permaculture

[Marcus Webb <permaculture1@planet-save.com>]

Greening the Desert
Friday, 15 November  2002

They laughed at him and said it couldn't be done. Nothing could be grown in 
that salt laden dustbowl. But Geoff and Sindhu Lawton had other ideas. They 
travel the world teaching others how to repair trashed environments that are 
beyond hope of becoming productive.

In this story, Geoff talks about re-greening the deserts of Jordan. By 
applying the principles of permaculture, they managed to salvage a heavily 
salted environment and turn it into a green oasis.

Geoff and Sindhu live and teach at their farm near The Channon, a small 
community not far from Lismore. Geoff boasts that despite not having a police 
station or church, The Channon has some of the most tolerant and friendly 
people in Australia.

Transcript - Geoff Lawton

So we went in and had a look and we thought “Oh, no!” This is the end of the 
earth. This is like as hard as you can get. This is hyper arid. Completely 
salted landscape. Four hundred metres below sea level - lowest place on 
Earth. Two kilometres from the Dead Sea. About two kilometres from where 
Jesus was christened. Hardly got any rainfall. We’ve got temperatures in 
August that go over 50 degrees. Everybody is farming under plastic strips - 
spray, spray spray! Everybody’s putting synthetic fertiliser on. Overgrazed 
with goats! Just like maggots eating the flesh off the bone, down to the 
bones of the country. Literally like maggots –giant maggots eating it to 
nothing. 
So we designed up a system that would harvest every bit of rainwater that 
fell on it.

On ten acres, there’s one and a half kilometres of Swale – water harvesting 
ditch on contour. And when they’re full, one million litres of water soak 
into the landscape. And they’ll fill quite a few times over a winter. And 
then we heavily mulched those swales with organic matter which was trashed 
from organic fields nearby. We put that almost half a metre deep. So we saved 
that and mulched our swales which were about two metres wide and half a metre 
deep on the trench. And then we put micro irrigation on the trench. And on 
the uphill side of the water harvesting trench we put Nitro fixing, very 
hardy desert trees which helped shade and reduce wind evaporation and also 
put nitrogen into the soil. And structure the soil for us. And on the lower 
side of the trench we put fruit trees. Majoring in date palms as the 
long-term over-storey in the end. And then we put in Figs, Pomegranates, 
Guavas, Mulberries and now some Citrus.

Within four months we had figs, a metre high with figs on, which is 
impossible. We done a course, male and female course. Trained up some locals. 
And we got a translator whose working for the project. He had his degree in 
agriculture, in the Jordan University. And he got onto his mates in the 
agriculture department, “Well,” he said, “you (said we) couldn’t grow figs. 
We got figs growing. We got figs on ‘em. You better come and test the soil 
because no matter what you say, we’re either growing in salty soil what we 
shouldn’t be growing or we’ve desalted the soil! And we’d like to know what 
we’ve done?” They came in and the salt levels were dropping. So they became 
interested. The salt levels were dropping around the Swales. They said, 
“You’ve must have washed it through.” See, normaly you put this huge amount 
of water on ‘em and wash the salt to the lower levels which just makes the 
ground more and more salty. In the end, you’ll salt it twenty metres deep if 
you keep doing that. And then it’ll take a thousand years to recover. And we 
used only one fifth the amount of water. So the water they thought we’ve 
washed it all through, no – we used one fifth! That really got ‘em. When they 
realized how much water we hadn’t used. With the same amount of water 
normally used on that much area, we could have done 50 acres.

Originally people laughed at us because we didn’t put straight lines in. We 
went on contour with these swales. They thought, “Why don’t you, –you got a 
bulldozer, you can flatten the desert, you can straighten--” We said, we want 
to go on contour, because we got a longer edge and we can harvest the water 
passively. And then we planted more non-fruiting trees than we did fruit 
trees. So they laughed at us. (They said,) “You’re planting unproductive 
things more than productive things. What the point? You know. In soil that 
wont even grow anything. And then we covered all the inside of the swale with 
huge amount of mulch where they scrape all their organic matter off and burn 
it, like most traditional agriculture.

In the middle of winter we got a funny email saying “We’ve got a problem. 
We’ve got mushrooms growing in the Swale. Well they call it fungus, but when 
we saw a photograph of it, it was mushrooms because they’d never seen 
mushrooms, because they never had so much humidity in living history in the 
soil. And when you open up the mulch, there’s all these little animals there, 
you know those little insects and the soil has come alive. And the fungi net 
that’s underneath the mulch, is putting off a waxy substance, which is 
repelling the salt away from the area. And the decomposition is locking the 
salt up and the salt is not gone. It’s become inert and insoluble.

So we could re-green the Middle East. We could re-green any desert. And we 
could desalt it at the same time. And if we can do it on an insignificant 
little bit of flat ten acres of depth desert, if you give us something with 
catchment, or a Wadi, or a canyon or any of those erosion gully’s, we can 
turn it right around. Completely.

You can fix all the world’s problems, in a garden. You can solve them all in 
a garden. You can solve all your pollution problems, and all your supply line 
needs in a garden.

And most people today actually don’t know that, and that makes most people 
very insecure.

See pictures: http://www.abc.net.au/northcoast/stories/s727970.htm

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