permaculture

[Jay Woods <woodsjaya@gmail.com>]

I'd like to try terracing on 5 acres of hillside here in Nevada. It is dry 
country so the water table needs to be perched in each terrace. Do you have 
any sources on their construction? I remember seeing terracing used under 
these conditions in the Mid-East.

On Monday, January 06, 2014 12:24:21 PM Lawrence London wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 10:38 AM, Pete Gasper, Gasper Family Farm <
> 
> farmer1@gasperfarm.com> wrote:
> > What kind of soil is underneath those fields? Here in America we'd
> > consider
> > that too steep to plant or do much anything with besides maybe cattle or
> > scrub timber. But then you can't run a combine with a 30' header across it
> > and our soils of such geography tend to have stone a few inches down. But
> > I
> > wonder if human scale agriculture could radically expend food production
> > here via methods like that.
> 
>  The amount of planning that goes into the design, construction and soil
> preparation of those terraces is incredible. I read an article on a group
> that rebuilt some that had been damaged from erosion when the walls
> collapsed. I guess construction methods vary according to materials
> available on site but usually a lot of dry-laid stonework goes into the
> foundation of each terrace wall. Drainage and wall reinforcement is part of
> the process. I think some Asian rice terraces date back thousands of years.
> The steep terrain was all the people had to work with, little or no flat
> land. Here in the US the best farmland, prime, not marginal, should be
> protected from development and made available for agricultural use only
> employing natural methods and materials and permaculture.
> 
> There is no reason that prime farm soil on hilly terrain could not be
> terraced and farmed productively. Depending on slope techniques using
> Yeoman Keyline plows to backhoes, to skid loaders to track loaters to track
> hoes could be used. Water would be a big issue and impoundments would be
> necessary. I am talking about earthworks only, without any masonry
> components unless they are abundant on site and can be used in situ along
> with the soil used to build the earthworks. An in depth permaculture
> systems design could be created using polyculture, livestock, fish,
> crustaceans, crop diversity, post harvest methods that recycle byproducts,
> chinampas, all ideas taken from certain terraced regions in the Phillipines
> where permaculture is practiced traditionally and is the de facto standard
> for their agricutural practices.
> 
> Sepp Holzer is doing great things on his hillside farm in Austria. There
> are vast universes of knowledge that can be gained from traditional
> agriculture as practiced in every country of the world. For the US Asian
> countries seem to offer the most with a considerable amount from Middle
> Eastern countries such as Iran, Iraq and Afganistan, with particular
> reference to the water conservation and storage methods and water delivery
> systems, i.e. quanats in Iran and irrigation tunnels in Afganistan, all
> ancient systems. Of course much of this would not serve large scale
> agriculture methods, i.e. broad acre farming, very well but would be of
> immense value to local small scale farming units, individual, family, small
> farm. Traditional indigenous farming systems need to be identified,
> documented and preserved.
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