I Won Money To Build Beaver Dams in the Desert

I got the grand My ultimate goal is to build a desert forest in the most isolated spot in the state of Texas and up until now most of my work has been focused on one single Terrace I have so much work to do and I need to keep adding grass and Mulch on that Terrace but we are getting reasonably close to the point where it's time to fence this in and move on to the next section the best way to bring beavers to dust UPS is twofold number one is I've already done the work trying to capture and infiltrate as much of the water that's flowing in these waterways as I possibly can I have 2.4 acres worth of dirt bathtubs there are two Earth and dams that hold nearly 100,000 gallons of water each and then there's the main area where I'm working The Terraces they're cut into the hillside which has the benefit of catching the rain water and getting it to soak in the ground you may remember my work last year building check dams those were very effective because I watched them during rain events and they did exactly what they were supposed to to do you can see water pooling up behind them and they did so without eroding the bank in the process beaver dams are even better than check dams because of their size they're wider and they're taller and of course that means that there's more water backing up behind them the only reason that I did not build Beaver Dam analoges or bdas was budget I have extremely rocky soil and it's super easy to build check dams I have large Stones everywhere beaver dams aren't really that expensive either and I should clarify this point that I am not building a beaver dam because I'm not a beaver I'm building a beaver dam analog or a BDA for short the key distinction between a beaver dam and a BDA aside from the fact that I'm not a beaver is the fact that the BDA has support posts all along the with it's time to build a beaver dam and when I tried to say it's time my inner Bruce Buffer just started going it's good time there's a decent chance that we may be using a check Dam that we've already built as a sort of foundation I want it to be right here this is the satl that the BDA is going to go on the other side of I think if I can get the dam here and I can trim this vegetation back so that I have room to work that's going to be the most impactful place to do it let's go get some measuring tape and TST this needs to be 10 ft across normally you want to use untreated lumber for those posts because they add organic material in addition to the structural support however for the purpose of this Grant on this Ranch nrcs approved me using t-posts because I don't think there's any chance that I'm driving a wooden post through solid rocks and driving tsts in normal soil conditions isn't anywhere near this hard but if you're breaking up rocks in the process of driving toost it becomes way way more difficult it's like the world's worst chisel because it doesn't even have a sharp end you're just bashing and banging on this Steel Rod hoping that eventually you break the rock to your will and make it part ways I was able to get the one middle post fully driven into the ground because the material in the actual River channel is more clay than Rock so it was much easier to go through but on the side channels where erosion hasn't taken place or deposited more friendly material so difficult to drive them [Music] in there we go so the next step is this needs to be convex Downstream the reason it's convex and not concave is that we want water to flow evenly over the top so instead of dropping right into the channel want to have even flow spreading as much along this flood plane as we can get so what I'll probably do with the next post is try to get it in between the rocks that we've already stacked try to get the the shape that we're going for it doesn't need to be anything extreme just mildly concave I mean convex this needs to be anywhere from 18 to 30 in from the nearest post I ordered a gasoline powered tpost driver well before I arrived on the ranch I'm so annoyed at Amazon I heard that part 3 weeks ago instead of UPS delivering the gas powered tpost Drive that I ordered several weeks prior I'm out here banging away with steel on steel making do with what I've got it's not like we get next day delivery on packages if we need parts right now from Tractor Supply Home Depot whatever we have to drive 3 hours into El Paso and 3 hours back to get whatever is needed so if I can order on Amazon and have the parts waiting for me it makes a lot of sense a common complaint that I hear from my neighbor in Sierra Blanca is about the useless Parcel Service known as UPS take a look at this screenshot from UPS where they allegedly attempted a delivery to the post office at 5:31 in the morning I don't think you have to have much experience with the post office to realize that they don't keep those kind of hours well that's pretty far in I think what I'm going to do is uh leave this and then I'll just have to come back with the toost driver and really drive it in cuz this is just going to be exhausting the post do go in at the end so I guess technically I'm following the instruction right break time right on Q that's brand it how's your morning going building momentum pretty rough in this morning yeah whoa yeah pretty rough glad you're up good to see you I'm uh driving toost you up for helping with Beaver Dam mhm where are you