This Genius Farming Hack Stores Rain Like a Battery

Alright, this is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com, today we have another exciting episode for you. Today we're here at Fertile Farms, this is in Dripping Springs, this is a permaculture seasonal produce and agroforestry. They can help you if you live in the Austin area to start growing food on your land doing food, forest, agroforestry, which is going to conserve and save the water. They're doing a lot of amazing work here. The first thing I want to share with you guys is what they did to this Easy Go golf cart. I mean, these are just common golf carts. This one is actually kind of unique, guys, because it actually has a dump truck, so you can lift this up and you can dump the back, and normally these just run on the stupid batteries you put in your car that keep going bad all the time. And what they did instead, as you look back, they basically converted this to use lithium batteries, that's a life peel battery, but the same one as the 12 volt battery in my electric car. And not only does it have the 48 volt batteries, they also have it charged fully automatically by the sun. Check it out, they got this solar panel up here that charges up this battery, so unless they use this golf cart a lot, they never need to plug this in to the wall to charge it. So that's really cool. So I want you guys to keep that model in mind. This is how sustainability happens, where we're just using the sun to capture the energy to put it in the battery, so now they can get from A to B here on the property, right. And they are doing the same thing, utilizing not the sun, but what else comes down from the ethers above us? Well today there's lots of clouds in the sky. It also rains here, I mean it needs to rain a lot more because they get maybe around 30 inches of rain a year, which is actually not a lot. And this is literally the hill country in, outside Austin in dripping springs, like this is one semi-arid climate and certain times of the year it's a totally arid climate. So what they're doing here at Fertile Foods is that they're now not only capturing the sun, but they are capturing the rain. So now I want to show you guys how they're capturing the rain here and using it in a unique and different way I've never seen before. And so I definitely had to share it with you guys today. So typically in permaculture, they basically do swales and berms. The swale is when they kind of dig it out and then they make a berm on the top that then can funnel and shift the water to make, to direct the water where they need it instead of where the water wants to go. This can also help to hold the water or direct it to certain places or to let it sink in where it lies to feed your trees, your plants and all these things, right. What they're doing here is different, right. Much like how the solar on the golf cart, right, is collected and then they send it to the battery for storage, that's what they're doing here. Because it rains, it can rain pretty hard for a short amount of time, actually not too far away from here. They had the recent floods that actually people were washed away unfortunately, right, because it could rain super hard, super fast. And when it rains super hard and super fast, like when it's super sunny and the batteries collect the power and then they can drive the golf cart all day, they want to collect that rain here. So instead of a traditional berm and swale, what they're doing here is they're basically digging it out. As you can see, I'm literally two feet in the ground. They've dug out basically two feet deep, two feet wide with a bucket. And what they're creating here is a carbon rain battery. You're like thinking, John, are you high? No I'm not high, I don't smoke actually. Because like basically I'm standing here in a ditch. So yeah, this is the first step, they got to dig it out. But now I'm going to show you guys the most important step, because you know, most traditional swales may not be this deep or this wide and it's more definitely more sloped. But this is where the carbon part comes into. Alright guys, so I'm not sunbathing, because I'm fully clothed actually. But what I'm here is, I'm lying in something. I'm lying in free woodchips, they get delivered here. And if you think about it, what are woodchips? Well woodchips is a carbon source. This is probably one of the best sources of carbon that you can obtain for free from websites like chip drop or just finding a local arborist near you, right. The biggest challenge here in this arid climate is getting organic matter. They have a lot growing and some of it falls down, but they can get a lot of carbon material dropped for free, because you know, they're trying to be sustainable on the planet. If you have to bring in pre-made compost, that's not sustainable. But when trucks are already running up and down and just kind of make a side drop to drop their chips on the land here for free, they don't have to pay the dump, you know, to dump their woodchips and pay money to dump their woodchips. Now this amazing resource that actually also smells amazing too, could be reused for the benefit of the farm here. So let me show you guys how they use these woodchips the most intelligent way, instead of just like mulching on top, which is what most people do. Alright guys, so here's some of the woodchips they're using, but I'm not even going to show you guys how they use that yet, because besides the woodchips, they're also using carbon from their land. Like all these juniper logs that basically just fall down in stems, they cut up and they literally fill that two foot wide by two foot