Water Management on the Climate Farm
By Mikael Maynard
In its past life, the Johnny Appleseed Organic Village was a more conventional farming operation, lacking a water management design to limit erosion and water loss. As a result, nutrient leaching was an occurrence as regular as receiving rainfall.
Since the farm is located next to the ecologically sensitive Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, it was critical that we solve these issues sooner than later. But before we get into how that was done, let’s look at why these issues occurred in the first place, and ways that you can spot them on your property.
How to Identify Poor Water Management
The most obvious sign that water, soil and nutrients were not being managed well on our farm were patterns present in the soil right under our feet. Hard surface runoff was present along the main paths of the farm during rain events, a pattern expressed in the form of very distinct little gullies lined with silt and sediment dyed with organic nutrients (runoff from compost and fertilizer distributed onto the farm rows).
This was happening because the tree rows were not installed on contour, causing water to flow out of the rows, towards the main paths and downhill off the property — away from where it and the nutrients it was carrying were needed most.
What is contouring? Kelda Lorax explains it best:
“Contour is a line along one elevation measurement. It is a line directly perpendicular to the slope (up and down) of a site. If you think of your standing body as a hill, then contour lines run across your body like a belt, bracelets, or a neck scarf. If someone were to pour water on your head, the water would travel downhill, but when water hits the belt (if you and the belt were made of earth), the water would slow and spread along that line.”
Of course, recognizing the problem is just the beginning. The next step is to take corrective action, but it isn’t as easy as deconstructing all of the tree rows and making new rows on contour. A lot of time, effort and money had already been spent on planting olives, mayhaws, blackberries and blueberries that have become established on the ill-formed rows.
Three Steps Toward Better Water Management
In order to preserve these perennial fruiting species while controlling the flow of water, soil and nutrients, we took three initial steps.
Step 1: Locate the contour line — This is accomplished using a type of survey equipment called a transit. It involves setting up a tripod with a laser level head mounted on top. This laser spins around while he holds up a receiver that beeps when it is level with the tripod mounted laser. There are lowtech options available as well that will provide the same level of accuracy with a little more effort involved. These include making an A-frame or a bunyip.
Step 2: Breaking down the tree rows — Tree rows that do not have perennial species in them will be dissolved completely and remade on contour. Tree rows with blueberry bushes have had the berry bushes removed and transplanted to a new location during their period of dormancy, allowing these rows to be dissolved and remade. Tree rows with long term perennial fruit species like olives, mayhaws and blackberries will stay put with the intention of putting a break in the tree row after every tree. Imagine each tree sitting on its own island of soil where water can pass between each island to a swale or catchment basin on contour. This process will be covered in-depth in a later post.
Step 3: Subsoiling on contour — This step is directly inspired by Allan Yeoman’s keyline system. The basics of this system are explained as follows: “Keyline planning is based on the natural topography of the land. It uses the form and shape of the land to determine the layout and position of farm dams, irrigation areas, roads, fences, farm buildings and tree lines. Keyline is an agricultural system in which great emphasis is placed on processes designed to increase substantially the fertility of soils. Emphasis is placed on the creation of a soil environment that rapidly accelerates soil biological activity, thus vastly increasing the total organic matter content within the soil.” One of these processes is subsoiling on contour. Yeoman created the Yeoman subsoiling plow, but we used our Kubota tractor in consortium with our BCS subsoiling attachment. To sum it up, we make line after line of passes parallel to each other between tree rows with the subsoiler following the line of contour. By doing this, when rain events occur, the water has increased contact with the earth (by being caught in all the subsoiler crevices) which sinks, slows, spreads and stores water — keeping it from forming a gutter off of the property.
Conclusion
In the next part of this series, we will cover in-depth the machinery and process required to break apart the tree rows and the methods we chose to divert and capture water, including swales or catchment ponds.
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