working to the left of the dam you'll see the toost sticking up out of the ground so that's going to catch hopefully some of the runoff and especially what I'm sending from this broken road till the Dozer gets fixed Rascal Flats Broken Road lost on me sorry it's always lost on me Su at a couple of weddings oh yeah nice how much uh vocal training do you think you have to do before you feel comfortable singing is a singer can you tell a month or two before I would sing in public everything about dust UPS Ranch is putting my values into action I value land stewardship and abundance which is what's leading me to build a desert forest that's the reason I'm excited to work with Harvest Returns the sponsor of today's episode there are so many different types of Investments that you can make but how often are you able to find agricultural Investments that match the values that you want to advance Harvest returns offers investment opportunities in nearly every type of of Agriculture cacao plantations aquaculture Orchards regenerative grazing and because it's not an investment fund you get to pick the individual projects that you want to support make sure that you scan the QR code that you see here on the screen or that you click the link in the description that's going to take you to the Harvest returns website you'll see my face so you know you're on the right page enter in your best email address so that you can go through the current investment opportunities again scan the QR code that you see here or click the link in the description pick the opportunities that match your values and that you want to support with Harvest returns Brandon knows of a stash where to find a lot of sticks he's going to take 30 45 minutes to go collect material meanwhile I'm going to adjust the Rocks now rather than a check Dam I'm going to widen the base out which will be better for the spillway anyway this this is no longer a check Dam it is a foundation L it out a bit even throw some of these rocks Downstream but the nice thing about this check Dam having been here already is that it's already filled with a decent amount of sediment so we can feel pretty good about the way this is likely to perform when it actually gets water not watertight it's definitely leaky but certainly better than the first run and now we got to start getting organic material into this many of the ideas between the dirt bathtubs The Terraces the dams all of these ideas they also reinforce each other every water structure's goal is to get water soaking into the ground including these bdas my property gives me the very unusual gift of the right depth between the Surface and the Limestone underneath there are parts of the property where Limestone sits Exposed on the surface it is bare rock exposed to the sun all the time now I didn't do this as an organized survey but I bought a $35 soil probe back in June and where I thought I had a pretty good idea of the soil depth I spent some time banging a steel rod into the ground just making sure that my assumptions about the depth were correct and my subjective experience was hey I'm not actually too bad at estimating the depth of the soil one of the best tools I've picked up has come from my work with nrcs the agency that gave me this Grant and specifically Francisco molinar when he was doing his PhD work he wrote a paper on cyot grma and using it as an indicator grass in the northern chuahan desert to estimate soil depth rule is where you see cyot Grandma growing in the northern chuahan desert It generally means that the soil depth is 1 to 3 feet deep at the top of the hills where we have larger clay deposits I know that those are at least 6 feet deep and the way I know that is that we' already run a skid steer through that area laying geothermal tubes on the hillsides where it starts to slope is where you see the cyot grma starting to pop up and that's where the soil depth is 1 to 3 fet deep it's where the soil changes from having a heavy clay composition to much more sand content and because it's more shallow you have the grass starting to grow as the slope reaches its point of inflection the grass stops relatively abruptly and and that's where I know that limestone is either really close to the surface or it's diving back down and it's fairly deep bdas are a better way to upgrade this whole get water in the ground strategy the Earth and dams I've built are high-risk High reward I've built them so large that they should be able to withstand a 100-year single day rain event and still not have to spill any water but of course there's always the time where it's going to need to let water go if those dams fail it could be catastrophic fortunately unfortunately in the next episode I'm going to show you how the dams almost failed on a very minor rain event it's a way that I didn't anticipate the dams failing which is a good reason to go slow and learn from experience before you commit too much what I'm trying to do is to bring this level is in a layer so that the the bank isn't quite is distinct I think I'm almost at the point where I just need to wait for Brandon to come with the longer sticks I don't want to get too far ahead that's a good time to stop I think that looks like a solid start now we wait for big branches my little white collar hands have he heat blisters after only six tsts that's actually better than it's been it's going to kill the neat freaks out here cuz