You can tell the season a permaculturist is in by the frequency of blog posts they produce. Because it has been a while, I’ll post a response to some questions sent in to my by a reader near Sira, India.
I plan to build rainwater harvesting & groundwater recharge structures, and leave the land undisturbed for few years. I will start serious work once I have more time. On a long term basis, I plan to build a small home and settle down in the farm.
This sounds like a really solid plan, in that it addresses the concern of water right away. Rainfall in most of India can be quite variable from year to year. It might be over 600 mm one year and as low as 250 mm on a bad year. Sira also has a dry period of around 5 months each year.
Are there any special considerations (Shape of land, amount of gradient, groundwater level, Soil quality) which I need to keep in mind while selecting a suitable piece of land for permaculture?
If Sira were a little farther north, I would recommend a north-facing slope to offer more shade (and thus more protection against evaporation). Because it is at 13°N, it won’t make a huge difference. A north-facing slope is slightly better, but not by much.
You will want to avoid slopes that are too steep to work, and keep in mind that any slope more than 20° is dangerous for machinery to work, and you will want to use machinery for earthworks. Labour is cheap in India, but manpower is still more expensive than a backhoe. Safe the human labour for grooming the earthworks. Slopes of greater than 20° can be terraced, though the cost is much greater for terracing than for dams. The most cost-effective, and beneficial approach for steeper slopes is to plant trees on them. Look towards something dual-purpose like Sesbania sesban, which provides, shade, fixes nitrogen in the soil, and can be used as a pole lumber. You could alley crop with S. sesban, provided there is easy enough access to the land.
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| Sesbania sesban alley cropping |
As for soil quality, the more fertile, the better, of course. The problem is, most of the soils will be rather nutrient-poor, lateritic soils. Looking at satellite images suggests that the soil is iron-rich, which would bode well for mango production.
To boost soil life, fertility, and thus water-retention, add powdered charcoal to the site (AKA bio-char or ag-char). This will greatly assist in building soils. Application of mulch on its own, or even compost on its own will not contribute much to long-term increases in soil fertility. The charcoal dust allows biological processes to take hold.
That said, you would do well to build a shaded cement trough that you put compost worms in to produce vermicompost. If the trough is 60 cm by 3 metres, you will be able to produce a fair amount of very high-quality compost. This would be something for the long term, not something you implement immediately.
For ground water levels, the higher the better, unless the water has a high salt content that would damage crops. It does not look like this is the case, however.
I don’t want to dig a bore-well. Average rainfall in Sira area is around 600mm. Will Permaculture techniques allow me to store sufficient rainwater to achieve water security? I would need water for both irrigation, and for domestic use (once I settle down).
You might or might not get away without a bore. The majority of the wells I saw in Anantapur District were dug with an excavator. The town of Talupula, however, drew its water from a bore hole that was something like 1000 feet deep.
What will help you for household use is to make sure you catch the water that falls on the roof of the house you will build. You would also be wise to divert greywater from your kitchen into a heavily-mulched garden. Wasting water should not be done, particularly in such a dry place.
In terms of earthworks, ripping will not work in your situation. The nature of the soil is such that any ripping you do will be erased with the first rainfall. What will work are large swales, gabions, and rock wall dams (unless you have a lot of good quality clay on site). Dams are the most expensive option and require engineering. Gabions, however, are relatively cheap and can make a large difference when placed across a temporary seasonal stream.
Having selected a site for our project, I mapped the boundaries of the site with a GPS unit, and assessed the site’s features and vegetation. Being ferrosols, the soil structure was generally pretty uniform from the surface down to as much as 8 metres deep. And being gravelly, it was not appropriate for dam construction. This meant we would stick to swales for this site. The cost of digging the swales was well within the total allotted budget for the project, so we next looked into choosing the best machine for the job.
We needed to map out the contour sites, so we tracked down some local engineers with a dumpy level. It turns out that the engineers owed a friend of the landowner a favour, so they came out to the site for free and mapped out the contour points for 4 swales on 3 different contours. While I planned on mapping the site myself, their proficiency had them finishing the mapping in half the time it would have taken me. They put us ahead of schedule by one day.
The swales were excavated without too much incident with the total excavation taking about 3 and a half days to move 600 cubic metres of earth. We didn’t have the backhoe do everything. We simply had it dig trenches 3 metres wide and 50 cm deep, placing the excavated earth on the downhill side of the trench. The rest we were leaving to be groomed by hand. At one point, we hit rock that would have taken hours for the backhoe to chip through. In such cases, it is simplest to try to go around either uphill or downhill around the rock. We opted to go uphill. Apart from that one little snag, the rest of the excavation went as quickly as one could expect considering the soil was nearly as hard as concrete.
We hired a team of ten labourers to groom the site. Because the soils were so hard, however, we had the backhoe come back and chip off the uphill edge of the trenches it dug to make the process faster. The first day of grooming was gruelling work for the work team. They had to rely on picks to be able to chip through the earth to smooth out the edges of the swale. Grooming the mound was much easier as the soil there was already broken up. In the end, I had hoped to get the mounds groomed to a more gentle slope while the workers were there, but time ran out before we could get everything as perfect as the ideal I held in mind. Still, the edges are not steep and erosion should not be a problem.
The rains transformed the earth from a concrete-like surface to a soft and yielding one. This made the final grooming much, much easier. In order to help make the swales more durable, I had the work team put in compacted, level-sill spillways set at 90 cm from the bottom of the swales. With them in place, water can spill gently over the top in very heavy rains, greatly reducing the chance of erosion damaging the swales. The workers seemed to get a kick out of me inspecting the spillway with a site level and having them fix spots that were a few millimetres out. While it may seem fanatical, if the spillway is not dead-level, flowing water will concentrate in the lower spots. When it is concentrated, it moves faster, and when it moves faster, it has more erosive potential.
