Geoff Lawton Arizona Transformed with Swales

Geoff is amazing you can tell how much of a soil nerd he is because he tastes his soil

All you need is a canal system from the ocean and enough horses and it's easy to grow graultural food and materials for manufacturing from plants we could be building rubber plantations and make tyres we already have the largest cotton farms for clothes in the world

It's easy to stir wet sand and pump compressed water through it

They'd make a brick well with cylander shaped center with sand

Medival churches purified salt water by pumping water through sand in a above ground well bucket they used horses that walked in a circle to stir the pure sant and the salt water flow desalinated salt water then they'd dump the excess salt sand in slurry mixture

Love the reenactment of bill's opening scene. It's an among legacy with unintended consequences. Soil creation is what life is all about. What do the locals think?

So how can I do this on my 40acres? Someone show me the way 🙏🏾

Is it a big bowl

Genius

I live in Arizona on 2.5 Acres, I have been researching swales and other water trapment features I could build on my land, it is something I find endlessly fascinating and would love to attempt.

I honestly wonder why the Saudis still aren't doing this on their mountains on the coast of the red sea.

What a fantastic guy!

You are an historian

Awesome!❤❤❤
I am gonna follow your advise and get myself a piece of land in high desert and turn it to something so green and beautiful. Thank you!

"carbon into the atmosphere" lol... another indoctrinated momo

Wonder what would happen if there were new swales dug that "connected" the ones already existing. And if a linking type configuration would speed up the process any...

I must have missed how the green areas were created. Updated: Oh, the seeds blew in on the wind.

Beavers

I don't understand... They knew everything 80 ago!!! Imagine if it had had a little maintenance what it would be. No reason that the desert exists and no water available for cities... How many degree would that area would losses. Thus, less evaporation ...

I just watched a video that explained that the mountain ranges I think it was Sierra Nevada that prevents water from reaching this area on a regular basis.

That’s what I’m talking about Geoff. This should be happening all over the West "

The Santa Cruz is coming back due to effort of Watershed Mgmt Group in Tucson. The Tanque Verde, the Rialto and other drainage systems are running longer now than they have in years.
The Navajo Generation Station had closed too.

Fascinating. Thank you for posting

Where is the green area

We need shelter, primarily vegan food, fresh water and a sense of community.
Anything else is a distraction.

Swales looking good to me I need to dig more for sure

I love seeing Geoff get excited

I remember there was an old railway berm in the park where I used to live. It was always lush or flooded. You had to jump across it in order to avoid going ankle deep in water. It was built by General Monash in the 1890s and it'll last forever.

Bill Mollison pointed these swales out years ago in his original permaculture teachings.

Why does permaculture have to be turned into show business?

the music?

The American west actually used to be mostly woodlands before about 9k years ago when humans arrived

I hate the unnecessary noise and music in the back ground! It is hard to concentrate what is said!

Blaming golf courses is a no go as they do add to porosity and water recharge during rain events (they reduce downstream flooding). There are plenty of areas to look at redress as we rebuild the wrong infrastructure after fires and floods by making water occlusive, impermeable surfaces...

The irony of it is, they recognized the issue and worked on solving it in 1930s , and then again repeated all those mistakes again over the next 70-80 years. What is the missing link that makes lessons learnt so hard to be held on to even across one generation ? Maybe it should be enshrined into policy and beyond the reach of corporations to lobby and degrade it in the name of profits. Because all I saw in those unstainable unnecessary water infrastructure is it keeps making someone money in an ongoing manner by creating a supply chain issue out of a basic resource. Rainwater harvesting is not a profitable business.

Not sure about Arizona but in Colorado this would probably be contested as violating senior water rights.

Terrible music, too distracting.

everyone doing regenerative agriculture wish them all the best

Catching run-off is not sustainable

I'm looking for the Google Earth link below for the location of these Swales.

We need to do what he Says, and do it everywhere.

amazing to imagine what a public works/housing project in the future could look like people could be paid/housed to move out their and rehab the desert and then retire after 10 years in a paid water secure community.

That coal plant is gone now in Page, AZ.

Also, “We can do it much better using natural systems. “ Press (x) to doubt.

Could we improve it? Absolutely. But we’re talking major terraforming. Please let me know when the US government is capable of doing anything like this anytime soon.

Everybody needs to see this.

Swales only make sense on a SMALL scale. Nobody realizes that the water you divert is MISSING elsewhere?

You need to ANALYZE where your runoff goes. In my area, it goes into the Colorado and then Lake Mead. So by diverting the water, you destroy the ecosystem in Mexico. THINK before you DO!

Of course I also try to keep as much water as possible on my property and I would even support a community garden with a larger water catchment, but DO NOT TRY TO CHANGE THE DESERT!

The desert is BEAUTIFUL and doesn't need to be "restored" as some misguided people think.

I love planting trees! I wish I could live in a warmer state so I could do that as a hobby...