Second part of our story about the beginning of Granja Caimito: a new regenerative agriculture farm in the province of Cordoba, Spain. #permaculture #regenerativeagriculture #spain #dehesa #andalusia #andalucia #valledelospedroches
Lovely, I enjoyed your video very much, thank you for mentioning that pigs are clean and will not dirty their own house and bed if they have room enough. It made me smile from ear to ear to see your cows so happy and dancing around in the field. I will watch your next video. I wil in Andalusia as well. and drought is a problem in Spain thanks for helping this beautiful country.
Fascinating project. I think you have a prime farm, and in a few years when you have restored the soil biology it will be amazingly fertile. Those oak trees are gold. Alan Savory and Greg Judy would disapprove of the swales, but in a totally depleted farm it makes sense, even if you fill them in later when the soil is holding the water properly again.
Thank you. Would Alan and Greg disapprove of the swales? I didn't know that. Any pointers to a video/article where they explain? We are going to plant a lot on and below these swales. One plan is to start with Vetiver at the bottom of the berm (downslope) to have mulching material right there. The reason is that the berms are mostly rocks and very little soil/earth. So we need to bring in something. At the moment the main swale has a lot of old straw and we will have the pigs go to work there in the next couple of days.
@@ProjectGranjaCaimito Loved watching all your videos. Greg Judy uploaded a video a few days ago where he is filling in the swales and ponds on one of his rented properties. He found he was unable to move cattle across them, and nothing would grow on the berms, not even grass. He was very disappointed with the experiment, and the land owner was unhappy. The proposed solution was to build bridges, which would cost even more than he had already spent. Now he is having them bulldozed in, including the permaculture ponds, which he calls “mud holes.” He is totally opposed to swales and ditches. Alan Savory has a video of a farm in Mexico that uses his Holistic Management method. There are before and after photos. Quite astonishing how the land has bloomed. The Mexican owner bulldozed a big pond he had installed many years ago, because he said he didn’t want people to see how silly he had been. Just managing the livestock brought all the carbon and water back into the soil and refilled the aquifers, which regenerated the springs. Alan discourages swales and ponds, arguing that proper management will do all the work. Check out Peter Andrews in Australia on how he turns erosion gullies back into still ponds that capture water by slowing it right down, and keeping the water on his farm for as long as possible. His farm is a case study. He puts rocks and logs into the river/gully, and makes the water part around them, so that when they collide into each other below the obstacle, the energy is taken out of the water, and it slows right down, into an almost static pond. He plants grass and reeds into the river bed, because they also act as a brake on the water. He plants reed banks to take the water from the ponds at right angles into the fields. He calls them “leaky weirs.” Peter uses swales, directing water from the river/erosion gully on contour, with the overflow where he wants it. Under no circumstances will he allow cattle into the reed banks and the water, because they befoul the water and destroy the reeds that are regenerating and rehydrating the land. When he gets a huge downpour, water crashes into his land from upriver where there are no ponds and leaky weirs, it is slowed right down and almost stopped so that the water with all the upstream topsoil settles on his land. Days later it trickles out of his sponge-like land down-stream, so the farmer down-river gets all the water he needs, but at a speed that means it is not stripping his soil. He just has to wait a few days.
Thank you for all these details. I am following Greg's videos but I'm a bit behind. Will look for both you mentioned. As with most things doing one thing 100% and ignoring everything else is always a bad course of action. As consultants say "it depends" and so my way is to observe and try different tools and methods and observe again. It's a complex system and from this here one can learn a bit how to approach it: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynefin_framework
Do you use the roads on your property to harvest run-off water? As in diverting it into ponds? You could also move chickens on a piece of land after the cows have been there. That way you will get double the fertilisation, the chickens will spread the manure more evenly and take care of fly larvae and you have another product to sell.
We have actually started a bit with that. And in our zone C there will a real need to divert the water from the road towards the adjoining paddocks. And the chickens are planned for a year now but building their mobile coops always gets delayed due to more pressing needs. But maybe "this year" we'll manage to achieve that.
