permaculture

["Robert Waldrop" <bwaldrop@cox.net>]

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