this is the opposite of a syntropic where syntropic is all beautiful and organized and this ain't beautiful and it's not organized it's supposed to function like aggregate where you just have not total chaos but a lot of chaos back to soil depth as you go in these washes the soil gets much deeper I don't know for a fact How deep the soil is I'm estimating just based on the slope and it really is a guesstimate I don't think the soil is anything more than 20 ft and I suspect it's probably less than 10 ft deep where this water flows so what happens when the water goes into the sand it eventually sits on the Limestone and then it flows downhill 5 and a half miles all the way down to the Rio Grand along Limestone sand here is really porous and really coarse which means that when water is fully submerged in the sand and flowing along the Limestone Rock on the bottom the local hydrology reports estimate it moves about a foot a day so from the point where I'm capturing this first Beaver Dam it's going to take 9 and a half years for water to soak into the ground in this BDA and actually leave the dust UPS Ranch but of course the entire time I've got it protected by the dirt where the sun and the wind can't evaporate the water away I think that'll do Brandon that'll work we're pretty close to being done uh the whole time I'm picking up as many different types of vegetation as I can rocks silk dirt gravel whatever and it gets shoved in the dam there's no magic recipe everything's going every which way and As We Lay these branches we're trying to make a fan the dam is going to be this High when it's all said and done it's going to be it's going to touch the bottom of those posts we don't want the water just spilling here we want it spilling here and here and here and here and here so that we're not eroding any particular portion of the bank we want to spread Force out as much as possible at some point this thing's going to fail mhm and we want it to fail in a controlled way so that instead of just failing right here and inzing the channel we want it to just blow out everything I've done all of this throwing mud at the wall to see what sticks all of it is following one Central strategy which is get water into the ground and flowing on this Limestone I am trying to build an underground river I don't know how big it is and I can't know for certain where it's going other than downhill and probably towards the river geology is a complex subject I'm so oversimplifying but I think you get the point the main risk of this going wrong is that maybe somewhere the limestone's fractured and I might just be donating a whole bunch of groundwater to the aquafer instead of the plants that I'm trying to support not the worst thing in the world but definitely not my goal without actually mapping the underground geology and using ground penetrating radar or some explosives and really looking at the underlying composition I can't know or I could do a whole lot of digging and I just don't think it's worth digging at some point you got to just put your chips on the table and make a bet have you seen a lot of beaver dams Sean no sir can't say that I have it's 12:30 and I'm I'm starting to poop out so even though we're really close to finishing if I keep pushing I'm going to get dehydrated and I won't recover the rest of the day so lunch time for me and I'll see yall this afternoon that really wiped me out I went through about a gallon and a half of water in a 4our period fully confessing myself as a novice in geology but also backed with grants from nrcs who have much more expertise in all of this stuff I sincerely believe that this really does have a long-term opportunity for Success the total Grant award is for $9,300 something dollar I believe for me to build 20 bdas and also to spread seeds over a 4 acre area at first $41 per linear foot seems expensive but by the time I factor in my labor costs and how long it takes to scrunch this material sometimes it might even involve transporting the material it really is about what it costs to build these I didn't know about these kind of grants in fact it's a brand new Grant I'm the first recipient in the state of Texas to get this grant I'm really thankful for the opportunity I hope I get to work more with nrcs as we build these Brandon schedule now is going to be to build at least one of these a week for the next 10 weeks that'll fulfill my obligation for 2024 if we can get up to two dams a week that's what we're shooting for I want to knock out this year's contract obligation and then hopefully get an early start on the next one we can always build more but we decided to start with something that I knew was manageable and doable but also that wouldn't be overwhelming and completely take me away from The Terraces the first Beaver Dam analog is complete well it's a rough draft because it's going to Ryan and Arbor I'm sure they're going to have some feedback for us if you have some ideas on what we could have done differently I know you won't be shy leaving comments it doesn't have to stop here I have made a special bonus episode that you can go watch by clicking the link in the description the episodes about life on the ranch waking up getting ready for the day before I went and built this Beaver Dam scan the QR code or click the link there's more dust UPS content waiting for you thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next episode