of their degraded landscapes and promote a faster biological recovery. The people became very excited about this potential.

Check dams

After the 10-day course we continued to share many learning experiences with our hosts, and some wonderful Powerpoint presentations were shown to us with visual representations of the valuable and extensive work that’s been done – earthworks, tree plantings and education systems among them. We went on from the Burjand sites and visited many ancient systems, very old earthworks and dams, and traveled through the perimeter of the Loop Desert – a landscape that holds the record for the highest recorded temperature on the planet – 70.4 degrees Celsius. It was winter when we were going through it, and there were small rain events we could witness through the landscape. We went onto other areas and visited sites where there were ancient water catchment systems, very large areas of almonds, walnuts and figs, with small catchments around every single tree. We went onto enormous areas planted in pistachio and many different crop systems.

We were also shown some very ancient cities, ancient markets and many different craft areas specializing in production of fabrics and carpets – of course the famous Persian carpets. Generally we were made to feel extremely welcome and everyone was very, very polite and very, very honourable. There was a great respect for us as foreigners everywhere from the people we were working with and everybody we met wherever we traveled. There was also a great united respect for the Islamic faith and spirituality. Everyone had very strong and very honest ethics. We were continuously shown different products that were processed by local people and traditional crops in the area around Birjand and East Iran. Of particular interest to us was the barberry. Often barberries (berberis vulgaris – a very small red berry that seems to be an endemic and wild species in Iran), were part of meals.

An ancient Almond and Fig system using individual tree water catchment systems

All in all this was a very successful trip. We were taken to some of the most ancient sites where some of the old cultures of Iran, and the world, were centred. The general end result of our work was that we were invited to continue to interact with the Iranian organisations there and the Forest Rangeland Watershed Management Organisation and the Sand Dune Fixation Bureau. We were also invited to become involved in at least two project sites and extend our work through other project sites, and we very much look forward to that as a continuing relationship. We believe the Iranian expertise in desert rehabilitation is something the world needs. Some of the best experts with some of the most extensive long term experience in desert rehabilitation are in Iran, and we would like to be able to share their expertise with many of our projects around the world. We will be engaging in their expertise and calling them in as consultants on many projects. We would like to publish some of their work, so the world can share in the quality of their ability to repair desert landscapes and arid landscapes in general. This we hope to do for them through our website and through interaction with universities with which we cooperate.

Whether it is an issue of conserving water of using suitable plant species, thriving in a desert environment is a masterful act of management. Permaculture co-founder Bill Mollison has spent time in many of the world’s arid regions and here shares his observations on surviving in some of them.

Building Abundance into Sandy Deserts

Why should we garden, when there are so many mongongo trees in the world? – !Kung tribesman

The mongongo tree (Ricinidendrin rautenii) grows in great groves on the crests of sand dunes in Africa’s Kalahari desert. It is a deciduous tree with two sexes. One in every 12 trees in a grove must be male to pollinate the females.

The tree is immune to drought as its roots tap the freshwater table of the sands. It is easily propagated from great truncheons of cuttings set in the sands 50–100cm deep (20-40 ins). These can be selected from female trees of good yield. Nuts buried 50cm (20 ins) in the sand will also germinate and can be used to select new varieties.

The wood, as light as balsa, is easy to work and widely used for small seats, bowls, drums and artwork. The tree has a long life and is hardy. It suffers from no serious pests and withstands frosts.

Thousands of kilograms of nuts can be harvested from a grove. Comparing the nuts with grains, Lee (1976) notes that they contain five times the calories and 10 times the protein equivalent of cooked rice or maize. The !Kung eat a handful (200g or 7oz) of nuts a day, or 1260 calories and 56g (2oz) of protein. This is equivalent to 113g (4oz) of cooked rice and 400g (14oz) of lean beef. The nuts provide about 50% of the food of the !Kung.

Groves of the mongongo trees are ideal for setting out in any dune deserts where severe frosts don’t occur, either for human food or for forage for game and pigs. It is only necessary to select a variety of males and females, take cuttings and grow them on. Extensive plantings from nuts would give future variation for plant selection. We should try to do this if we have sandy deserts or dune areas. Ref: Lee, R.B. and DeVore, I.1976, ‘Kalahari Hunter Gatherers; study of the !Kung San’, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Important Runoff Findings for Rocky Deserts

It may now be possible to reforest the deserts of Israel’s Negev. Recent findings from old lakes and buried soils reveal the Negev area (lat 38 N) was once forested with oak, myrtle and pines. Desertification came more than 2000 years ago with the introduction of herding and agriculture. Today, annual rain in the Negev is usually less than 200mm/yr (8ins) and, at places, more like half that. At Sede Boker in the Negev, pits and trenches dug at the top of the colluvium below the last rocky ledge grow a great variety of trees adapted to arid lands, without additional irrigation – if planted after the first winter rains. For 120mm of rains we get more than a metre of wetted soil, enough to grow figs, mulberry, jujube and citrus as well as pine, Callitris, tamarisk, juniper, oak and myrtle. It seems possible that reforestation could be achieved not only in the Negev, but in all stony deserts where such infiltration occurs.

