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  • From: "Robert Waldrop" <bwaldrop@cox.net>
  • To: "permaculture" <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Conserving water in ponds
  • Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2008 22:10:39 -0500

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@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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