[Sdpg] Yeoman Books on Line and Keyline Workshops

[Santa Barbara Permaculture Network]

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 at 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/fenn
er/papers/ref/04%2520Hill_Stuart.pdf+Yeoman+Keyline+USA&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&
cd=7

Santa Barbara Permaculture Network
(805) 962-2571
sbpcnet at silcom.com
www.sbpermaculture.org

"We are like trees, we must create new leaves, in new directions, in order to
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