Upon arriving in Talupula, I found the lateritic soils to be slightly more yielding than asphalt. The soils are ferralsols, which are an iron-rich lateritic soil that becomes hard after the land is stripped then subjected to repeated wetting and drying – just the conditions that occur in the dry tropics. When wet, they are very workable and may even bog down machinery working on it. When dry, they are are hard as pavement. In these soils, calcium, magnesium, potassium and sodium are weathered out, and there is next to no humus content in the soil. As a result, the cation exchange capacity is low, meaning that plant health suffers. While these soils do tend to lose potassium easily (another argument against the common practice there of burning pasture land as a management strategy), they do hold onto phosphorus well. They also respond well to amendments of lime and gypsum, though this was beyond the scope of our project.
The Indian government is in the process of building a large irrigation channel to divert the flow of the nearest major river to the drier regions of the south. While I am personally skeptical of the ecological viability of this project, visiting the excavation site for the channel did give me the opportunity to examine the typical soil strata of the area. Lateritic soils are deep – sometimes running down to 20 metres in depth. I could see from the channel excavation that the gravelly soil continued down at least 8 metres to the bottom of the channel. All that gravel meant that I would not be designing and constructing an earthen dam as the gravelly conditions require considerable engineering for dam construction. The focus then became on swales and possibly gabions.
Before I left Canada, a site in Talupula on public land on a small mountain outside of town was suggested. It is said that the deity Obula Swami lives at the summit of that hill. Our potential site there was the highest practical site to work on. On firsthand inspection, however, I found that the access to the site was difficult and there was very limited space to work in. There also were a number of rock walls already build on the site to combat erosion. And as it was public land, would it be subject to neglect, or destruction? A further problem was that shepherds regularly burn the land there, so establishing trees would be difficult at best.
For a few days, we were stuck without a site to work on. Then we got the approval of an organic farmer outside of town to do whatever we liked on a 7-acre hillside patch of his land. The farmer, Gangahadr, had already greatly benefited from the agroforestry advice of the Green Tree Foundation and was eager to see what we could do. The land was not too steep, and the nick point on the land (the point at which the hillside goes from convex to concave) was high enough that we could get up near the top of the hill and put in a series of swales. Being private, the land would be well cared for and access to it controlled. Gangahadr had a growing reputation in the area for excellent results, and the site was visible from the national highway, giving the project more exposure. As an added bonus, the site was adjacent to and would thus compliment a rock check dam built in 2005 by the Rural Development Trust. The effect of that dam has been to change the land downstream from desert-like conditions to a rich oasis. This was the site. I met with the Ganghadr and got his permission to build swales on his land.
Azadirachta indica, neem, the village dispensary. This amazing tree has so many uses that it’s hard to imagine a tropical garden being complete without it.
The dried leaves are used as a moth repellent to protect clothes, in grain and dried fruit stores to protect from insects, and as a general insect repellent. Fresh leaves are sometimes eaten to rid the body of parasites. Twigs from the tree are chewed on one end, then used as a tooth brush.
During the month of May, I was in the semi-arid region of Andhra Pradesh, India at the invitation of the 
Some forest is lost by people cutting trees for fuel wood but, as many species in the tropics coppice vigorously and firewood cutting tends to coppice the trees cut, this is not the major cause of deforestation there. The major causes of deforestation are land clearing for agriculture and land destroyed by grazing animals or by shepherds setting fire to the land as a management strategy. Also, grazing is communal by default. If land can be accessed by shepherds, both private and public land will be grazed.
The quickest means of repairing the land might arguably be by the controlled grazing techniques of Holistic Management®. This method would involve using one of the current degraders of the environment – grazing animals – to regenerate the land. I gave the practicalities of this approach some thought. To do just one District of the province would involve a large scale educational program to teach Holistic Management® to thousands and thousands of shepherds. It would also require each shepherd to have portable electric fencing to contain their herds in a controlled area for a controlled amount of time. Additionally, a sophisticated database, easily accessible by cell phone (the only communication tool at a shepherd’s disposal) would be needed to track grazed land and grazing schedules of different plots of land. The alternative, if Holistic Management® were to be employed, would be to have land owners fence their land into small plots and control animal access themselves. One problem here would be to convince the land owner that there would be benefit to him were he to shoulder the expense of fencing and managing the grazing on the land. The alternative is to only allow grazing on one’s own land. The problem here being that this approach would ruin the livelihoods of thousands of families, throwing them into poverty.
The approach that my associates at the Green Tree Foundation are taking is a tree-based approach. The problems are well defined: poverty from a degraded environment; the environment degraded by biotic pressures – mostly from grazing animals. The solution they are using is to try to replace the forests that once stood and to shift agriculture in the region to an agroforestry-based system.
They are surveying local villages, finding the material needs of the villagers, selecting appropriate tree species based on local conditions and local needs, and supplying trees at low or no cost to the farmers and citizens of the village. To address the problem of grazing animals specifically, they often seek out productive tree species that are non-browsable or use non-browsable species as a living fence to exclude grazing animals from a site. They are planting agave as a firebreak to protect their planted areas from the fires set by shepherds. They are also encouraging the use of fodder trees for animal feed. Penned animals cause no damage to surrounding lands and feed can be cut and carried from fodder trees to the animals.
