How we improve water retention and water harvest at Granja Caimito to be prepared for the yearly summer draught. #swales #permaculture #regenerativeagriculture #spain #dehesa #andalusia #andalucia #valledelospedroches
Parents have a 5 acre site in Portugal. Ì have dug 4 small swales in the main garden. After 2 months the top 2 swales now hold water for over a week. The main site is an olive grove, so I will be digging swales next year and extending the grove while also planting afruit polyculture. Cheers, interesting.
If you orient the swales North / South, given a certain depth the walls of the swale will provide shade to the water when the sun rises and when it sets, the water will evaporate more when the sun is overhead for example between 10:00 am to 2:00 pm.
Just watched few of your videos. Man, this is amazing! Regenerative Agriculture/Grazing in a dry climate and that too in English. I am eagerly subscribing to the channel and hoping to learn here. Thanks for all the extra work in sharing your work on RU-vid.
Most important part from 7.02 the music started and it became difficult to hear what the narrator was saying. However, this is a great video. Very useful.
As you rehabilitate and rehydrate the soil explore the use of liquid smoke, biochar and vermicomposting. A combination of swales and the organic nutrient expanders I've mentioned accelerate the formation of biomass and thus humus and beneficial microorganisms.
Yes. So many good things that can be done. We are trying some of these already but haven't really gotten to do it for real and on a significant scale. We are still struggling to create basic infrastructure. Cows are helpful but they also like to eat new plants ahead of time - to give an example ;-)
Great ideas! I have quik clays too. It is ground I farmed 45 yrs ago. And now I have time to consider and plan for the near future! Thank you! East Coast Canada
All this is well explained in the Book ‘Desert or Paradise from Sepp Holzer’, but he adds a deep hole in the center of the pond to fulfill the aquifer. Well done anyway, thanks for sharing in English, i’am In the south of France so close to you !
I worked in the countryside in Málaga for several years. People there probably consider you a "crazy foreigner who doesn't know how to work the land". They're very closed minded (specially people over 30s) and don't like changes, even if you can prove and improve, they don't follow your example just because you're a foreigner. It's sad Andalucia has been desertified by centuries.
@@ProjectGranjaCaimito you're right, you must go on. You're doing a good job and taking the best decisions. When I arrived there in 2008 and worked for some months in a poorly nourished "olivar" , I asked my boss why he let the land get worse and worse. I proposed him to plant some fabaceae. He answered there was not enough water. I investigated and proposed him some drought resistant varieties, he just ignored me.
Yes. That tale "it doesn't rain enough" is very common. People don't understand that water gets stored in the soil. They complain about torrential rains during spring that create dangers but don't connect the dots.
these Swales will change the world. in wild fire areas dry arid mountains , the creeks need to be diverted into pools or Swales and store more water in the land .
I would like to share some knowledge with you, you can create similar structures around each tree to capture the water that runs down the tree during rains, you can use a tractor and ploughing and form a deep Circular set of rings. Around each tree which helps capture the water. Plus the larger ones across the fields and pastures, if I lived closer I would join you from time to time as I live about 70 km south of Cordoba
Let the cattle graze the land according to the principle of regenerative agriculture (move them each day) and you will solve any water issue within a couple of years.
Pictures should be dated. I'm sure land has improved, but it'd be better to know whether or not the pictures were taken during the wet season or not. As a resident in Spain, I know the climate and how the landscape changes from summer to winter. On a side note, good job for those practices and good luck on your next years!!!
Looks nice. With that clay you have you can build ponds anywhere you want.. plenty of elevation change..flow channels to fill all the ponds during the rainy season. You can't make dry wet unless it's wet:-).
That's right. The only challenge is that we have to respect the roots of the oak trees. Can't make up a plan based on topography alone. These trees are protected for a very good reason: very slow growth.
A huge difference between the Hutewald and the Dehesa is also the kind of trees. Olivos does not lose the leaves in winter, so the soil is much less rich in nutrients from natural compost, so there're less and smaller sourronding plants, so much less water and erosion retention. It comes also from the warmer summers of spain, where the same german trees would not survive with the same amount of water as olivos do.
We do not have olive trees. Those are all encinas (Quercus ilex) or holm oaks in English. There certainly used to be a lot more trees in the past. We are trying to restore that. See caimito.eu for details.
