- Hi, Geoff here.
Coming to you from the Dead Sea Valley,
400 meters below sea level.
And this is the Greening the Desert Project.
And this is what I like to call our engine of fertility.
It makes compost with chickens.
We make it into piles, they disassemble it,
we put it back together, they break it apart,
we put it back together.
About five weeks later
we got a cubic meter of compost popping out this end.
And we make a new pile at the top every week,
every week a cubic meter rolls out the bottom.
Now it wasn't always like this
'cause it wasn't much here to start with.
This soil was terrible.
It was just covered in rock and dust.
I can show you a shot of what it looks like
'cause it's the same next door.
And we started composting with anything we could get,
anything.
We'd bring in any food scraps, any crop waste,
banana leaves, all kinds of stuff.
Any produce that anybody was throwing out.
And we'd bring in sheep manure and goat manure
'cause that's the most common.
And we composted, and composted, and composted,
and we just kept composting.
And then we set our systems up to more or less automate it
with this biological engine of fertility.
And really, that and all the different plants
that we were able to assemble
with our pioneer rugged species,
and then our rugged fruit trees,
and then more and more sophisticated assemblies.
We've just been able to increase, and increase,
and increase.
But the fertility is held together by the compost.
But we have most of the ingredients here.
Everything we need, more or less.
We still bring in some manures.
We still bring in some crop waste and food waste.
But the really interesting diversity
of ingredients from foliage, and branches,
and wood chip is here on site.
This is more diverse in any site
for a long way around us.
I think it's grown around us.
They're mostly monocultures.
But here in the surrounding blocks of land
have become very, very diverse.
'Cause we're taking over the block next door,
and the one next to that we've already got,
and one across the road's in action.
And people around us.
We're turning this whole street, this whole area,
into a permaculture village.
Because it makes total sense.
Especially if you want to be food secure
and make sure that you've got some definite resilience
in the uncertain times.
But this is the core.
How do you bring the soil alive quick
when you assemble all those elements that are of value?
Let me take you inside the engine.
We'll get down in amongst the working parts,
and I'll show you how it works.
(rooster crowing)
So here we are.
This is the end of the line.
It's more or less ready.
See it's a bit dusty,
but we do have an irrigator running over the top.
We can't use too much water.
And we have a shade over the top as well.
Most of that's date palms, and what's only a palm fronds,
which we replace when it starts breaking up.
We compost it.
So that helps the chickens cool down.
A lot of the pens kind of blow ground a little bit,
though it is cooler in the surrounding area.
So this is what fertilizes the system.
This is the engine of fertility.
At the top end, the piles are added,
new one just about to come in,
and then they strip it apart and we put it back together.
Each time we do it, it gets less interest into the chickens.
The bottom one doesn't get interacted as much
as the top one, but they're interested in it.
They definitely like all the microorganisms or something
in there that they're digging around.
We bring in a lot of stock birds from different breeders.
This guy's interested in me.
And we give 'em out to our project ladies that garden
in the area.
So we have a project here getting other people going
with similar sort of systems.
So there's more chickens here than normal.
Normally there's about 30.
We've had up to 60 in here as they go out to projects.
But this is what's really made the difference.
Let's go out and have a look at the difference out there
between where we started and where we are now.
So starting right in the middle of the site,
if I walk up to one of the swales,
and I go into the swale trench here,
and just walk along where we've got some good ground cover
'cause that's where we're going to get
the best soil production.
Somewhere around here and these fruit trees will be good.
I'll just break through that ground cover.
And there, straight away,
can see it's gone quite dark in there.
I can see prunings.
There's all kinds of organic matter here.
You can see the prunings that we've been laying down,
they're dark in color.
You can see that soil creation happening
with that dark color.
Right at the surface.
It's pretty good.
It's cool on my hand down there.
And immediately it's quite crummy and brown.
Lots of organic matter.
I'll go down a bit further.
It's going down to the more yellowy color,
but it's damp and it's got crumb structure.
That means there's microbes there.
See all those crumbs?
Crumbs are stuck together by the microorganisms.
Trying not to get washed away.
And there, that's the soil now.
Top soil looks like that.
Okay.
That's a pretty average look at the top soil, I reckon.
Not too bad considering where we started.
Okay, let's just go outside and have a look at
what we did start with just to remind ourselves.
Okay.
This is what we started with.
That's the project right below us.
That's the project wall.
And you can see, we had a lot of stones.
That's really why we built stonewall earth back swales.
'Cause we had to do something with the amount
of stones that was there.
And there was even rock reef sticking out like this
in places.
And if I get up on here
you'll be able to see into the project.
There it is.
Okay, let's have a closer look at the quality of this soil.
Here it is here.
It's...
(rock scraping)
That's what we started with.
Now I'm really not exaggerating here.
I'd have a job to find some good soil here.
It's a little bit of grassy vegetation died off here.
(rock scraping)
I can't scratch through my fingers.
That's where we started.
That dusty stuff there.
It's horrible.
It's not an easy beginning, but put your trust in life
and you get paid back with living systems that can flourish.
So there's nice dust there.
And you can make a difference, like that, over that wall.
There you go.
Soil report.
(airy music)