How To Capture And Utilize Every Drop Of Water On Your Farm Using Keyline Water Design

Managing water is one of the most important design features in a permaculture design system. Water is life incarnate and designing your landscape to capture and slow down the movement of water as it moves across the land is key to creating abundant, productive food systems and food forests.

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These are many techniques that can be employed. One of the basic and least understood options is what's called the keyline water system.

I'm in Vietnam as I write this post and it's very exciting to see that the Vietnamese are using an adaptation of the keyline water system in their rice terraces. It's not exactly the same but very similar.

Whether you're designing land for a forest, pasture, dairy, food production, or a homestead, beginning with a keyline water system will make your land sustainable long after you have left this earth and is well worth the time. It will save you money in the long run and protect your land from fire, floods, and drought.

What Is A Keyline Water System?

Keyline design is a landscaping technique of maximizing the beneficial use of the water resources of a tract of land. The "keyline" denominates a specific topographic feature related to the natural flow of water on the tract. Keyline design is a system of principles and techniques for developing rural and urban landscapes to optimize the use of their water resources.

Australian farmer and engineer P. A. Yeomans invented and developed Keyline design in his books The Keyline Plan, The Challenge of Landscape, Water For Every Farm, and The City Forest. source

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Water is naturally going to concentrate in a valley as it rains causing those valleys to flood, As the water picks up speed it erodes the land and that extra water is lost.

What keyline systems do is move water from the valleys to the ridges on a piece of land so that the water has a chance to soak into the landscape before running downhill into a stream. The longer you can keep the water on the land before it escapes your property the more productive the land will be.

When water accumulates in a valley after a heavy rain it erodes the land in that valley washing away minerals and nutrients as it travels to the lowest elevation on that land. Besides losing fertility you also lose the potential energy of that water as it loses elevation.

Keyline systems interrupt the downward flow of water in a valley keeping the water and nutrients moving through the landscape as long, slow, and high as possible before descending, increasing the fertility as it travels, reducing erosion, and soaking the landscape so life can thrive.

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To capture the water you have to rip trenches into the soil on a slightly downsloping contour beginning from the valley and moving outward towards the ridges. So, instead of the water rushing down the valley, it slowly moves away from the valley and outward toward the dryer ridges soaking into the landscape as it moves.

This prevents the valley from filling up with fast-moving water and evenly soaks the entire slope increasing its holding capacity and stopping the erosion and flooding of the valley.

Because the water is now soaking across the entire landscape the ridges which are normally dry and less productive become more fertile and productive while the valleys which are usually flooding and eroded of nutrients have a chance to recover so they can become more productive.

In short, you're just spreading the water across the entire landscape instead of having it concentrate on where it picks up energy and can be destructive.

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Keyline planning is used today to develop drought-proof, water-abundant landscapes and farms. Keyline design focuses on spreading and sinking water by moving it from existing collection points (“keypoints” where water naturally concentrates in valleys) to new collection points (dry ridges, ponds).

A keyline plow is a simple device used to create the trenches on a slightly sloping downgrade across the contours of a landscape that help move water falling on a piece of property across the landscape to a ridge or pond.

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The key-line plow opens up the soil deep enough to reach the subsoil so the water can soak into the landscape. Over time this will loosen up and aerate compacted soils so plants can grow.

http://crkeyline.ca/what-is-keyline-design/

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Soil formation on compacted pasture

The results are impressive and well worth the time and expense when designing a farm. This video from Wolf Gulch Farms is a perfect example of what can be done with the proper planning of a keyline water system

Permaculture Keyline Water Systems: Tom Ward @ Wolf Gulch Farm

You can solve all the world's problems in a garden

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