deep hole with all the stems and stalks of the wood. This is if you think about like, he's combined several different things that he's learned from other places. You can think of like, oh they do that in hugelkultur, John, but in hugelkultur they don't bury it, they put it on the bottom and then they mound over it. So now he's basically burying this two feet with a lot of carbon material. He is literally making a rain battery, this is the start of the rain battery, but it doesn't stop there. Because now he wants to fill in all the gaps and spaces in between here, that's when he takes all the woodchips and then he piles them on top, and that's what he's done right here in front. He's got this already piled with woodchips. If you watch when I step on the ground, can you guys see the ground moving? It's like I'm walking in the middle of a forest, right? This is not like I'm walking on like a concrete slab, this is like I'm sitting on a sponge and when I push down, up and down, it gives a little bit. Because now this is like literally acting like a rain sponge, or we're going to call it a carbon rain battery. Because as the rain comes down, it hits this and it gets stored right here as a battery and then releases it so that plants such as the daikon here can grow. And the other thing is, of course, this is also being used traditionally as a berm because as the water runs down, this is on a hill, it basically stops the water, the water stops, to this carbon rain battery. All right guys, so now I want to share with you guys how this carbon rain battery works. Let's go over here to an area that was previously covered up. Let's go ahead and dig some of these woodchips aside. As you guys can see, as we dig down and down and down, the soil gets a bit more moist. It's capturing the water, the carbon is capturing the water. When we pull some of this soil up for you guys to see, you guys are going to see it's nice, rich, and dark, a lot more moist than the stuff on the top. The plants, nearby plants could come by and sink their roots into this moisture. They're smart. They're like heat-seeking missiles to find this moist carbon source of rain that they now can grow from. This is just completely incredible. The carbon rain battery, this stuff works. So this is super ingenious, guys. They've only been on this farm for two years so far. They've installed a lot of these carbon rain batteries all around the property. And now I want to get you guys the expert, the permaculture guru, Desmond, in here to talk to you guys more about how he came up with carbon rain battery today. All right, so now we're here with Desmond, permaculture guru. So Desmond, how did you come up with this carbon rain battery? And why is it so important here in hill country, here in central Texas? I've always been on a quest to have not only nutrient-dense food, but actually truly drought-proof the soil. And I've been on a quest for quite some time. And as I studied more amazing content of the hugelkultur, the wicking beds, the back to Eden style, the moisture batteries, and a few other techniques, we just kind of decided to make a hybrid of it all. It just made a lot of sense to store all the carbon, to store all the water, because it's the foundation of life. And putting those things together just make a lot of sense. And seeing the results of doing it for 10 to 13 years, it's been the best thing that's happened to any of the land that I've ever seen around this region. So how long have you been making these carbon rain batteries? Since around 2012, yeah, right around, I just got done with high school, and I got a bunch of my buddies. They didn't even know what they were doing, but I got them out there. They're excited to help me plant some trees. But little did I know that we were doing the inverted hugelkultur, the carbon rain battery. I had no clue that I was starting something that I would be providing for my family and friends and community for years, for life, really. So what makes this different than using standard berms and swales that is normally used in permaculture? This stores water and carbon a lot longer. A lot of people use the mushroom, I mean, the mushrooms as well, but the wood chips as just a layer on top, they kind of mix them, but like this, it's very integrated with the land, and it becomes the land. And I've gone to lots and lots of food forests, and I go down there, and their swales will be dry, where I come here, and our swales are wet year round. That's the biggest difference, is having that water availability, because these plants are very intelligent. If they want more water, the roots will come in. If they want less, they'll go the other way. Awesome. And then the other thing is that we are in a very arid climate here, and you know, this is where it doesn't rain that much. So you're trying to literally re-green, not quite the desert, but almost desert here, in the arid hill country of central Texas here. So tell us why this method is definitely more important than using just traditional permaculture methods that you've seen in other local farms do, and what the difference in the results will be. So yeah, the resilience, you get all this resilience from this type of method. The plants grow way better, the moisture, it's cooler, it's 10 to 15 degrees cooler all around. You can feel it in the breeze. It's just, it's night and day, and the springs, a big part of this is healing the springs. It's not just to grow vegetables and whatnot. We're healing the land, and that land heals and provides us the airs better, the quality of life is better, and it's really immersive. Alright Desmond, so the next question I