Rain Gauge

written by

Joel Salatin

posted on

August 27, 2024

Water is life.  What would you do if you turned on your water faucet and nothing came out?  For a month?

That’s the way we farmers feel in a drought.  This summer we’ve had two significant droughts; one was in the spring (in April) and the other was in July.  We can count on at least one drought four years out of five.

Outside the back door of our house is a rain gauge.  Do you have one at your house?  It’s okay if you don’t; this isn’t a judgment call.  Nonfarmers seldom have rain gauges out—unless you’re a weather watcher.

This little instrument is one of the most obvious points of contrast between a farmer and non-farmer mentality.  In the summer, few things are as welcome as big black thunderheads showing up on the southwest horizon.  Our hearts leap for joy as big raindrops descend.

Whether we’re in the field, the barn, or the house, summer rains are always welcome.  Old-timers around here say “We’re always one thunderstorm away from a drought.”  

When the sun bears down and the temperature soars into the 90s, just a few days can make the difference between grass growing well and not growing at all.  And when you depend on grass for your livelihood, and the herd of cows depends on the grass for their sustenance, that’s a big deal.

As I age, I’m more interested in how people think and what we think about.  

How we live and what we do shapes our thinking.  What we see and how we interact with everything and everyone creates a thought roadmap - if you will.  Obviously, if we’re thinking about one thing, we can’t think about something else.

If I’m thinking about rain, for example, I’m not thinking about the upcoming presidential election.  If I’m thinking about soil moisture, I’m not thinking about the war in Ukraine.  

As a farmer, I’m borderline obsessed with water.  I’m convinced that non-farmers barely devote any time to water.  That’s not an indictment; it’s just a natural result of not interacting with it as dependently and viscerally. But just thinking about water does not create action.  

Most farmers share this level of thought about water and rain but, here at Polyface, we’ve taken strategic action steps to ease the highs and lows.  

The first thing is building organic matter (OM) in the soil.  Just 1 percent OM holds 20,000 gallons of water per acre.  In the United States, farmland has gone from about 7 percent OM in the original pre-Europeanization to less than 2 percent today.

Across the landscape, that’s a lot of lost water holding capacity.  In the soil, OM is like a sponge.  Here at Polyface, we’ve gone from 1 percent OM in 1961 to a bit more than 8 percent today, which is an increase of 7 percent, multiplied by 20,000 gallons of capacity per acre, which is 140,000 gallons of water per acre we can hold today that we couldn’t when we arrived.  This means the shoulders of droughts—going in and coming out—are more rounded.  The grass grows longer in dry times and comes back quicker when it rains.

The second thing we do is build ponds to hold surface runoff.  Worldwide, about one-third of raindrops run off because they either come too fast for soil absorption or too much at once for the soil to absorb. Obviously, with high OM, the soil can absorb much more, which reduces flooding.  The other option is to become a beaver, building ponds to inventory flood water and dispense hydration gently during drought.

Historically, roughly 8 percent of North America was water—primarily from beaver ponds.  With 200 million beavers working diligently, these ponds were everywhere.  Today, less than 4 percent of North America is water, even with all the lake construction of the last century.  Here at Polyface, we’ve built some 20 ponds over the years, and continue to do so, trying to reach that 8 percent water ratio of pre-European days.

Impounding surface runoff, holding those raindrops high on the landscape, does not rob downstream folks of water.  By definition, surface runoff indicates the cup of the commons is full and running over.  Holding that water high on the landscape reduces flooding on low ground and maintains base flow for aquifer recharge and springs, as well as evapotranspiration function for good cloud formation and hydrologic cycling during dry times.  That’s a mouthful, but there’s a reason why North America produced more food 500 years ago than it does today, even with tractors, chemical fertilizers, and factory farms.

Worldwide, about one-third of all raindrops become surface runoff.  That means here in the mid-Atlantic region with 33 inches of annual rainfall, 11 of those inches become surface runoff.  One acre-inch of water is 30,000 gallons, so 11 inches is 330,000 gallons per acre per year.  That’s a lot of water lost in big rain events and snow melt.  Our ponds offer irrigation opportunities during drought, which keeps soil biology going and photosynthetic solar panels in full operation.

To be sure, the landscape was carefully managed by Native Americans.  Some tribes were better stewards than others, but the indigenous population pre-1492 was profoundly higher than it was in 1607.  Some 90 percent of the native population died in that century.  In fact, in 1492, more people lived in Kansas and Nebraska than live there today.  They weren’t eating Tyson chicken and corn-fed beef.

Here at Polyface, we don’t just complain about the weather; we honor fundamental ecological principles to restore the landscape.  We can’t stop droughts, floods, heat, or cold.  But we can massage creation, as caretakers and stewards, to ease nature’s hardships and gentle out the weather spikes.  

Yes, we’re obsessed about water, but not in a worrisome, fearful sort of way.  Instead, we build the soil sponge and carve extremely large bathtubs to ameliorate highs and lows.

Even urban areas can participate in water care.  Using compost on lawns rather than OM-cannibalizing chemical fertilizers is a good start.  Reducing impervious surface area.  Creating water run-off swales to slow down run-off and give it time to soak into the ground.  Cisterns to catch roof run-off. That could be a small fish pond or buried potable water container.  A living roof—grow your garden on the roof.  That’s another twist on solar panels.  All the vegetative cooling can let you shut off the air conditioner.

