Water Management For Every Permaculture Farm

When I was a kid, my brother and I used to enjoy the winter weather at my grandparents’ farm in the mountains. In a beautiful interplay of natural forces, throughout the winter and early spring we would play in half a meter of snow, walk on frozen lakes and then run from the floodwaters once the snow had thawed.

We always looked forward to wintertime and knew what to expect. Now that we’ve grown, however, these natural cycles of snow, ice, and floodwater have changed significantly.

It’s not like [ed.] they no longer exist, but everything has become so much less predictable, and so much more extreme.

This weird weather is the new normal for many of us. It is beyond doubt that we all are experiencing more extreme and erratic weather cycles, with huge downpours and flash floods on the one hand and extreme droughts on the other.

Now, maybe meteorologists will one day call this period of weird weather some fancy term such as the ‘mid-millennium little warming period’ and, looking long term, it will just be blamed on a statistical error, but for us living through this period, it is the new normal. If this new normal continues for just 50 years, while it may a tiny speck of time in the Earth’s history from a climate science perspective, for many of us it’s going to be the rest of our lives, and the lives of our children.

It is this new reality to which we have to adapt and create resilient extreme weatherproof systems that are able to handle either too much or not enough water, all in one growing season. In these circumstances, where water from rainfall is generally in short supply while at other times there is run-off from rainfall, the plan for the control of water is paramount and involves a combination of earthworks, soil-building techniques and irrigation pipes.

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