It is rare to find well researched field data on run-off water, leading to sound strategies for run-off harvest and tree establishment. The record of Sede Boker (Sde Boqer), on heavily desertified hills with extensive cretaceous sediments (typical of many drylands), is well worth noting. The research has taken place for 15 years starting with careful rainfall measurement. It has evolved to concentrate on the fate of water in overland flow and on infiltration – and therefore on where to plant trees on hill slopes in order 1 of streams (headwaters just below the uplands and just below the ‘breakaways’ or where the small streams are well-defined).

Results demonstrated no particular rainfall pattern in the landscape and averaged much the same pattern across hills and valleys. It is a Mediterranean climate with winter rains but more than 80% of rains yield no runoff. Even in areas where stony surfaces predominate, an episode of rain must exceed 5mm (20pts) before runoff occurs. An increase in isopods (pill-bugs), together with more soil salts and a richness of species in the sparse vegetation, indicates that some areas of the slopes infiltrate water. (Neither worms nor termites have significance here as desertification is severe.)

Above the point of infiltration (where the more solid rocky surface of the convex slopes form a ledge or drop-off) and below this point (where colluviums if material wasted from the upper slope gathers and deepens downslope) there is a dramatic difference in both runoff and infiltration.

On the upper rock slopes, an average of 24 episodes of runoff annually provides 3.5 litres of water per sq m per year. On the colluvium, only 2-3 episodes of runoff occur and this yields only 0.5 litres per sq m per yr.
Hence, water yielded by the upper slopes is 12 times more frequent, and seven times heavier (a total of 84 times more plentiful) than runoff on the colluvial boundary. Also because it does not seem to enhance the stream flow (which occurs 2-3 times a year), it is clear this water infiltrates at the base of the rocky slopes and is absorbed by the colluvial mantle. Israeli scientists have found that this runoff pattern holds true for stony deserts in South America and Africa.
Professor Moshe Sharter of the Jacob Blaustein Institute of Desert Research, Ben Gurion University at Sede Boker, explained all of this to me on the site itself.

Liman or Valley Catchment in Israel

Linman is an ancient and, more recently, widely used method of patch reforestation in Israel successful in growing a wide variety of trees. It is essentially a bund of earth about 2m (6ft) high and 4-6m (13-20ft) through at the base which is carefully sculpted across the valley flood-flow.

Rainfall of 70-100mm (3-4ins) and floods two of three times a year, yield enough water in perhaps 10% of the landscape to fill small fields – up to 4 acres (1.6ha) – with floodwater. Any surplus can be split to another liman.

At Wadi Mashash, Professor Area Rogel – who worked with Michael Evenari in the Negev – grows olives, grapes, figs, acacia, eucalyptus, leucaena, carob, oaks, stone fruits and almonds in a succession of liman. Crops or intercrops comprise sorghum, wheat, adapted maize and legumes.

While building the liman, Rogel uncovered buried stone walls, about a metre (3ft) wide and deep across the valleys. It is thought these walls were once a series of “leaky” liman, now silted over, built more than 2000 years ago by Jewish settlers.

To ensure about a metre (3ft) of water a year, liman might not use all of the flood plains. But we must allow about 20 acres (8ha) of runoff to each acre of liman. This proportion can be increased (1 acre of crop to 5 acres of runoff) as rainfall increases toward 500mm (20ins) a year.

The flood levels are clearly marked on the inner walls of the liman by a line of weeds and straw trash carried by floods. Great care must be taken to spill into grassed or stony spreader drains as any concentration of floodwaters causes rapid gullying in valley sediments.

In the last 40 years, hundreds of liman have been have been made and planted to trees, mainly as shelter or forage for herds. Wadi Mashash, however, uses very limited grazing. Even so, many trees are bark damaged by goats. One senses that any reforestation must be accompanied by protection from the numerous herds of goats that traverse the Negev.

Small valleys may be fully bunded across, but liman in the sides of large valleys may have a low diversion bank directing water to the upstream entry of the liman. Spillways are usually close to the entries, often in the opposite side of the liman.