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  • From: Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network <lakinroe@silcom.com>
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [permaculture] Holistic Management , Keyline Design® , and Broad-acre Permaculture with Kirk Gadzia and Darren Doherty by Owen Hablutzel /santa barbara
  • Date: Sun, 6 Dec 2009 08:09:06 -0800

Sustainable Land Management Course
Courses/Workshops, Land - by Owen Hablutzel

Holistic Management, Keyline Design®, and Broad-acre Permaculture
with Kirk Gadzia and Darren Doherty
November 10-15, 2009
Orella Ranch, California

http://www.permacultureusa.org/2009/12/03/sustainable-land-management-course/#more-1489

The winds of change are blowing extra brisk these days and gathering transformative momentum. Highlights and ground-truthed strategies for this agrarian revolution underway were served up and stacked high for six solid days at the Orella Ranch Sustainable Learning Pavilion, during this second module (of four) in the on-going and leading-edge Carbon Economy Course.

A partial list of participants would include multiple farmers and ranchers (most from California, but some from as far away as Wales!), Permaculturalists from far and wide-east to west coast, ass0rted eco-preneurs and small business operators, along with several other representative strands from the growing and diverse web of people, organizations, and groups contributing positive actions to regenerative practice and culture.


Kirk Gadzia (of Resource Management Services) led off this module with an inspiring three days instructing participants on the well-developed framework and practice of Holistic Management. With over 30 million acres worldwide under this form of ecologically sound management the original work and insights of Allan Savory (originator of HM) have taken on a powerful life of their own through the many practitioners and land managers who have found increasing health in their families, land, resources, and livelihoods through using the various tools and techniques-from holistic decision-making and financial planning, to grazing and land planning-found in this useful framework.

Mr. Gadzia is a renowned consultant, educator, and author (co-author of Rangeland Health: New Methods to Classify, Inventory, and Monitor Rangelands through the National Academy of Sciences, and a practical guide for range health monitoring, Bullseye!, among other publications) with a background in Holistic Management extending to the early 1980s. His speaking and presentations reflect this depth of knowledge and wide-ranging experience. Armed with a multitude of fence-line comparison photos spanning at least 30 years - visual examples of extensive land improvement and massive carbon sequestration-Mr. Gadzia leaves the impression he could continue to show dramatic photo proofs from ranch after farm after ranch across the globe for the entire three days!



So how are these multiple, impressive results achieved? The Holistic ManagmentTM processes and tools leading to these productive achievements were learned by course participants along the way. It begins with each person or group establishing a clear definition of the unique whole they are managing-a baseline for where they are starting from. To decide where they want to go from there a Holistic Goal is then determined. In the process of creating this goal participants identify the values, ethics, and quality of life they wish to create and live by, what they must produce to achieve those, and how their future resource base-including land, people, and community-must function into the future to support everything else in the goal. With a completed Holistic Goal anyone has available an unusually potent tool-specific to themselves or their organisation, their passions, proclivities, talents, values, and their situation-for testing decisions that will move them towards the livelihood, society and environment they are working for.
These topics, and an abundance of others-including, soils, livestock, wildlife, grass physiology, planned grazing, fencing, decision testing questions, watershed restoration, and so on-spanned the three days and were interspersed with 'pasture walks' out into various sections of Orella Ranch. During outdoor explorations participants learned how to assess on-the-ground functioning of the various ecosystem processes (water cycle, mineral cycle, energy flow, and community dynamics-or, succession), as well as how to monitor these over time in order to learn how management is affecting land health, and to use this up-to-date information for making better decisions about practical responses to the emerging land conditions.

