[permaculture] Conserving water in ponds
Robert Waldrop
bwaldrop at cox.net
Wed Aug 27 23:10:39 EDT 2008
I am from Tillman County, which is in the
southwestern part of the state along the Red
River. When I was a kid (1950s-60s), Tillman
County had a lot of trees. In the original
pattern of settlement, there were 4 160 acre
homesteads per 640 acre square mile. Wherever
there had been a house, there was a small grove of
trees, often with heritage fruit trees. Many
farms had extensive shelter belts that had been
planted during the Dust Bowl. Many of those trees
along fence rows were mulberries, and people used
to make jam and cobblers out of them. I have
mulberries here in OKC, and the jam and cobblers
are quite good.
Nearly all of that tree cover has been removed so
that "fence to fence" planting of wheat and
cotton, their two major crops, can rule the day.
The area was originally a short-grass prairie, and
by all historical accounts it was very lush. Two
good things that have happened in that area is a
large wetland, originally drained 1910-ish, has
been reclaimed as wetland, and the government's
CRP program subsidized returning quite a bit of
cropland to pasture. Alas, the CRP rules
typically require management of said pastures with
herbicides to encourage monocultures, and the
grass they require isn't one that is native to the
area. And they don't allow grazing. They do allow
an occasional controlled burn, which is good
because historically fire was part of the prairie
cycle.
The last prairie chicken in the county lived in
one of our pastures. I never knew it, but my Dad
says that my grandfather would go up to that
pasture and sit, anda fter a while, the prairie
chicken would come out and sit and they would just
look at each other for a while. My Dad said he
thought my grandfather and the chicken were both
grieving.
Quite a bit of wildlife remains tenaciously
present in the county. When I was a kid, close by
the bridge over the ditch in front of our house,
there was a colony of red ants. That colony is
still there, I check it out every time I go down
there. Buffalo gourds still grow in the ditches.
The farmers in the food coop are a different sort
of farmer, so I am hoping they will be open to
some alternative ideas for coping with coming
changes.
Bob Waldrop, OKC
www.barkingfrogspermaculture.org
----- Original Message -----
From: "Darren Doherty" <darren at permaculture.biz>
> Rowan Reid (University of Melbourne, Forestry)
> recently suggested that every
> farm should have 22.4% (from memory) of each
> farm in some kind of tree
> cover...having travelled through Oklahoma last
> year I could see that much of
> this state, like much of the rest of the great
> agricultural regions that we
> travelled or worked in (US, brittle Europe,
> Argentina and Australia for that
> matter) have done their level best to remove
> anything even looking like a
> tree...so much so that any perennials don't even
> get a look in. A bare earth
> policy prevails and so from that the
> dehumification cycle starts. So there
> is much to be done at that level and it means
> using Holistic ManagementTM,
> Keyline Design, Carbon Farming & Integrated
> Farm Forestry (especially Alley
> or Avenue Farming) to start the rehumidification
> process.
>
> As for the potential for dam failure due to
> leakage...a good idea is to
> actually do some test holes with a backhoe or
> excavator and test the
> substrate from which you are going to build the
> storage. I have the unedited
> copy of the 2000 Permaculture Activist article
> on all of this at:
> http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dct6rvhv_17gn3b6sfh .
> Doing some testing
> is a good and I believe necessary part of the
> process of risk management,
> especially these days when diesel is sooo
> expensive...even though these
> structures and other well considered
> 'terraforming earthworks' are
> appropriate for the objective of rehumidifying
> human landscapes.
>
> The 'Great Agricultural Retrofit' as I call it
> starts however with the soil
> and its coverage and management and there are no
> shortage of methods proven
> to build soil on any scale...as Allan Savory
> puts it: "...Its all up to
> human decision making..."
>
> All the best,
>
> Darren Doherty
>
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