Turning One Desert Rainstorm Into Months of Water.

We're turning one desert rain into water that sticks around for months. Here in the Texas desert, we've gotten pretty good at harvesting floods. This beaver dam analog back flooded after a heavy rain, pooling water where all the plants can drink it. And when I came back two months later, there was this nice thick stand of green grass. But this guy thinks we can do better. What if it had water for an extra month, two months, three months? That is my new mentor. He made all of his money regenerating ranches across the desert Southwest. and for reasons unbeknownst to me, he has adopted me as his pet project. His only condition for helping me is that I don't show his face, so sorry for the weird shots. He invited me out to one of his ranches in New Mexico to show me how he kickstarts the regeneration process, and the very first thing that he wanted to talk about was water. You gotta irrigate the first year. That's the caveat. You need water. Period. That initially struck me as backwards. If we're trying to harvest rain, why are we talking about irrigation as the starting point? This is all side oats, grama, and bluestem. Just threw the seed, went over with the biology, didn't even drill it, sprayed the biology. I set out a sprinkler for three days, haven't touched it since. We're kick-starting the plants that are going to kick off this whole cycle, and irrigation is an essential part of that. The less steep the slope, the more water you're going to sink. And you don't want just infiltration, you want percolation. My experience with hydrogel was really formative because it taught me how water works in the soil. and it was very controversial. But the reason I decided to try it was that it holds 100 times its weight in water. But as I saw the plants respond over that first summer, including in areas without irrigation, I realized it's not the water that lands on the ground. It's the amount of time that the water stays in the ground in a place where the plants can drink it. All of my efforts have been focused on capturing floodwaters, but we actually get a fair amount of rain here. It's comparable to Los Angeles. The problem is keeping it. My mentor is showing me how to use the roots and biology to do that job for me instead of using synthetic substances. So you're going to plant things like sunflowers. They have deep roots, daikon radishes, mustard, rapeseed, things that drill four, five, six, seven foot down. The biology is going to be there to decompose the roots and now there's room for water to go deep. This megaswale taught me how to catch floodwaters and hold them in a place where plants can drink them. When this area floods, it holds water sometimes for more than a day, and what I've seen is a natural response from the environment. There's some seeds I planted like this millet, but most of this are native volunteers. I didn't plant these seeds. They just popped up. It's green, and it's because of the work I did capturing the water and letting it infiltrate. The way I know it's infiltrating is partially from experience when i have to disturb this occasionally with the bulldozer because we're still doing some final grading once in a while but i also have a small observation well over here that goes about two and a half feet down and when i pull the cap off i can just look down there and i can see moisture Northfield's a completely different idea normally i'm trying to catch flood water from somewhere else here this is the water collector this is a temporary berm but it gives you an idea we're We're going to have it 18 inches high, so about here, just enough that it can hold significant amount of water all in one spot. What we're trying to do is to prepare for once in every 10 year type rain events where maybe we get 6 inches of rain in 2 or 3 hours. We don't want to lose any of it. So although we're going to have an access point, the berm is going to go all the way around the whole thing and be one giant bathtub with plants that love to drink it up and send that water nice and deep into the soil. So this over here is just a little community dump pile where people are free to come bring their brush and drop it. I think most of this is what came from the the fire along the Rio Grande. These dumps are huge. The tub grinder has its own claw but we usually park it out there in the middle so usually there's an excavator or i don't i mean we're only maybe a third full right now but we'll get four loads this week wow um this is there's 10 loads in this row okay big end dump trailers there's 10 loads in this row two of our backhoes have grapple buckets i can put grapple on the truck on our tractors that's why i had you get the third function it's for moving stuff right on the front and then we just keep chugging it over to the tub grinder and just keeps filling trucks and then we truck it up to the to the fields we're building up north this is mostly going to be mulch all of it all of it's going to be oh yeah yeah he's found a way to turn waste into money other people are collecting all of this valuable material spending their own money to bring it to him and then he has an industrial process to turn that into mulch and that mulch is carbon that he gets to add directly to his fields i sincerely hope that that one day I have the money to buy a tub grinder that I'm operating at a scale where it makes sense to chip that much carbon. Until then, I have Hank. With the tractor I bought and now Hank, the wood chipper, I haven't chosen any of this equipment myself. My mentor gave me the shopping list and including on the tractor, which has very specific quick attach valves on the back, that's custom, the front loader is custom, all of this. He just gave me the shopping list. I sent it to the dealer and said, I want this. and spent $45,000 blindly on the advice of a guy that I hadn't shook his hand yet. And Hank was part of that shopping list. You can see what he looks like here, although mine is going to have googly eyes because I'm hoping that viewers will help me feed him all of the wood and carbon that is gonna be required to cover this whole thing in mulch. Mulch is a critical piece for this project because it can keep desert soil temperatures up to 30 degrees cooler than bare soil, just by having a layer of protection. Keeping the temperature of the soil lower is what fights evaporation, and it's one more tool that keeps the water around for longer. But it's not just the temperature, the enemy out here is the UV. I've been sun sick, I don't know how many times. It always happens in the daytime when I'm in the sun. Out in the desert, it is hot. And that's why I'm thankful for Bombas sponsoring today's episode. Anything I can do to remove