Learning to fully engage in an active and informative feedback-loop relationship with the land participants explored pastures and enjoyed Orella's cool, Fall days while overlooking a sparkling expanse of the Pacific Ocean. All senses were activated in order to better understand the unfolding of ecosystem processes on the landscape. Enthusiasm for this part of the learning venture found different groups wandering within paddocks, surreptitiously digging down through decomposing grass-litter layers, exclaiming at signs of soil life, estimating plant production amounts per acre, wagering how much of the standing material would feed a cow for a day, quantifying species diversity, and all punctuated by occasional outbursts of collective glee!
One such episode unleashed when pasture monitors discovered a dung beetle under a new stack of horse manure! A veritable dung beetle induced riot ensued. Perhaps not since ancient Egypt-where they were worshiped-has a dung beetle been the focus of so much attention, respect, and appreciation as many folks gathered around to witness this amazing decomposer in action.
A partial list of 'A-HA' moments over the first three days, as articulated by various participants in the Holistic Management section of the Sustainable Land Management course:
* Ecological principles are not broken, rather people break themselves against these principles when they attempt to cheat or ignore them
* A diversity of cool and warm season plants (C3 and C4) in perennial pastures is important for creating longer growing seasons, more resilient pastures, and increased yields of forage
* Importance of managing for the 'triple bottom line'-ecological, social, and economic (a very similar pattern to Permaculture's ecological 'Care of Earth,' social 'Care of People,' and ecomomic 'Return the Surplus')
* Importance of ruminants-especially in the world's massive areas of 'brittle' (arid) environments-to a healthy, functioning decomposition cycle
* TIME NOT NUMBERS: Overgrazing is about the amount of TIME plants are exposed to grazers and NOT about how many grazers (NUMBERS) they are exposed to
* People and non-human animals are also 'successional'-not only plant communities
* 'Chaos Farming' and 'Chaos Grazing'-creation and maintenance of landscape mosaics, patches, and heterogeneity-in time and space-in order to increase edges, diversity, and yield
* Effective PLANNING is never a single action-rather it is a continuous cycle: Plan - Monitor - Adjust - Re-Plan
* Soil surface management is fundamental
* Importance of the holistic viewpoint and practical value of the holistic goal

Sunrise over the Pacific at the Orella Ranch campgrounds
With this learning and context fresh in participant's experiences - and gaining a few new students as well - Darren Doherty commenced teaching the second three-day section of the Sustainable Land Management course, on the topics of Keyline Design®, Broad-acre Permaculture Design, and other innovations developing for regenerative agriculture and carbon farming.
Mr. Doherty-a prolific Australian Permaculture and Keyline® designer, developer, consultant, and educator (Australia Felix Permaculture) - was the original 'master-mind' and driving force behind the entire concept and organisation of the Carbon Economy Course series. Mr. Doherty explained that his plans for this course were partly a result of his 2007 world tour teaching Keyline Design® courses, along with his learning more about emerging methodologies and seeing huge potential in bridging those together. He notes "an obvious need to have some accelerated training to help folks work on what I like to call the 'Great Retrofit' of agricultural landscapes" as "our entire land-based systems are becoming Carbon poor. Right now we have a unique opportunity to revitalise our communities and societies through the building of a Carbon rich landscape (and) we have the technical means to do soŠ."
The details of these ground-breaking means were the matter-at-hand and together advance a compelling vision of the multiple regenerative opportunities emerging with the Carbon economy. The Holistic Management framework was emphasised as a vital context and perspective with which to frame and ground the increasing smorgasbord of pragmatic, ecology-based, land health strategies, including carbon farming, natural sequence farming, Zero Emissions Research Initiative (ZERI) methodologies, Soil Food Web, pasture cropping, bio-char, Rodale 'crop-rolling,'along with Keyline® and broad-acre Permaculture Design. Taken altogether these form what Mr. Doherty has called 'Keyline Design Mark IV.'

In the classroom and during field excursions participants engaged in the practical issues associated with design and implementation of regenerative, carbon-rich, extensive systems. Details included:
* understanding and use of Keyline landscape geometry
* design and building of farm-scale dams and irrigation systems
* innovative forestry and silvo-pastoral systems
* appropriate contexts for carbon sequestration using trees or grasses
* many function-stacking variations on multiple, in-line attachments to the Yeoman's plow (mounder, discs, power harrow, planters, compost tea applicator, seeders, roller, etc)
* useful landscape design profiles and examples
* importance of project costing and phase-planning
* how to get the most from GIS applications to designs
* Keyline orchards
* appropriate contexts for swales vs. keyline
* establishing proper payments for ecosystem services provided by farms and ranches
* a keyline pattern plowing demonstration.

Fieldwork included instruction with the transit (dunpy) level, as well as a laser level, and was fully integrated with learning the GIS contour mapping process. Participants used surveying skills and a simple GPS unit to mark reference points along the contours of a valley area, then were walked through the process of getting the GPS points into a GIS format like Google Earth or MapInfo. With the base contour map this process provides one can begin to design according to the revealed site geometry.

The land patterning understanding offered by Keyline sunk in deeper with participants as Darren Doherty walked the group out on the land through parts of the proposed future farm dam and catchment system as designed on Orella Ranch, so that all could visualize in situ how the plan matched the actual landscape (the existing plan for Orella was designed by Mr. Doherty along with those students who attended for a week in April 2007, when Orella hosted the world's first Keyline Design course).

