If I had 320 Acres of Desert…
~ for Shaun Overton, and the rest of those YouTubers ~
TL;DR — “Dustups” is a YouTube channel which catalogues the various projects to terraform patches of desert in the far, far west of Texas. They’ve been trying a lot of different stuff, small-scale, for two years… with 320 acres around themselves. I would take a different approach. Work quick, share the dividend with the team, and capture as much water and power as possible.
Return on Investment: the Cost of Lag
Suppose I plan to use a truck as a delivery service. I figure that, if I own that truck, I can make $40/hr above fuel and maintenance costs, and I plan to work 2,500 hours per year, earning $100K/yr. If a new truck cost me $200K, and I pay for it over four years with half of my earnings (the rest towards basic needs), then in the fifth year, I’m walking home with $100K. Debt gone. Because the truck is new, maintenance is minimal, and there is almost no down-time or disruption.
OR?
I plan to use a truck as a delivery service… so I decide to buy all the parts, to save money by assembling it myself! I have to invest lots of time learning about each step in assembly, even though I plan to only use that knowledge once! Every mistake I make takes roughly three times as much labor and twice the materials as it would if I had done things correctly, so NONE of my ‘tricks’ seem to be worth it… and it takes me four years of $50K in living-expenses, sunk without revenue, before I get everything working. I have NOT been delivering anything, this whole time; no productive output, no revenue. Now, I can start earning $100K delivering stuff. Yet, that four years of no revenue, lagging before a return is generated, means I am $250K in debt. It will take me five MORE years before I break-even, due to $50K living expenses. That means I am permanently $250K behind, which gets worse as that lost-investment would have earned a dividend — in twenty years, I missed-out on a $Million!
The Lesson: “If you want to practice lots of small projects, then none of them will work properly, because you didn’t do them often-enough to do them well-enough to compare their real value. Try them on 3 acres, one at a time, until you get good at each one, not 320-acres-and-try-each-just-once.”
In Contrast?
Plan for the Scale you will NEED:
With 320 acres, that’s about 1.2 Million m2. If folks are working 2,400 hours each year, and assuming that they can do a ‘full conversion’ of 1m2 in 1hr., then you will need 500 person-years to convert the entire area. So, if that conversion happens due to the efforts of five guys, then it will take them an entire Century! Lag-on-revenue is knocking, guys. You should have scaled labor up-front, to earn revenue this decade.
How can you afford to pay all that labor? Think of stock-options; if each worker earns a share of the dividend from the property, growing as they add more hours of labor, then they are incentivized to work until they get real results, so that they reap that revenue SOONER rather than later. Make the property a Land Trust. The Board of Directors awards and revokes Memberships. Members work to earn Shares of Dividends for the rest of their lives, self-diluting with new labor. Members also receive an allotment of buildable land on the property, in proportion to their labor-shares.
That value to the worker means you only need to afford their operating costs: Fuel, Food, Water, Shelter, Internet and a few Amenities. With a multi-layer tarp Yurt complex ventilating evaporation like a Termite-Mound Swamp-Cooler, and a Water Truck hauling tons in round-the-clock-shifts, then that $50K you spent on soil could have paid for 100 man-months of labor, Shaun.
You should expect a team of Forty guys, working for Five years, to convert the acreage into useable ravine-crops and buildable plateaus. That plan should be an up-front membership contract, to guarantee labor that is competent and committed. If you have continual churn with only a few hours per participant, instead, then most of your free-time is spent on-boarding and filtering new applicants. Don’t let HR take all of your brain-space!
Design & Operations
To get the most value per labor, then you need to generate that value efficiently. Key to this is Capital-Utilization.
Imagine the two Scenarios:
“Dozer Daytime”
From about 9am until 6pm, with breaks, someone is shoving dirt back and forth inside a big machine, rolling over it, to form mounds of loose dirt into a Berm. They move a lot of dirt, but it all gets washed away when the water backs-up behind it! It was all tiny, light particles, turning into slurry. Most of the work was wasted, and that big, expensive piece of equipment sits idle for 75% of the hours of the year! That cannot multiply labor much; it only multiplies the output of ONE dude, only PART of the time, and the results aren’t very VALUABLE.
“WaterJet Stadium”
You have shifts, five hours each, all night and around the clock, with a break in the high heat of the afternoon. Stadium-light LEDS shine down on the narrow ravine of the wash when it’s dark. For twenty hours each day, water jets carve dirt from around rocks, sluicing sand and silt into a deepening pond. The settled clay, sand, gravel, and rocks will all be used to build the Berms and soil-beds, later. As the water settles, it is pumped back to a kiddie-pool settling pond, then re-used by the water jets.
From the first edge-point on the property where the Derecho rains wash-through, we’ll dig a deep trench and use that material to form a Berm downstream of the trench. The Berm must be ANCHORED, first:
Water jets excavate deep post-holes, where you lay metal posts a yard into the ground and seat with water-proof fill — some geopolymers are good! Then, lay a cement foundation more than a half-foot thick, to form a contiguous, anchored floor. Bind posts to each other with cables or chains, each post linked to the post downstream of it, in parallel rows. Make the post-spacing wide enough that you can pull a dolly-cart full of rocks between them!
Then, as you waterjet the trench upstream, you pile the stones atop the cement foundation. Lay across the entire planned footprint of the Berm with the largest rocks, adding smaller material in cake-layers above. The waterjet trench accumulated sand and pea-gravel as you wrinsed and sloshed. Place those atop the rubble pile when it is most-of-the-way to its planned elevation. As each layer of rubble and sand is laid, use cables to bind the adjacent rows of posts at the ground-level of the filler at that moment. Don’t trip over them! This forms a contiguous, bound grid of support, with LOTS of friction and tensile strength.