layers and get the heat away from my body as fast as possible is a win. As I walk around camp, I do everything in my Bombas sliders. Every time I leave that building, which has gotta be dozens of times a day, sandals on, sandals off. Like when I'm walking to the shower or when I'm walking into the kitchen to cook, I'm always wearing these sliders because they're comfortable, they go on and off fast, and they're thick enough that even out here, everything wants to stab you. And I've had sandals before that have foam cushion and especially Ocotillo thorns just jam right through it. But I don't have that problem with my Bombas sandals. In addition to feeling good about your purchase of the Friday sliders, you can feel even better knowing that somebody that needs a pair is gonna get one. I've been wearing Bombas products for three years now, and I'm wearing the Merino wool socks as we speak. I wear them every single day out here. I can't recommend them highly enough. Scan the QR code or click the link in the description to get yourself a pair. Thank you to Bombas for sponsoring, and now, back to the episode. The temperature can be 100 degrees, and if I'm in the shade, that doesn't cause me any problems, but in the direct sun, I feel like I'm melting, and that applies to the microbes in my soil. They, too, literally die because the sun irradiates them. So part of the job that that mulch is doing is not just temperature, it's protecting them from the radiation that literally, it nukes them. My mentor sums up his process with the four A's, and the mulch is the first of them, which is armor. It fights the UV, keeps the microbes safe, and then the soil that's building underneath might be blown away by the wind, which happened to me on this trip, where I'm operating the equipment and I can see all the fine particles. The best stuff that holds water blows away with the wind. It's an unfortunate part of the construction process. It is what it is. However, once it's stable and I add mulch on top, that stops immediately. The next day is awaken, which relates to the soil biology that we wanna wake up. And instead of that being a theory, he showed me a cactus where he made it happen in real life. If you look out anywhere, you see biology. Sad and small. That was biology added last year. We'll take a quick 30 second jog real fast. We'll show you biology for three years. This is three years quenched with biology, one time in September. So you literally just poured it at the base of this cactus. Yes. It is large and angry. Yeah. Should have brought my tongs so you could take on a couple of the fruit. They are freaking delicious. So there is example number one, case for putting biology in quantity in your soil and you're going to use that to mulch your next acre and then you're going to use those acres to mulch the next and then you start putting in groves vineyards everything this is the part that i couldn't see before i went to the ranch in person to see how the system operates i didn't understand the way everything compounds on itself that i scrounge purchase do whatever I have to do to get 350 cubic yards of wood chips or really any kind of organic carbon onto that one acre my fertility factory that I get grass and other annuals established that help with the percolation they create the biomass we harvest that and we use it to expand to the next area and the next area and we just keep going your plan of action is put in the biology, build its habitat. Two ingredients endlessly repeated that we get biology and we give it some place to live. The mulch isn't just fertilizer, it's housing. His compost operation lives on a mother pile and year after year after year that is spread and fed and compounded and the system keeps growing on itself. This pile has been, there's 20 years of collections in this pile. I can do one thing he can't, which is to collect soil samples from all around the continental United States, aggregate them, put them in the mother pile, and we are going to select the absolute best soil microorganisms that can thrive in my section of the Chihuahuan Desert. It's the size of this audience that makes it possible, and if you think you might want to participate, make sure that you're on Team Dustups because that's where I'll have all the detailed instructions when we're ready to go about that. And now that I'm back home in Texas, my job is to finish building this field north field this is my future island of fertility this is where i'm going to kick start the entire process because i'm at the highest point on the ranch where gravity does all the work for me as we build more water and biology and mulch and carbon eventually that's going to facilitate the trees that i want to grow and make my desert forest and all of these elements reinforce each other to keep the limited water that we have around for months instead of a few weeks. So here's where everything comes together. We are racing to hit the September 15th deadline. I have a water well, which I should give you a quick update on that. Today's September 9th. Current status on the well is that we have the final last plan before they just have to hire a different driller and subcontract it. They've tried every which way to get the steel casing in the ground. They've given me $10,000 worth of steel casing, but it doesn't do any good if it's not actually in the well. They've tried every which way to get it through the bends and twists, the sloughing off. It's problems non-stop. The only solution is to attach a drill bit to the casing itself, and that way they drill and case at the same time. They considered welding the drill head onto the casing, but there's the risk of a failed weld, so they went with a screw-on option. That is ready as of tomorrow morning. That means that they're going to be on the ranch either this week or early next week to case and pump test the well so we can finally get it in operation. That will come in just in the nick of time. It's not the journey I would have chosen, but it's the journey I'm on. Assuming we get the field done on time, the task will be to we'll haul the irrigation the quarter mile from the well to the site. We're going to broadcast seeds. We're going to import literal truckloads of organic material so we can mulch and feed everything. I see the flywheel. I understand it in concept. Now it's time to put it into practice. All of this has been and will continue to be a massive learning process. My goal is a desert forest. I don't understand all of the details of how this is going to get me there, but I do see the momentum and the biology and the process that can facilitate it. Since you enjoyed this learning process, I know you'll love this one. I built desert beaver dams five times faster.