As the map is never the territory marrying concepts to physical experience can really send the 'insight-meter' off the charts for folks. As if to further emphasize this the Yeoman's plow was brought out, introduced, and thoroughly explained in its functions and parts by one of the world's foremost experts, and put into the ground paralleling a true Keyline marked out by freshly trained surveyors. After many parallel plow passes the survey equipment was used to demonstrate and confirm that the plowed pattern would in fact guide water out of the valley and onto the ridges! People only 'eye-balling' the pattern at the site might have sworn that if water followed those lines out of the valley it would indeed be a miracle since it appeared to run uphill. The laser level put the eyes to the test and showed clearly that the lines in fact ran down slope, regardless of how the brain wanted to interpret it. Another valuable lesson: use the instrument, eyes can often 'lie.'

Other notable gems from section two of the Sustainable Land Management course:
* For all the multiple values, around 22% of a well-integrated farm landscape should be in trees
* 20%-35% clay content soil is needed for building farm dam walls - do your 'due diligence' geo-technical testing
* Keyline pattern cultivation with a Yeoman's plow is a physical impact that jumpstarts a biological impact which, in turn, jumpstarts the chemical impact
* The only inputs to agriculture should be air, water, and sunlight
* Blue before Green before Black: harvest the water, grow the plants, sequester the Carbon
* Every metric tonne of soil organic Carbon sequesters 3.67 tonnes of atmospheric Carbon
* Pasture cropping: seeding dry-farmed winter active annuals into summer active perennials (or vice-versa); more yield, less erosion, more diversity, less disease, more Carbon, low risk, improved soil health
* Big, dense, root networks growing as rapidly as possible (grasses) sequester the most Carbon per unit of land
* Fix the soil with relatively inexpensive techniques-HM planned grazing, Keyline pattern cultivation-before building dams, chances are you will need much less dam water than you initially think, once water cycle is more effective
* Importance of the tool of large animals (cow tractors) and extending effective land-use into Permaculture zones 3, 4 and 5
* "It's a lot more interesting than chess!" - Bill Mollison

Indeed, if this course is anything to gauge by, the regenerative learning and transformations underway are extraordinarily interesting, intelligent, adaptive, practical, and needed. And becoming more so every day! Great thanks go out to Kirk Gadzia and Darren Doherty for their exemplary, ongoing work, valuable teachings, and vision, as well as to all the dedicated participants in the series thus far. Kudos are due also to the good folks at Quail Springs and Orella Ranch who are doing the demanding work of jointly organizing and convening this leading-edge series. Congratulations on another successful module! (See the links to these organizations to learn more or to donate in support of their ongoing efforts to bring sustainable land management practices to a wider audience.)

Next up in the Orella hosted West coast Carbon Economy Course series: ZERI Training (Zero Emissions Research Initiative) with Erin Sanborn, followed by Re-localisation with Joel Salatin. See you there!
~~~~~~~~
Owen Hablutzel performs international work in Permaculture design, consultation, speaking, and education. He is a director of the Permaculture Research Institute USA, and can be reached at owen (at) permacultureusa.org
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From: Nicollas <permactiviste@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 6 Dec 2009 17:35:32 +0100
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Subject: Re: [permaculture] Permaculture Knowledge Ecosysterm! very important
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Interesting,

if i've understood correctly, the innovation (w.r.t wikipedia) is the
businnes plan based on "on demand printed books" based on free/libre
colaborative contents, who's base should be tagari books and experiences,

in such a system, people could buy books on techniques, design ideas,
experiences in their country, or similar climat, or about livestock, etc.

These kinds of books would form the long tail, with a few hits (PDM, intro
to PC) representing a lot of downloads.

It would be quite amazing, but it requires a lot of mind shifts and
contributions and semantic knowledge and ...


Nicollas

2009/12/6 Evan Schoepke <thejulianeffect@gmail.com>

I think one has to see this video if you want to understand *the future of
permaculture* knowledge tools and content.
How *we can and must* open permaculture knowledge up to hundreds languages
and people all over the world and bring it from the digital dark ages!
Publishing on demand will cut out the middle men, save money, and open up
content!
Richard Baraniuk: Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source
learning<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRymi-lFHpE>
recommended sites working in this direction appropedia.org
*
*

--
The obstacle is the Path.
-Zen Proverb

I write at www.punkrockpermaculture.com
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  • [permaculture] Holistic Management , Keyline Design® , and Broad-acre Permaculture with Kirk Gadzia and Darren Doherty by Owen Hablutzel /santa barbara, Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network, 12/06/2009

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