Hi, thank you for sharing your videos and insights on the farm. I'd be interested in the holistic framework that you have formed (probably) for your farm, what your plan long term for the farm is and how you cover your investment in the land and other costs over the short term. If you'd be open to share of course.
Thank you for your nice comment. Please see bosque.caimito.net for one part of your question. The questions about the investment is simple to answer. It costs money to live and one can either spend the money on rent and gadgets or invest into a nice environment. We live on the land and so we basically do "home improvement". It doesn't really matter what it costs as long it's affordable and makes us happy. Eventually we also get a product which in the case of a farm is the surplus that can be shared by selling it. It used to be that way for centuries ...
1. Music is good, but still too loud 2. mention your website in the video, but plz put a *link* in the description. The website needs a LOT more love. 3. don't use polywire, use polybraid 4. I suppose you know Greg Judy's channel. If you don't, check it out *immediately*. Will help you to avoid some mistakes I think I saw. hth
Hello. I love your channel I am going to do the same thing in Portugal this year. I need advice on a brand of solar panels that would be good thank you
Our local supplier sells 330W Axiom panels. I can't tell about any particular features a panel should have but I have noticed that with the new inverter (SMA Sunny Boy) we get a LOT more out of the same 16 panels than before.
perhaps to help improve your soil at a faster rate you could look into the (Dr} Johnson-Su Bio-reactor method so more fungi and bacteria can be introduced into your soil along with the swales that are adding moisture to your soils.
Thank you. Very interesting. I'll look into it. As I said in another reply: first we need to finish fencing so that we can manage who goes where and when. When that's done we can then move on to the more interesting things and your suggestion is certainly one to look into. Thanks again.
been tracking this project for a few days now. Makes me realise we're managing our land wrong here. I live in the Netherlands and our land has never looked this good. We only graze in the summer and parts of spring. But these last few years, summer has been extremely dry. We do get a lot of rain but most all of it falls in fall, winter and some in spring. Should we be grazing in the winter/fall too?
A lot of people say you graze 365 days/year. Just think about what the animals would do without the human getting in the way? Snow, of course, can be an issue but then horses do move the snow to get to the grass below. But yes, there are limits and the animals would move without the fences :-)
Saludos, tengo una duda sobre el proceso de rotación que mencionas en 17:19, me gustaría comprenderlo mejor, hablas de una carga de 80 vacas en divisiones de media hectárea (5.000. M2) por día. Pero luego hablas de "moverlas 2 o 3 durante el día". ¿Estamos hablando de llevar esas 80 vacas a pastar en una hectárea por día?. ¿Entonces porqué haces divisiones de 5.000 M2?
Explico. La idea de pastoreo rotacional es que el animal no muerde la misma planta dos veces. Para lograr eso hay diferente maneras y al final del dia lo que se hace depende de la situacion acual del pasto en la zona en cuestion. Divisiones pequenas dan mas opciones. Se puede usar un grupo de vaqueros (o uno solo) para mirar todo el dia donde se debe pastar y poner y quitar hilo electrico para guiar a los animales. O se puede abrir y cerrar puertas y dejar los animales encontrar la siguiente zona para pastar. En nuestro caso yo quiero que una sola persona puede hacerlo y entrenamos las vacas para se les puede llamar o comunicarles con el dedo indicando que deben salir. Tipicamente las vacas quieren salir cuando queda poco pasto. En tan solo 5000m2 este momento llega pronto. Cuando hay poco pasto se cambia mas veces que cuando hay mucho y se pueden quedar hasta 2 dias en la misma zona.
@@ProjectGranjaCaimito Gracias por la aclaratoria. Disculpa, estaba pensando en las divisiones como algo perfectamente igual, cuando evidentemente la naturaleza no es así.
There is a myriad of things that could be done. We try to watch who shows up and what happens. It's a complex system. At the moment during summer the whole area is so dry that every form of life goes into hiding. Let's see how this year will be.
