How Farmers Shaped a Desert to Feed Millions

How do you turn a desert green? To find out, I traveled to the Tar Desert of Northwest India, the world's most densely populated desert, where 25 million people survive in some of the most extreme conditions on Earth. It's one of the hottest places in the world, but amazingly, they not only survived this harsh landscape, but actually created a thriving agricultural system by carefully using their Places like the Tar Desert have proven that you can create water resilience, food resilience, and climate resilience, even in a place with these conditions. And in this video, I'm going to show you the three major techniques that make life possible here. And it starts by building the perfect pond. Pretty nice, huh? Right here in the middle of the desert. Normally in a hot desert like this, you would not want to have a big open body of water because of the high evaporation. You'd want to soak the water into the ground and build a groundwater reserve to draw from. But here, because of the geology, no wells will really function because the water's salty beneath the ground. Besides that, a lot of the areas that we visited are literally surviving on one, two, or three rainfall events in the year, where short intense monsoon rains dump over the whole landscape and a large volume of water is flowing everywhere for a very short period of time. That is all the water they have to live on for the entire year. In these conditions, large surface ponds are the answer. And these large ponds need to be perfectly placed within the landscape to maximize water collection during the brief rainstorms. And then the overflow from the ponds needs to be perfectly managed to take maximum advantage of that resource. There's enough of a watershed feeding this pond that it'll fill this pond up and this pond actually never goes dry. So it really speaks for the very wise placement of this pond. They worked with the villagers to dig this pond out and they basically created a permanent water source. Prior to this pond being here, the closest larger water source was 10 kilometers away. When people are needing to refill their domestic reservoirs at their homes, tanker tractors come pull up here and pull water out of this pond right here and then distribute it out to local villagers for their domestic supply. But the most fascinating part is the way this pond is connected to an entire agricultural system. This field is actually the overflow from the pond that we just saw. So when that pond is full, it spills over, it floods this field, and then you'll see on the bottom boundary of this field is this berm. So each field is like its own shallow rainwater collection pond. This is the second crucial technique. Every farm field is a water harvesting basin. Right here, this is the spillway, and this spillway will lead it down then to another series of agricultural fields. And these field basins overflow from one to the next during heavy rains. The farmers have only one narrow window of time to get their crops in the ground, but the rainwater farming technique ensures that even just one rainstorm will allow a crop to be planted, and then they grow from the moisture that's stored in the soil during the rains. You can see that they have a diverse tree plantation along the bunds that helps to hold these berms when there is a lot of water here to stabilize the soil and lessen the erosion. It's really interesting, actually, in a desert climate, seeing the integration of field cropping and tree cropping. It's sort of like a low-key agroforestry system. So this, we have kedgeree and we have bear. Both of these have a food component to them that people can eat, but they are also for fodder, wind protection, erosion control, firewood, shade. All of this has been made possible by their ingenious management of surface runoff and storing water in surface ponds and surface tanks and surface catchments for direct use from those reservoirs. This pond was built in 2003 by Gravis. Gravis was founded in 1983 on the principles of Mahatma Gandhi to serve and uplift the poorest and most marginalized people as part of creating a just and non-violent society. We are teaching farmers, if you harvest the rain for drinking purpose, for livestock, for agriculture purpose, you can use this water for good farming. So they've been deep in the Taar Desert for the last 40 years, and their work here is so vast, you can see it from space, greening the desert communities with a wide variety of water harvesting and natural resource management strategies. Gravis is really encouraging rain-fed agriculture. So if you don't have the means for storing water for irrigation to grow a second crop, then you only are growing crop during the monsoon season. It's a marginal life, because if the rains fail one year, and your crop fails, you have no income. But if farmers use these techniques to catch almost every drop of rain when it does fall, the fields flood, and the result is a lush, wet landscape that we see here. So we are teaching those farmers who are not knowing such technologies how they can adopt and then use these technologies in their farm field. So now you are seeing a lot of greenery here, and on the other side, dryness. So we are going to the driest part of the driest part of India to see some water security work by Gravis Jodhpur. The third technique is home-scale water harvesting. Having rainwater collection and storage at the home is so critical. When people lack a domestic water supply, then traditionally the women have to walk a great distance every day to fetch water from some source. This impacts the educational prospects of young women, because they are busy fetching water all day and can't go to school. So these rainwater harvesting tankas are so important for the society of the Tar Desert dwellers. The tankas are underground cisterns constructed by Gravis out of ferrocement that have become the household water source for many people in the Tar Desert. There are those that collect water directly off the roofs of houses, and also those that collect runoff directly from the ground surface. This is a 20,000 litre underground tank right here. This is what they call a tanka. And there's this small catchment area right here. These diversion drains basically collect all the runoff from this hillside, and then the water is taken through this zigzagging silt trap to get the sediments to settle out of the water, and then the water overflows into this tank here. They said the last time it rained, this tank was filled up, and it lasted for about five and a half months, and now they're filling it with water tankers from places like the pond that we just saw. Village of Bakri. Population, three to five thousand. Very arid. Very sandy. This is actually rainwater from the roof that is channeled into this tanka right here, and as you can see, a simple pump gets it up into a bucket. Look at that, how they built this rainwater harvesting tank right into the deck of the house. It's part of the house. This family here used to walk four kilometers to get water. Basically they would spend a good deal of their time just fetching water to this very dry location. The groundwater here is very saline, but with the help of Gravis, they constructed this tanka. A bad year here is like two to three inches of rain, and a really good year here is about 15 inches of rain. So basically, given the roof surface here, and this 20,000 liters, they're hoping for a good year to fill this tank up to last them through half the year. When they get water from tanker trucks, they've had situations in the past where the water had poor quality, it was high in minerals, so it gave them joint pain. Now they put in this sand filter here, so when a tanker truck comes, the water's actually filtered before it goes into the tank. The last structure we visited was like an ancient version of the tanka, where a well had been carved into the bedrock, but the well was not reaching the groundwater table. It was just collecting surface runoff and storing it in the excavated hole. Most places that you see a well like this, it is to reach the groundwater table, but here it is just to store surface runoff into a deep underground reservoir. It's not really a well that accesses the groundwater, it's an excavated tank into the rock. Your grandfather built this, and it's been here for 60 years. It holds 300,000 liters of water here, and Gravis came and put in the silt trap and made the structure more whole, but this is an example of a successful ancient technology. This supplies water to two families, and it lasts all year round. So we are creating pastures, we are creating farming dikes, we are creating underground drinking water storage tanks, we are creating seapage wells, we are renovating and rejuvenating the community, rainwater harvesting ponds, and we are also creating so many village-level institutions. Visiting the work of Gravis, who's been working here for nearly 40 years, we visited many sites and saw so much work that they've done, and how they have changed the livelihoods of the people here, that I get some inspiration and hope, because what Gravis has shown here is that you can actually make an area that is this harsh, this hot, with this marginal rainfall, you can make it inhabitable for people. You can create water resilience, food resilience, and climate resilience, even in a place with these conditions. Are you ready to transform deserts, create lush backyards, and feed communities? In my almost 30 years as a permaculture designer traveling the world, I've put everything I learned into Oregon State University's online permaculture design course, or PDC. The PDC and PDC Pro are the ultimate ways to begin mastering permaculture. Me and my team guide you through over 20 assignments with more than 100 hours of top-quality video lectures and resources, all focused on developing your own property or project throughout the course. You'll get personalized feedback from a dedicated instructor in a small group setting. People are always asking me, how can I be part of the solution? This is your starting point. Check the link below for upcoming courses, and join us in creating a better world for everyone. See you in class!