Hi, I'm Lindsey Raven from ecological design
I'm Eric Berg with Berg Brothers
We're here at the Main Street project farm. It's a research demonstration farm in Northfield, Minnesota
And we've worked together for a long time on many projects and we're really excited about this one
Water is super important water and soil building to jump-start the land
we're transitioning from a very old system of many years of corn on corn and
conventional agriculture
transitioning over to
More perennialized lands with livestock. So we're starting with the water and
We have a lot of wetlands and a lot of water surrounding this entire property when we first got here
We saw a lot of tire tracks a lot of machinery stuck in a lot of areas that shouldn't have been farmed were being continuously plowed
And so we have a massive amount of erosion on this hill behind us
And all the good black capsule eroded down to the bottom land. So eric has been working on
creating swales waterways grass waterways and
Some ponds to harvest that water and then taking the productive soil making it into more production area
We're looking at what are the factors? What are what are the designers want from us? And what do the clients want?
And then we have to see what we actually have when they get on the ground
So we we knew there was a road going about here. We knew we were gonna put a pond
And some swales in certain locations
What we were hoping to do was dig the first pond and find subsoil or inorganic soil that would build a road
We didn't find the material we were looking for so that changed things up a bit then we went back to scraping the black
Back from where the road was going and and mining the subsoil or the inorganic soil
As close to the road as we could we're lifting up these areas where we had it
We had sort of a pond there already
It was a depression that stayed wet all the time and and you weren't gonna plant trees or vegetables in it
We created an area to hold water
But then we also used that material to build up the soil
Directly around it to change it from marginal land. That's sometimes wet to a more
Usefull more often piece of property. This is a larger scale example of what we can do
But we can do this on all size properties
so Eric, if someone's wanting to do this if a farmers wanting to do this on their land what kind of you know
We're standing in front of a d6 dozer. But what what how can farmers do this on their own land?
You know, I guess he'd have an idea of how you wanted to start, but you could do it
I mean you can do it as by hand. You could do it with a tractor and a plow you could
bobcat, or
You know just about anything you could you could change the way the water flows on your property
You don't have to have this, you know, it's one way to do it and get a lot done in a hurry
But there's lots of ways to do it. There's lots of small-scale stuff. You can do that
It could make big changes or at least convince you that you'd want to do more
And so we're always moving towards a perennialized system
But we will till the soil to start a project or flip the soil if we need to so as we're building this up
We're prioritizing water on this land because it's such a design driver. It's it's surrounding here
Once we know that we know the biological system of the farm is going to be able to be kick-started much faster
And so we'll finish this project up in the spring
of the earthworks and then well the crops and the ground covers and the
Livestock will arrive next year and 2018
Now it's summertime nice and warm and we're feeling really good where the farm is that everything has greened up and
We have our ground covers in we're on our second rotation of cover crops about to enter into
our final perennial rotation
We got our woody, some of our woody Agroforestry crops in. Our hybrid hazelnuts have all been planted
12,500 we got our asparagus crop in and
We're really excited about how the pond has filled up. We continue to observe and interact with a lot of the
complexities of this property
around the drain tiles
potential contamination from outside sources
We have the overflow bioswale that's
seated in native grasses
into our wetland areas
We're noticing the drain, tile the old drain tiles still filling up some of our wetland areas
And so we're going to work with that process and see
What we need to do in order to minimize
Disturbance from those broken drain tiles. We have a large amount of
Wildlife that's starting to show up on the farm fields, which is a good feedback sign for us
we're still looking forward to getting the coops built for our chickens the first of the coops by the end of this year and
Getting our animals integrated into the farm and we are very excited to be stabilizing the site
To allow our water to spread and sink into the ground here
