hi everyone
        Here are the links to   books  you can access written by P.A. Yeoman to give you some insight in the original thinking that formed the The Keyline Plan.

Darren Doherty Australian Approved Keyline Design™ Farm Planning Consultant (2002)
Whole Farm Planning Certificate ~ Train the Trainer  (1995) www.permaculture.biz   said this is one of the best article examining the Keyline Plan http://www.yeomansplow.com.au/basis-of-keyline.htm
  
There are plans in the making to bring Darren Doherty to Southern CA for a Keyline Workshop in Spring  2007
Let us know if you are interested
Margie Bushman  margie@sbpermaculture.org

What is Keyline Water Management?

Keyline systems of water and soil conservation were developed in Australia during the 1950's by P.A. Yeomans as a response to increasing desertification and erosion of the landscape. His book Water For Every Farm (see "Resources" below) is an important resource on holistic farm design. Keyline is a set of principles and techniques based on a whole systems approach that works with natural patterns to restore or increase the depth and fertility of the soil, while increasing its water holding capabilities. Keyline integrates terraces, ponds and cultivation techniques with the natural landscape to infiltrate water into the soil efficiently and hold it on the land as long as possible. In order to truly work with nature, implementing a Keyline system requires careful observation and assessment of a site.
>From Article in By Tobias Policha appearing in the October 2001 issue of Oregon Tilth
www.foodnotlawns.com/keyline_water.html



Yeomans, P.A. The Keyline Plan. Sydney: P.A. Yeomans, 1954.
http://www.soilandhealth.org/01aglibrary/010125yeomans/010125toc.html

After only three years of experimentation with the Keyline system, Yeomans self-published this, his first of several books. In the tradition of Louis Bromfield and Plowman's Folly, it is an eye-opening look at how to help land retain all the rainfall it receives, opening the whole soil body to root penetration and releasing the natural fertility of the land.This book became an agricultural best seller and sold out. It is still sought after by collectors. The book is offered here without restriction through the permission of Allan Yeomans, who himself is writing a book offering a cure of global warming through better farming by increasing the carbon retained in the earth as humus. Allan Yeomans also runs a farm-implement company in Queensland; a pre-publication version of Allan Yeoman's book can be read and Allan and his farm implement company can be reached at through his website.

Yeomans, P.A. The Challenge of Landscape. Sydney: Keyline Publishing PTY, Ltd., 1958.

http://www.soilandhealth.org/01aglibrary/010126yeomansII/010126toc.html
This massive illustration-filled book is primarily a practical farming textbook focused on water conservation and small-scale dam construction and gravity-fed irrigation projects. Especially useful for practicing sustainable rainfall-dependent farming above the broad flood plain where water is always feast or famine. Made available here without restriction with the permission of Allan Yeomans.

Yeomans, P.A. The City Forest: The Keyline Plan for the Human Environment Revolution. Sydney: Keyline Publishing, 1971.
http://www.soilandhealth.org/01aglibrary/010127yeomansIII/010127toc.html

This is a tiny book of barely 100 small pages written in very compressed form, chock-a-block full of partially-developed insight. It should not be the first of Yeomans' books that a person reads, as having the background of his earlier works it will become more comprehensible. It is almost a utopian plan for human betterment, having as much or more to do with city planning and landscape architecture on a macro-scale as it does with farming. Made available here without restriction with the permission of Allan Yeomans.

Percival Alfred Yeomans or "P.A" as he became known to all alike,
changed Australian agriculture. It is doubtful that any man in this
country's history has had such a profound influence on the thinking and
methods used by the Australian agricultural community.

   He was from the country, but grew up in a town. His father, James
Yeomans was a train driver, and close friend of our World War Two Prime
Minister, Ben Chifley.

   When P.A. started farming he had already achieved considerable success
in business. He applied the same thoughtful and common sense approach to
agriculture that had proven so successful in his other ventures. He knew
what Australian agriculture needed. He created a "sustainable agricultural"
system before the term was even coined. A permanent agriculture, he
believed, must materially benefit the farmer, it must benefit the land and
it must benefit the soil.