Normally our thoughts eventually drive our actions and our actions drive our thoughts.  It’s a self-perpetuating feedback loop.  

Perhaps in the hurried-harried, frantic-frenetic schedule of life, devoting a bit of time to thinking about water would help us all become better stewards. 

Water is life.  

The rain gauge is a little reminder - not only of our ultimate dependency on a power outside of ourselves - but the responsibility we enjoy to actively participate in this primal building block of our existence.

What are your thoughts and actions furthering?

- Joel

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Food Shortages

I'm in Oregon today speaking at the Azure Harvest Festival and a question from the audience during a Q&A stimulated a lot of discussion:  "What do you think about the possibility and preparation surrounding food shortages?" David Stelzer, founder of Azure Standard, answered that the issue is not food volume, it's food nutrition.   That was an interesting answer that has a lot of merit.  As a nation, we are overfed and undernourished.  This is the crux of the MAHA movement and the epidemic diseases we see in our country. At Polyface, we know the pastured meat and poultry we produce is far superior in essential phytochemicals and other nutrients due to the carotenes, exercise, and stress-free habitat we offer.  You can taste the difference, feel the difference in texture, and measure it empirically. Perhaps my most poignant affirmation was our cat test.   We purchased meat from the supermarket and offered our own for the four cats.  They wouldn't touch the conventional meat (ground beef). Even though two plates and four cats would be much easier to accommodate if they spread out, all four crowded around the plate with our meat, eating it all and licking it up, before later sniffing and gingerly eating the supermarket counterpart. Since cats don't understand TV ads or USDA propaganda, they know what's good and what's not.   We encourage anyone dismissive of food differences to ask their pets:  you can trust them far more than doctors and experts. Yes, I get the nutrient deficiency angle on the shortage question.  But I'd like to explore it a bit further.   Right now, the world throws away more human-edible food, as a percentage of production, than at any time in human history.  The planet is awash in food.   Some 40 percent gets thrown away because it has a slight blemish, exceeds the sell-by date, or is tainted in some way.  We have a fundamentally segregated food supply rather than an integrated one, and that creates a lot of unusable waste. The vulnerabilities of our food system, I think, are much more subtle.  When I was in Uruguay two years ago, speaking at a conference, one of the other presenters was from Germany and showed a soil map of the globe.  Not a single commercial agricultural region had a stable or positive soil trajectory.  Every single area on the planet is losing soil; some faster than others, but globally our soil depletion continues without any sign of abatement. This is not a good trajectory.   As much as the technocrats promise food without soil, that's not the way to bet.  Soil is the skin of the earth.  When it goes, famine results.   The main difference now compared to centuries ago is that we have the capacity to move food around.   Nobody starves due to a lack of food on the planet; they starve due to socio-political unrest and dysfunction. But what happens when massive areas can't grow anything anymore?  Even being able to move food around doesn't help when there isn't enough.   The soil trajectory does not look good.  But at Polyface, we're building soil.  Areas covered with shale (layered rocks) half a century ago now have a foot of soil on them.  That's not the 3-5 feet that 150 years of inappropriate tillage eroded, but it's a build-back start. In addition to soil loss, as a planet we're seeing hydrologic decreases.   The Oglala aquifer, which undergirds the irrigated agriculture in five states, has dropped more than 100 feet in the last half-century.  At its current rate, it will be unpumpable in about 50 more years.  Imagine if all those circular irrigation pivots in Nebraska and Kansas shut down.  What then? At Polyface, we keep building ponds to inventory surface runoff.  By definition, surface runoff occurs when rains come too fast at once or too much at one time for the soil to absorb it.  Holding that and using it strategically in a drought is a way to reduce flooding during rain events and grow grass when it gets dry.  This is one of the most landscape resilient techniques we can implement. Finally, major animal and plant diseases threaten the world's food systems like never before.   African swine fever, hoof and mouth disease in cattle, and bird flu in poultry appear to be getting worse and covering larger areas.  Why?  We believe it's because chemicals and factory farming compromise the immunological systems in both plants and animals.  Monocrops and chemical fertilizers wreak havoc on immune systems, opening the planet's food systems to new levels of fragility. In contrast, at Polyface, we believe happy animals and biodiversity offer the best antidote to immunological deficiency.  Stress from unsanitary conditions, mono-species density, or dietary deficiency (rations or fertilizer) invites disease.  Nature uses disease to cull the weak.  Predators pick off the stragglers.  This is the way biology works. But at Polyface, we keep these vulnerabilities at bay with compost fertilization, pasture rotations, and lots of species diversity, including pollinators and wildlife. Here's the point:  the basic long-term vulnerabilities in the planet's food systems could all be reversed with practices Polyface uses every day.  Looked at another way, the entire food shortage question could be answered if eaters and farmers implemented these ecological and immunological protocols, working together to rather than completely separated.  We don't need to fall into an abyss of starvation. If we all simply began eating food from farms that build soil, increase water, and stimulate immunity, we could deliver a hospitable, abundant planet to our children.   Reversing these trajectories wouldn't take much time or money.  It takes intentionally-minded folks who connect the chain of sustenance from their plate to the planet. Polyface patrons do that.  Thank you.  Let's heal the land together. Joel