Case Study: Dryland Permaculture Design

Happy new year! I hope that everyone has had a good start to 2024 and is ready to dive headlong into a new year of possibilities and a new growing season.

For my first post of the year, I wanted to share this exciting concept design for a dryland permaculture design project in Arizona which I worked on towards the end of last year – a design for an extreme environment that shows the exciting opportunities that can come from design constraints such as water shortage.

Dryland agroforestry is an approach that seeks to make the seemingly impossible possible. It is about increasing the opportunities for sustainable food production in an arid landscape, through earthworks, native planting and other strategies that maximise soil building and growth while minimising water use, and maximising soil moisture content and the replenishing of underground aquifers/ ground water.

This project, as so many do, combines some recent advances in technology and knowledge with ancient ideas that have been used by desert and dryland peoples for millennia. 

As we move into an uncertain future, we must remember our hardiness and resilience as a species as well as the fragility of the systems around us, and embrace new advances while also learning from those who have gone before. 

Remember, we already know many solutions for the problems we face around the world – we just need to implement those solutions to move in the right direction.

If you are interested in learning more about dryland permaculture, agroforestry in general, sustainable water management and conservation techniques, or anything else raised by this case study, I would be happy to hear from you. I can offer flexible consultancy in writing on an hourly basis.

This project is an example of the work I undertake through my Regenerative Farm Design & Agricultural Consultancy service.