have for you is about like, how did you model nature? Because I know you'd see things in nature where, you know, it was green oftentimes, and you're like, how could I bring that to my land? Like what was this thing that you saw in nature that you're modeling? So often, the only areas that were green, like our land, early on in spring, were the ditches on the side of the roads. We'd go for miles and miles and road trips and not see anything that resembled our land. And seeing that green in the ditches, weeks and weeks before anybody else went green, and then weeks and weeks after, extending our growing season and maximizing photosynthesis is just so important, and like I was saying, the quality of life, it's just night and day. Yeah, so basically he saw what was happening in nature with the ditches, and he's like, how can I bring more ditches on my property here? And so he literally made ditches, filled them up with the wood, and then put the wood chips on top. So then, Desmond, what are the actual benefits, you know, say if you did this versus if you didn't do this and you're, you know, growing cash crops for example, like you're growing the daikons here and other different, you know, starter species and, you know, pollinators and you're growing nitrogen-fixing plants and all this stuff and getting your systems established. Like what's the benefit to all the plants here? The biodynamics of the plants, everything works together. So the more biodiversity you have, the more intelligence you have, and the more connected they are, they can share more. It's like, like right now, I'm super hot, I would be miserable if I was standing out here in the sun by myself, but hanging out with some buddies, you know, I feel good, I can, you know, it's tolerable. And that's the same thing with these plants, they communicate and they take the load off each other. And it's really important to have this diversity for less disease and more pollination and it's more, just more fruitful, more productive. Awesome. So the thing is you're not only working your land here in Dripping Springs, but I know you also offer services to people in the local Austin area. So what kind of services can you help them so that they can start conserving water, you know, using your carbon rain battery to grow food, even if they don't have like a spring or a well or, you know, a spigot that they could turn on? How can you help them in the local area to grow more food, more nutrient-dense food? What do you do? We do design and designs consulting, we also do installs, we also host educational events that are free to the public so people can get hands-on experience and knowledge that they can practice and then also take home with them. We do share more videos, we want to make more videos like this, introducing people to these concepts so they can either do them themselves or hire us. And it's just about getting that information really out there and getting people involved and seeing what kind of cool ideas they can come up with. Awesome, man. So how can somebody contact you? They can find us on Fertile Foods Official on Facebook and Instagram, we also have our link tree set up and we're working on getting a more official website out. Alright, cool. Well, I'll put all the links down below for all their social medias that were mentioned so you guys could easily find them. So Desmond, we're about to sign off for the day, but are there any final words of wisdom you'd like to share with all my gardeners out there that are trying to grow in a more arid climate like you are? Stick with it, don't give up, contact those mulch suppliers and really lay your stuff on contour, contour is your biggest friend. You don't have to have all this mulch, you could do rocks if that's what you have. Use what you've got and go from there and keep going. It's just rewarding and it's just great to get involved like this. Heal your land, you'll heal yourself, so just keep staying with it. Awesome, man. Definitely wise words of wisdom from this amazing permaculture guru that I had the time to share with today. You know, I want to encourage you guys, I grow in the desert, I mean I have a spigot I can turn on so my plants always get watered, but if you're in dry conditions like this, this is probably the most intelligent system I've ever seen to literally re-green the desert to bring water, not in from somewhere else, but from the rain to capture it to use it to the best of its ability to grow more crops, more plants and make the world a greener place by capturing all the carbon instead of sending it up into the air, which all these big politicians want to argue about. All right, so in any case, if you guys enjoyed this episode today here at Fertile Foods in Dripping Springs, Texas, give this video a big thumbs up, more importantly share this with other people that are trying to grow in arid climates so that they can start capturing water, one of the best ways out there by making a carbon rain battery. Also be sure to click that subscribe button right down below so you don't miss out on my new upcoming episodes. I'm coming out every five to seven days. You're going to remember to wash up, what you've been learning on my YouTube channel. Also make sure you click the little bell so you get notified as those videos come out. And finally be sure to check out past episodes. Past episodes are a wealth of knowledge. Over 17 episodes at this time on this channel dedicated to you guys all about how to grow your own food at home. So with that, my name is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com. We'll see you next time. And until then, remember, keep on growing.