   His ideas of collecting and storing large quantities of run off water on
the farm itself for subsequent irrigation was virtually unheard of, and
quite opposed to state soil conservation departments then, and by some even
now. His ideas to create within the soil a biological environment to
actually increase fertility was unique, and totally opposed to the
simplistic approach of the agricultural chemical industry. His ideas that
using tyned tillage equipment and a unique concept of pattern cultivation
could totally solve the ravages of erosion, was sacrilege in the eyes of
extravagant and wasteful soil conservation services. They still are seen as
a sacrilege to convention by many, even to this day. A quotation from the
great German physicist; Max Planck, (1885 - 1947) seems so relevant to the
concepts, the thoughts and the beliefs of P. A. Yeomans:

   "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and
making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die".

   For how much longer must we say, "So let it be with Keyline"?

   In retrospect, Yeomans' entry into the farming world appears almost
inevitable. As a young, man after abandoning a possible career in banking,
he tried several fields, including the then very new, plastics industry. At
one stage he was a highly successful door to door "Fuller Brush Salesman".
The wealth and excitement of mining however, fascinated him and during
those hard depression years, and with a small family, he completed a
correspondence course in mining geology. That course changed the direction
of his life. In the wild and charlatan mining days of the 1930's, he
established the rare reputation of being a reliable and trustworthy
assayer, and valuer of gold and tin mining projects. A reputation he held
throughout the mining fields of Eastern Australia and New Guinea.

   The family was constantly on the move. It took less than half a day in
the town of Snake Valley in south western Victoria to disprove the wild
claims of riches of yet another gold strike.

   He eventually established himself as an earth moving contractor in the
early pre-war years. This business grew, and his company, P. A. Yeomans Pty
Ltd became one of the major earth moving contractors supplying open cut
coal to the war time Joint Coal Board.

   The enormous war time taxes on company and personal income continued for
many years after the close of the war. A tax incentive however had been
established to encourage the introduction of soil conservation practices,
and encourage a possible change to, what we now call, sustainable
agriculture. Food production would be enhanced and the terrible dust storms
that ravaged the country, mitigated.

   Income earned from non agricultural sources could be spent on saving the
land. If farm dams, fences and contour drains could be constructed
economically, and beneficially, this could result in a considerable capital
gain. Capital Gains Tax itself did not exist. It came much later as yet
another imposition on initiative. So was born the "Pitt Street Farmer" (or
Collins Street, depending on your state capital city).

   Consequently, in 1943 Yeomans bought two adjoining blocks of poor
unproductive land, totalling a thousand acres, forty miles west of Sydney.
The farm manager was his brother in law Jim Barnes. Conventional soil
conservation practices then in vogue, were commenced. These practices had
been adopted by the newly formed state soil conservation services. They
unfortunately originated from the agriculturally illogical practices,
"invented" by the United States Corp of Engineers, guided and advised by U.
S. Army construction officers. The doctrines of soil conservation
departments, in Australia, have been fairly inflexible on these issues, and
department after department adopted and promulgated these extravagant and
useless practices. In those years that's all there was and these practices
were tried by Yeomans and proved wanting.

   A horrific grass fire, fanned by one hundred kilometres an hour winds,
raced through the properties. It was the tenth day of December 1944. Jim
Barnes was riding the horse "Ginger" that day, but they could not out run
the speeding flame front. Only "Ginger survived the ordeal, and was retired
to become a family pet. After this tragic accident, it was some time before
a family decision finally concluded that, the farms should not be sold.

   All the experience gathered in those years of mining and earthmoving
Yeomans then brought into play. The twin blocks became "Yobarnie", a
combination of Yeomans and Barnes and "Nevallan", from his two sons Neville
and Allan. Ken was born later in 1947.

   The cheap storage and transportation of water, over long distances, are
usually the life blood of a successful gold mine, and Yeomans became
convinced it could be the life blood of a successful farm in Australia.
Yeomans then became an avid reader and soon realised that conventional
agricultural wisdom totally ignored the biological aspects of soil. The
concept of totally inverting topsoil by using mouldboard and disc type
ploughs was progressively destroying the fertility of world soils.

   He applied the wisdom of T. J. Barrett, Edward Faulkner, Bertha Damon,
Friend Sykes, Andre Voisin and many others, to Australian broadacre
fanning. So for the first time in human history, techniques were developed
that could produce rich fertile soil, thousands of times faster than that
produced in the unassisted natural environment. This then became, after on
farm water storage, the second major facet of Keyline which is also having
a significant influence on Australian agriculture.

