Dear all,
I've just returned from participating in 3 days of the 4 day course by Darren Doherty about Keyline design. The course was at a farm North of Berlin, and included finding keylines in the landscape, mapping them with GPS using 3 different techniques, and finally doing keyline ploughing with a Yeoman plough. Denisa Mullerova, Czech permaculture designer from Boskovice took part in all 4 days of the course; she also took her PDC direct from Mollison and Geoff Lawton, and her teacher course from Rose Mary Morrows.
We're now hoping to arrange to get Darren Doherty to C.R. next autumn to have his course here, especially for farmers with large pastures/animal herds, who will get the best profit out of the course. We'll be looking at ways to get external funding for the event.
Darren is a wonderful teacher. He has 25 years of farming experience, has been making natural key-line ponds since he was 16, seems to know all about practical animal husbandry, incl. an impressive talent for remembering a large amount of data. Add to this that he's charming and entertaining enough so no-one falls asleep after a 7 hour day of lecturing/film/photos ! Darrens clear aim is to save as much soil as possible on the planet. He does this by teaching soil regeneration to 1000's of students, consulting many farmers around the world; several of them with farms of many 1000 hectares (Frequently farms larger than Denmark!) .
He repeatedly states that the first principle for starting to do soil regeneration of pastures are 'Wire and Water'; Special electrical fence systems and water for live stock (typically cattle, sheep and/or chickens). Only once you have your investment back, or are certain you'll re-capitalize soon enough, you'll do the key-line ploughing.
Typically you'll only have 3 yeoman plough 'teeth' mounted on the plough for first run; about 60 cm from each-other. It typically requires about 15-25 horse power per 'tooth'. I'm considering the viability of having 2 made locally for our 36 hp malo-traktor, they can be mounted on our cultivator frame... Anyone knows a talented blacksmith?
In addition to this we learned lots about pond placements, supply-swales (often combined with roads), moving animals and other ways of doing soil building agriculture.
I'll post photos soon...