@@ProjectGranjaCaimito anyway, also not estational trees ("perennes" in spanish=not loosing leaves in winter). Same ecosistem with less organic materials in the floor. Thanks for the link. I'm really curious about a German guy managing an Andalusian project ;D. I'll check it out and try to visit you in place sometime.
Climate looks ideal for honey mesquite (prosopis glandulosa). They are drought resistant nitrogen fixing trees which produce edible beans for humans or livestock and will also make the soil more fertile.
Thank you for the recommendation. Plan is to finish fencing to create some structure that allows us to manage who goes where and then look at planting new things in designated areas. That might be the berms of swales, corners in paddocks (that can be separated with a wire) or areas along the paths.
Plant vetiver on the border of the swales, the seasonal creek and the ponds, vetiver is a swamp grass and it will thrive in those micro-climates. Note that vetiver thrives in areas that are in full sunlight.
Excellent stand of volunteer vetch around that swale. Do you also have hop ( or suckling) clover? In my experience, whenever vetch appears, hop clover tends to join in before the better clovers show up under rotational grazing.
Ich bin gerade dabei, mir in der Provence ein Stück Land in den Bergen zu kaufen, das total erodiert ist. Die Oberfläche besteht praktisch nur noch aus Steinen und Sand mit einem Lehmgehalt von etwa 10%. Bis gerade eben hatte ich keine Ahnung, wie ich da wieder Leben rein bringen soll. Jetzt aber kaufe ich mir einen Bagger und will anfangen den Hang so zu gestalten, wie es hier gezeigt wird. - Mal sehen, ob 's was bringt. Danke für das Video.
ru-vid.com/show-UCPAAcgmGNDLJMuPT5qkaPnQ paßt gut dazu. Das ist in Portugal und dort hat man erstmal die Landschaft mit einem Bulldozer verändert und einen See gebaut. Ein Bagger ist eine sinnvolle Investition.
Why don't you plant a few tall trees thah will give biodiversity but maybe also some future wood crops along with tree forages like moringa, you use those trees to give the shade for the grass and other trees to grow then chop or trim them down when you require more sunlight... But now your land will produce more as well as give the shade you require and another easy crop....
Not yet for lack of vetiver but it is on the list of the thousand things to do. Could be quite useful in areas that are sloped but not very steep. We do have some ideas of sort of hedgerows in between paddocks and along paths. But then, this is a forest not open fields that used to be forest centuries ago. The forest does exist today but it got a bit too open for my taste.
There's a Dutch company called Groasis & they have a variety of water saving products, principally of which is their Waterboxx. Although primarily intended for growing trees it can be used in a variety of ways & is completely reusable. Best way I can describe it is that it's sort of like a 60cm diameter by roughly 30cm deep plastic basin with a cotton wick & a hole in the bottom & H2O reservoir & it has a corrugated lid, again with a hole in the top to allow moisture to collect in the H2O reservoir part of the base. Dig a hole large enough to accommodate the depth & circumference of the Waterboxx, plant your tree, water it. Then making sure to keep the cotton wick evenly half in/half out underneath the Waterboxx & resting in the H2O reservoir, thread the base over your tree. Fill the base with H2O, placing the lid on while ensuring that the tree sticks out of the hole in the lid. The wick will draw moisture from the H2O reservoir down into the soil as the soil drys out, thus providing adequate moisture for the tree. Long term experience by both Groasis & its customers show that in the most unlikeliest of circumstances, trees planted this way stand about an 80% better chance of survival than by most other methods, even if grazed by animals. Groasis has won several awards and recently received EU grant funding. Check out their website and their RU-vid channel for more. Some of the videos are filmed in Spain. I just thought this might be useful for expanding your woodland.
I am aware of that box. Interesting product but for a different use case and also pretty expensive. Check out more recent videos and also the project page on caimito.eu for more details.
Great video! I am in the UK and am considering Spain to live more sustainably on my own land. Is there anywhere else in Spain you would consider? You mentioned rainfall information and improving the land to improve water retention which is all great but I was hoping for a bit more rainfall overall! . Is there anywhere in andalucia or Catalonia that gets relatively more rain? The coast around Bilbao seems to be much better. Did you consider this area? Looking forward to any knowledge you can throw my way!
We looked for a less populated area ;-) caimito.eu/concept/desertification has more about rainfall. Check out the page from the Spanish government about desertification linked from there.