   Being a mining geologist, and understanding the underling geological
structures, gave him an appreciation of land form that is almost totally
lacking in the farming world. With brilliant insight he combined the
concept of the ever repeating weathering patterns of ridges and valleys,
with contour cultivation. He was well aware that when cultivating parallel
to a contour line, the cultivating pattern rapidly deviated from a true
contour. He realised that this "off contour cultivation", could be used to
selectively reverse the natural flow and concentration of water into
valleys, and drift it out to the adjacent ridges. He discovered that a
contour line, that ran through that point of a valley, where the steepness
of the valley floor suddenly increased, had unique properties. Starting
from this line, and cultivating parallel to it, both, above the line, and
below the line, produced off contour furrows, which selectively drifted
water out of the erosion vulnerable valley. He named this contour "The
Keyline". The entire system became "The Keyline System".

   The effects that P. A. Yeomans and The Keyline System have had on
Australia and Australian agriculture is profound. His last book "The City
Forest" Published in 1971 expanded the application of the principals. In
it, the same Keyline concepts are used as a basis for the layout and design
of urban and suburban communities. City effluent and waste are considered
as valuable commodities. He proposed the creation of tropical, and sub
tropical rain forests, within the city boundaries, as park lands , as
sources of exotic timbers and as the means of economically utilising city
effluent for the benefit of all. The City Forest has now become a textbook
for landscape architects and urban designers.

   The equipment and the practices of Keyline, have become so well
established as part of Australian agriculture, that it surprises many to
realise this influence. In no other country in the world, have farm
irrigation dams, contour strip forests, chisel ploughs, deep tillage
cultivation, water harvesting almost become a nation's "conventional
agriculture". P. A. Yeomans was constantly in conflict with bureaucratic
orthodoxy. So no stone monuments, nor official recognition, has ever been
accorded to his works. The changed and changing face of the Australian
landscape however, is his immense and worthy memorial.

Allan J. Yeomans
Gold Coast City, Queensland

YEOMANS’ KEYLINE DESIGN FOR SUSTAINABLE SOIL, WATER,
AGROECOSYSTEM AND BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATION: A PERSONAL SOCIAL ECOLOGY ANALYSIS

Stuart B. Hill
School of Social Ecology & Lifelong Learning, University of Western Sydney,
Richmond,
NSW.
Abstract

The potential for farming systems to be ‘redesigned’ and improved based on our
understanding of biology and ecology is enormous. Among the few pioneers
who have led theway in this ‘project’, the late P.A. Yeomans’ work in NSW is exemplary. His
understandingof soils as living systems, farms as complex, integrated and evolving  systems, and landscapes as the appropriate scale for planning and major decision-making was key to
the developmentof his ‘Keyline’ approach to agriculture. In addition to learning how to
make up to 10centimetres of topsoil in three years (it normally takes 100s to 1000s of
years), he designed a landscape that did not suffer from lack of water, was fireproof, high in
biodiversity, and highly productive and profitable. Despite this, his ‘whole healthy system design’
approach has been largely neglected in favour of component focused curative approaches to
problems. Here a social ecology analysis of Yeomans’ contributions is provided with the hope that it may inspire a new wave of ‘whole healthy system’ approaches to agroecosystem
design and management.
Introduction
Soil is the primary natural habitat that determines the long-term wealth of  nations. Most
declines in civilisations throughout history have been largely caused by  the mismanagement
and subsequent degradation of the land (Carter & Dale 1974; Hyams 1952;
Hillel 1992).
Although the highest levels of biodiversity are found in tropical  rainforests, coral reefs and
soil, among these ecosystems it is the activities of the communities in  soil (also the home of
most plant biomass) that are largely responsible for the survival and  persistence of our
species (Hill 1986; 1989). However, because most of the species that live  in the soil are
barely visible to the naked eye, and live below the surface, out of sight, in an environment
that is aesthetically unattractive to most ­ and regarded as just 'dirt' by  the majority ­ and
because of the extreme complexity of the physical, chemical and biological
relationships and processes in soil, throughout history this habitat has had few champions
and crusaders for its responsible care and management. Consequently, soil has most usually been
taken-for- granted, used-and-abused, and treated as the 'Cinderella' of the ecosphere.
There are some parallels to our own skin. If we lose a third of our skin, through severe
burns for example,we invariably die. If the earth were to lose a third of its vegetative
Read more on  website
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:FSUIlQplKJ0J:www.csu.edu.au/special/fenner/papers/ref/04%2520Hill_Stuart.pdf+Yeoman+Keyline+USA&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=7

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