Contour Dams and Swales

Last week Nemawashi Permaculture Design held an advanced Permaculture design course focused on the implementation of broad scale earthworks for water harvesting on a 60 acre clear cut in Middle Tennessee.

The first phase of the design was a 10,000 gallon contour dam with 200 meters of swale work. This was implemented as a part of our coursework with participants helping complete survey work, and learning the inns and outs of broad scale permaculture where the rubber hits the road.

The course progressed from class room learning centered around slide show and theory, to small scale modeling and prototyping in the sand bay of the Ecovillage Training Center. In the evening of the first night of the course we screened Water Harvesting, a great new video by Geoff Lawton showing a similar project being implimented. This gave participants a tast of what was to come.

We quickly jumped into the implementation of the the first phase of the earthworks design allowing participants to witness the equipment at work as the design created by Permaculture designers Matthew English, Cliff Davis, and Greg Landua was implemented under the supervision of Rick Valley.



As with any large and ambitious project, there were changes in plan and some quick re-designs were necessary to keep a safe amount of free board on the dam, but all of this was solid gold learning for the participants who were able to witness a real broadscale implementation.
The next day students participated in surveying and designing a design with several phases that will be implimented over the course of several more years.

Earth surgery, as Geoff Lawton and Darren Dougherty (two of the worlds leading permaculture desingers) put it, is an essential pathway to regenerating ecosystem functions and helping to combat climate instability repair damaged watersheds, desalinate soil and raise the water table.

After the successful completion of the first phase of our earthworks design we are looking forward to continuing with the master site plan as well as creating more opportunities in our bioregion to learn, teach and impliment borad scale earthworks for water harvesting.

Stay tuned to Gaia Emerging and Nemawashi.org for more information about our designs and future courses