@@ProjectGranjaCaimito thanks for the reply. Had a look at the link , very impressed with what you're doing. I was looking for somewhere I could try and grow some of the things I love and eat regularly e.g citrus. My wife and I are doctors so unfortunately we do need to be near a city
I can see that in more warm and moist areas. In our case we have a different climate and usually don't have mosquitos. On the other hand we use the animals to perform certain jobs. They get to the "jobsite" and when the job is done they are elsewhere. It is not our intention to make them "live" in a swale. However, pigs/hogs do need a wallow (hole with water) as they cannot sweat and so where there are pigs there is always some sort of hole with water and mud. It is important for their well-being.
Hola , veo que eres aleman me gusta cómo tienes tú dehesa y los esfuerzos que estás haciendo para mejorar el suelo .tal vez te interese un método de mejora canadiense llamando MRF , a mí me ha dado muy buenos resultados.
Si. Se usa alrededor de arboles nuevos en nuestra zone B02 donde hemos creado un poco un bosque comestible (food forest). Es para que los hongos pueden ayudarnos.
Temperature is a big problem in my garden, not only the dry summer. It's too hot and almost everything dies, even with water. Shadows are not enough either.
The swale traps and holds the water and then it gets released slowly. But if there is a lot of clay maybe there are issues with mud slides. Not sure. Maybe planting a lot of deep rooted vegetation or something like the Vetiver grass may also help. Or leaky dams out of wood debris. Anything that helps to slow down the water.
Yes. The swales were just a first step. We learn as we go and I prefer to read what nature is telling me instead of implementing a master plan on a site. Have a look at caimito.eu for more about the concept and projects going on today.
Here we are in 2022, talking about a topic that should have been a commonsense practices ions ago. We claim to be an advanced civilization, yet the repeated cycle of drought-floods-drought covers most of the earth. Even after catastrophies we never learn. We live on a planet of highly intelligent fools. Nature's shows a course of action, but material greed prevents HUMANE THOUGHT PROCESSES.
Right. Unfortunately people have always short-term goals that get in the way. We are in this for the long run and the swales in this video are just an early step. Keep watching and also check out the projects page on caimito.eu
Important topic. However, this is not a mosquito rich area. There are uncountable numbers of flies instead. In general in any ecosystem you have a lot of predatory insects and lots of birds. Everything feeds on something
That video is several years old. They have changed shaped since then. In our area in Spain there are no excavators that can swivel the bucket. They only dig straight. We also have plans to let pigs do the reshaping. See more recent videos to learn what we are doing today.
We have been designing things in the wrong way for centuries purely because the solutions are ego dominant rather than intelligent dominant.. what that means is there are actually huge amounts of room for further invention and innovation if you have enough vision to see beyond your conditioning that is.. ask more questions stop settling for answers..
Well said. Welcome aboard and enjoy the show. There is a lot more to come. Make also sure to visit caimito.eu for more details where this is headed to.
@@ProjectGranjaCaimito Looking into the future, the temperature will continue to be hot, best is to research for some additional trees from Africa, to fill the void.
Actually the contrary is the case. Water retaining structures slow the rain down and help plants to establish themselves. Running water is a huge problem. Not water that is sitting there with roots holding everything in place. But then, don't dig without planing anything. In our case the slope isn't huge so there is no risk either and the existing oak trees also do their job. The 6 months without rain are more a problem here.
You're doing a wonderful job with the water and land, but a lousy one presenting your work to us; you see, we want to listen to you, not to music (please remember that if we wanted to listen to music, we wouldn't be watching your video), and it's especially irritating if your voice and the random music is hitting us at the same time!
I think your ideas are flawed . I believe your carbon in your soil Is not high as should be. Your land has bald spots that mother nature needs to cover . Reading and learning on rejuvenating farming teaches me that bringing more carbon ( saw dust ) to help enrich the soil as you will. Joe salatin and many other farmers practice controlled grazing and adding carbon to the landscape adding ponds for watering rather then creeks or runoffs will help. I believe your land is typical for scattered grazing. Be kind to mother earth and listen she tell you what she needs.
This land and most of the region here has been mistreated and neglected due to lack of knowledge for decades or even longer. Since we own it and do things to it (2018 up to now) it is improving rapidly. Have a look at the video about our rotational grazing.
I see an improved ecosystem that 1 man made happen. What have you improved or changed for the better in the last 2 years?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? Anything???? At all? God I hope your not American, we don’t need the bad rep.
Sorry, but don't say it too loud in Andalusia. They do like it very much. But I did learn a lot about video marking and so ... please enjoy the more recent ones. Lots of improvements. Welcome!
