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.

Thank you for providing an English language commentary, and, well done for nourishing the land and bringing it 'alive' again - wonderful!

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 KZfaq.

Very interesting video. Thanks for posting.

Impressive work, keep improving the land ! Holistic management equals more productivity and a more sustainable future. Cheers from Brazil !

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.

thank you for sharing this knowledge

Great video. Thanks for the English version. Hello from Indiana, USA

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.

Beautiful Ranch, great job!

i've been looking for someone who was doing this work on youtube for so long. Subscribed!! please keep posting!

Simple and basic is sometimes the best way to cure a problem.

That kind of farming plans are very good for greening certain parts that have become arid,..

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 !

This is great video. So wonderful ppl want to make the place we live better .

Great video

Excellent job, looking forward to seeing your progress. Thanks again.

amazing production and wonderful to see this project so well documented

Excellent idea. We can improve our lands. This method could build up the barren land into fertile lands within few years.

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

Thank you for such a great video and explanation!

Well done !

It’s alway good to come back to this video months later, after a harsh summer

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

Muchas gracias 👍 MaBuhay ka!

Wonderful agroforestry project! Good luck!

this quicksand swale got me to subscribe to your channel.. 👍 makes me want to do something like this on our property.. thanks...

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 .

Excellent! Hello from Australia.

Really interesting.Cheers!

Australia needs to do this sort of land and water management

This stuff is so good.

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.

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 was pretty amazing sir!!....i will make good use of this information,thanks.

Excellent.

We will need more things like that with temperature rising

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.

Great Job. 👍

Swales are wonderful.

Ziemlich Interessant das Ganze 👍

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.

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.

Have you tried using vetiver hedgerows on the contour rather than the constructed swales that you show in this video?

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!!!

Amazing

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.

The music is loud, distracting and unnecessary. The content itself is entertaining and appreciated. Thank you. 💕

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!

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.

Don't know how I got here, or why the video was suggested. Enjoyed every second tho.

Hi , good theme, to much music, hard to follow what you say 🤔🇦🇺🇫🇷👋

Force water to take the longest path possible through your property, and you have maximized the opportunities for life to flourish

Does living next to a forested area stop erosion? The soil is very porous so I wonder if building a sway would work

Nice content..To follow better, it will be good to reduce the volume of background music or take it away altogether

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 KZfaq channel for more. Some of the videos are filmed in Spain. I just thought this might be useful for expanding your woodland.

Valas e barriguinha sai importantes para reter águas da chuva no solo melhorando a vegetação e o lençol freático.

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.

How would swales work on a clay slope? I don't want to increase erosion.

Schöne Grüße Das gleiche mache ich im Alentejo Umarmung und Gesundheit

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....

Water slows water ✌️👍🙂

Como puede funcionar una sanja de infiltracion en un suelo aluvial?

A lot of guys I’ve seen use ponds and swales don’t allow livestock to access the area directly due to them turning any water into a mosquito mud hole.

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.

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.

Could bees be used to rejuvenate the land too?

Great presentation, but your choice of music and its volume drives me crazy. Is there no soft flamenco guitar music?

Where in Andalucía are you?

How do you reduce the risk of mosquitos after 24 hours in a slow-draining swales?

Very interesting. But the music is too loud and distracting from your informative voiceover.

It's a bit like the rice terraces of East Asia

Do that in the states 10 agencies fining you for not getting their 15k worth of permits

Wonderful effort. Perhaps 10percent of land area be reserved for ponds or lakes

very interesting but the music covered the narrative which spoiled the commentary

U should plant some lupine to fix the nitrogen in the soil

Your Swales need to be wider and not so deep and you need to plant trees along the mounds. Check out Geoff Lawton videos

Awesome but at times the music is too loud.

Unterwald = under forest?

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.

Music very loud

I think the trees are totally not dense enough..mentioned in the video..

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..

wow thats so fertile

Music is too loud. Voici can hardly be understood

remove the anoying overly dramatic music plz

Very nice and knowledgeable video screwed by annoying music in the background. I struggled to hear your words because of this useless music.

then you will suffer from landslides with heavy rain i believe.

It would have helped with out that insane music! Wow too bad!

Get rid of the music. I want your information, NOT LOUD MUSIC. it adds NOTHING

The music is annoying

You have interesting content but I couldn’t handle the annoying music . Get rid of the music it’s a terrible distraction .

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.

after 2 years what have you produced ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? NOTHING ?

why don't you just sit on a road to protest that nobody is doing anything about climate change

I wish you would have made the video without the garbage annoying music.