Water for Every Farm: Yeomans Keyline Plan (4th Edition)

This is the first Yeomans Keyline book published outside Australia and it details the principles, techniques and systems for sustainable development of rural and urban landscapes.

One of the primary objectives of Keyline planning is to enhance the swift development of deep biologically fertile soil, i.e. living soil, in a systematically designed landscape. Developing and deepening biological soil fertility will rebuild the soil structure and reduce the damaging effects of excessive storm-water runoff, which exacerbates erosion and infrastructure damage.

This book reveals how Keyline is the natural way to defeat the menace of soil erosion and salinity by healing the primary causes of soil erosion that are declining soil fertility and excessive stormwater runoff. The bio-adsorption of salinity and the long term storage of atmospheric carbon in the soil as humus are simply incidental benefits of Keyline.

This book reveals the Keyline methods to systematically convert subsoil into living topsoil. It explains the Keyline management techniques to resuscitate topsoil quickly so that the soil’s aerobic organisms are enabled to easily move down into the subsoil, spreading biological fertility and the resulting humus into the sub-soil below and so increasing the structural stability of the landscape.

This book will show you how to produce soil better than exists in the untended supposedly natural state.

Learn about Keyline pattern cultivation; a technique to achieve an exaggerated contour ripping pattern in undulating country. It causes the low points of the contour rip marks to occur in the centre area of the ridge shapes. The high points of the rip marks are in the centre of the adjoining valleys. Rainfall is of course rapidly adsorbed into the loosened soil. When runoff does eventually occur it tends to hang on the ridge shapes longer. This is a nice effect, considering ridges are normally dryer and harder than the adjacent valley shapes. The valleys benefit too from this pattern of cultivation because they don’t receive runoff during storm events till much further down where they are naturally flatter and more stable.
Keyline pattern cultivation is unique in this water spreading effect. All other common patterns of cultivation will somewhere cause runoff water to arrive in the valley shapes higher than would occur naturally. Keyline pattern cultivation is so effective for surface water control that it has enabled the rapid flood irrigation of gently undulating land without the need for terracing.

Whilst deep biologically fertile soil in a well-designed landscape was P.A. Yeomans’ goal, it was his development of the Keyline Scale of Permanence that provided the priority guide for planning the various factors of broad scale landscape planning and development. The correct planning priorities order is key to achieving optimum results.

On fully developed Keylined properties the vistas are of lakes with water birds; roads that climb along the ridge lines and follow level paths beside contour channels that are also adjacent to stepped contoured tree belts that shelter healthy crops and green pasture growing in deep, dark, biologically fertile soil.
No wonder this book is a recommended text for Permaculture students and natural farming enthusiasts worldwide.

This book includes updated selections and information; from the original P.A. Yeomans books:- The Keyline Plan (1954); The Challenge of Landscape (1958); (Water for Every Farm (1964 and 2nd edition 1968) and The City Forest (1971).
Keyline Designs is at www.keyline.com.au



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