it is, it has a 360 degree view of the entire bowl. I have all four mountains in view and so abundant water when it does rain. Now the plan is to catch the water as it runs down, slow it across the land, hold it to percolate through the profile, or onwards to be stored for later use, but first thing I need to do is crowd out these weeds with some good old cardboard mulch and woodchips, and get added organic matter down so we can begin to boost the lands ability to hold water when times are tough.
The force I had to swing a pick in to the ground can not be repeated without sustaining injury. It is as hard as granite and I dont fancy bringing in any more bloody tillage gear, which has clearly played a huge role in the way the land looks today.
The people here having been miss led by big Ag just as the bulk of the farming world have, on the advice of" experts", whose job it is to make sales of massive land crushing machinery, have convinced everyone that the reason plants dont grow is because the soil is too compacted and needs to be ripped apart by some metal forls and hundreds of HP. Not one of them has ever bothered to offer a reason as to why soil compacts in the first place, no chance for us to address the matter in a sustainable way, only spend our money on kit that is at the very root of the problem. And by problem I mean human minds, this is the problem, not tractors, not diggers, not horse shit, not even synthetic salts. It is us that ruin the land because we are by nature looking for short cuts and we cant be bothered to learn whats needed.
Farmers all over the world have stripped the living armor from the land, eg the plants, and so inadvertently, esp here, they have baked the soil in some of earths highest UV levels for many many years. There is no hope if you are less than a 10th of a pin head and full of water and so the soil is what I call dirt, it is brown stuff without living organisms of any value, only opportunistic bacteria are left, waiting on the next tilling machine to chomp up any glomalins that may have recovered since the last hammering.
Sure we see then lots of N being released, and plants in this situation grow fast, but if we want to cook a sausage, do we set fire to our whole house?
As i was once told by a good man, get the top two inches of the soil working, and the rest will follow. This means we put life back on top of the soil today, we cover the ground, we add living root systems, we add resources and we wait. In a short time we will have armies of tiny tillers, we will bring back the worms, enable the shredders and so on, these will dig all day for us, they will mine and scavenge nutrients for our plants, feed them and protect them, most of all never demanding vast amounts of fuel and cost. Why would I want to waste my life digging, when there are creatures put here by a god or other, whose sole purpose is to dig soil in a way that resonates with all the other biology. Yeah i can wreck a field in ten minutes with a tractor, make it look nice to the human minds who have been told by "experts" its the only way to grow plants, but if i want the soil glues and I want organic acids as buffers, a critical part of balance re soil pH, I must have life. I dont want to waste my money on short term sticking plasters like Lime, and I dont want the extra cost of my life because I use it.
The light here is extremely strong, the soil calcareous. We are really only a few degrees north of the equator. We get cooler night temps, but the day temps are really high in mid summer, up to 50 degree C. Cooler night temps, well last night for example 9c with a day temp rise somewhere to 34c right now. Thats a huge swing for any plant or microbe to manage. Son the night temps will rise and then we will have 40 degrees in the day with 30 degrees at night, this is all Celsius, i am European, but to make it easier, right now my temp differences are average 44.6F night to 93.2F day so a swing of about 50 degrees F.
Every part of the world has different challenges of course. Here vDiff is one of the largest. it will be interesting, I can not wait to test my ideas.
The nation here is paying the price for listening to so called wise men who went to school to learn how to sell you shit. Fuck sake even doctors do this too, go to school to be legal drug pushers, see Oxycotin, legal heroin, so I say beware the so called experts. i learned by getting my own head in to the questions i have, not by going to some big ag business funded school whose mission is to sell fucking tractors and lime and not to provide an answer as to why soil compaction happens in the first place.
Anyone that wants to know just ask.
Sorry that was meant to be a nice email saying its great here, but i went all ranty. Time is pressing me, I want it to look better but I know this takes time :)