Your Berm will have plenty of gaps between the rubble at its base, which guarantees that it will LEAK — good! The water-pressure on one side of each rock will be only slightly less than the water-pressure on the other side, so that even a tall Berm won’t collapse if the grade is shallow-enough.
Those gaps, and the flowing water, will convert your Berm into a hillside Hydroponics for an orchard! Roots reach deep to tap a continual flow of fluids, dude. And, by making that Berm the height of the surrounding ridges which gird your Derecho Wash, then the Berm becomes a Causeway to link the two hillsides, for walking and carts above, water flowing beneath like a bridge, all while providing a gentle grade for a stroll down into the ravine. Perfect!
The Berm will leak downstream, creating a long-lasting flow of water for all the plants adjacent to it in the wash. And the deep waters behind the Berm will have the depth which creates water pressure, to push the water into the ground, percolating along the downstream sides of the ravine to feed plants’ roots, there. Once ‘Team-Foundation-Posts’ has laid their posts and cement at the first Berm, then they move to the second Berm-site, downstream; ‘Team-Rubble-Crew’ comes after them; ‘Sand-Crew,’ then ‘Silt-Crew.’ They cascade downriver until the entire annual supply can be absorbed. Which reminds me:
How MUCH Water do you Get?
This is a critical question for the scale of the Berms; we need the first Berms to be able to hold all of the Derecho flood from a major rain-event without catastrophic overflow. And, the cascade of Berms will hold more than a year’s worth of heavier-than-usual rain, in total.
For Shaun’s spot, the ‘annual’ rate is about 2", or 5cm. Yet, that happens in spurts, with up to 30 MONTHS between spurts! We’ll plan for a heavy 10cm rainfall and expect a quarter of that much as normal.
Next, that Derecho Wash is receiving rainfall from its entire watershed, and that watershed is only discharging on its way passing-through Shaun’s property. If that watershed covers about four square miles, then that’s 10 km2, with 2.5cm rain per year, for 250,000 tons of water. That sounds like a lot, but it puts a solid cap on the size of Shaun’s Desert Forest:
1km2 will need that entire 250,000 tons, just to get 0.8 acre-feet of irrigation. Sure, it will be hyper-efficiently trickling through the soil downstream of the Berms, and you will obviously be selecting for low-water crops… yet, that only greens 240 out of the 320 acres. Well, that sounds about right, actually!
With a team of Forty, each receiving 8 acres, then 6 of those acres are crops, 2 acres for home and solar array, unusable slopes. Yup.
Big Berm
The goal is to hold-back 250,000 tons of water, along a ravine with a 40:1 slope, widening at its ridgelines to 20m wide at a height of 10m. That lets you form a pond reaching 400m upstream, an average of 5m deep, with its bowl-shaped cross-section averaging 12m wide, for only 24,000 tons of capacity! We will need TEN such Berms.
Each Berm is 10m high, spanning 12m on average, with a 5:1 slope on both sides, for 100m length front-to-back. That’s 6,000m3 of rubble and sand, 15Kt of mass. Ten of them?! 150,000 tons of material. And in order to create that Berm, then the water jets must sluice for shovellers to load dolly-carts, to haul and dump along each row. Give them an hour per ton per person. That’s 150,000 hours. At 2,400 hours per person, a team of 40 adds 96,000 hours each year. In a year and a half, all of the initial Berms are complete.
Average depth of these ponds is 5m, width of 12m, needing a travel of 4 km in total to absorb all of that water; a footprint of 12.5 acres! Low nooks and crevices among hillsides MUST be in-filled by these ponds’ edges just to contain all of that water, creating a fractal coastline and many points of water-intrusion and diffusion into the soil. A large percentage of the property is within a few yards of the water’s edge.
I recommend adding Iron Sulfate to the ponds in small doses, and stirring their silt periodically, for a harvest of algae! Algae will yield as much as 20 pounds of dry bio-mass per m2 in a year, compared to crops’ 2 pounds. Lots of nitrogen-capture for fertilizer, as well. Pour it over your Compost Piles, so that you add the nitrogen gently, slowly.
Meanwhile, each year’s floods lay another bed of silt and clay, to combine in a Cement Mixer with finely chopped straw for thick Mud Daub, which is then laid thick as a platform for planting-beds covered in compost, then topped with protective ceramic crumble.
Gravel Foundation
Build atop the hills, cutting them flat with waterjets and laying a thick bed of gravel across the whole surface. Then, the house is built with sturdy corners and plenty of triangles to re-inforce itself, laid atop that gravel. Water and moisture, compaction and settling, are all easier to manage when the whole house is designed as a solid box sitting on a self-settling, redundant-drainage platform.
Surplus sand can be poured into sandbags and laid among metal posts, which are then locked into place with a topping of cement, to build retaining walls to enclose nooks and dips in the hillside. Dig deeper, there, piling high to form a protected amphitheater. Sepp Holser, a permaculture designer, calls these ‘Crater Gardens’, ideal for micro-climate shade and moisture in harsh locales.
To receive a continual flow of more building materials, then use the waterjets to carve an overly-sinuous channel for the Derecho stream to follow. Because the slope and flow-rate do not match the channel’s average curvature, then each flood will help to carve MORE of the dirt-layers, depositing gravel, sand, silt, clay, grit, even gold-dust in the basin trench behind your Berm. Every year, you can add more Mud Daub soil beds in more sandbag retaining-wall Crater Gardens covered in Algae-boosted Compost. Done.
