I was delighted to present at a recent Lantra Wales “Farming Connect” webinar titled: “Making Your Horticulture Enterprise Drought and Flood Resistant”. The event was free of charge courtesy of Lantra and the Welsh Government.
Event listing:
The Wales Permaculture Connection
Back in September of 2024 I made the trip over to to the Wales Permaculture Gathering to give a lecture and workshop on designing large areas for sustainability. I focused on how Keyline Design is a perfect starting point for large scale permaculture projects, referring to my own work using drone mapping to generate low interval elevation contour maps, and then designing using Keyline methodology.
Suffice it to say that it went down well with many in the audience at the permaculture festival including Paul Jennings who is also a permaculture designer and educator. Since then Paul and I have been looking for an opportunity to collaborate on this theme and so I was delighted to do so when he got in touch about the opportunity to present on the Farming Connect webinar with him. Paul also enlisted Abel Pearson to present. Abel is is the founder and project leader of Glasbren, which is a not-for-profit, Community-Interest Company in Wales focused on Community Supported Agriculture (CSA).
Flood and drought Resilience Webinar Details
This is the event description on the Business Wales Event Finder:
“In a time of accelerating climate change, this webinar aims to address the vital techniques we might use to make our farms resilient in the face of both flood and drought. We aim to move beyond the paradigm which frames water management as a problem, to one which recognises water management as an opportunity; we will discuss ways of using living systems and mirroring nature to increase productivity and resilience, whilst also enjoying biodiversity gain and watershed-level remediation.
This webinar will take the form of a panel discussion and will include Paul Lynch from Ireland, a Permaculture teacher and designer who combines engineering, architecture and regenerative landscape design in his work, and Abel Pearson, a farmer, permaculture educator and founder of Glasbren, a community food and farming project which has found a new home at the 134 acre National Trust farm, Parc yr Arglwydd/Lords Park farm.“
Webinar Learning Outcomes
- Participants will understand a range of techniques that can be used to improve water management on a holding level, including conventional rainwater harvesting, earthworks and planting schemes.
- These strategies will be presented as an integrated approach that can be applied across a horticulture or farm holding.
- A range of approaches will be discussed so that participants will learn how they might undertake water management improvement within their budget.
- These water management strategies will be explained in the context of their productive potential for farm enterprises.
- Holding-scale strategies will be put in the context of watershed-wide benefits.
Flood and Drought Resilience Webinar Recap
We had just an hour to deliver on the huge topic of flood and drought resilience. With three presenters our time was further divided. As permaculture practitioners and educators however we were well placed to focus on different subject areas. Paul Jennings set the general scene and broad concepts, I dove into design methodology, and Abel focused on practical aspects of irrigation in horticulture.
Ireland, Wales, UK and Europe Climatic Regime Outlook
Paul Jennings opened the presentation outlining the broader climatic picture for the UK and Europe and likely climatic scenarios going forward. He focused on the concept of designing “sponginess” into the landscape. This term refers the the landscapes ability to soak up and store water thereby to ameliorating the effects of extreme rainfall and drought conditions. Paul touched on many ways to do this, for example though rainwater harvesting, having more trees in the landscape, pond creation, and using grass roofs in architecture. Watersheds don’t recognise our political and social land ownership boundaries and so Paul drew attention to the need for trans-boundary cooperation between landowners and stakeholders to attain best practice in watershed rehabilitation.
Ireland and Wales Climate Averages and Extremes
Although I was focusing on design approaches I also had a couple of points on climate. Although I had already done a Keyline Design presentation and workshop in 2024 at the Wales Permaculture Gathering, I still needed to do some extra homework on ensuring relevance to horticulture in Wales. The Met Office 30 year averages for various locations indeed confirm that Ireland and Wales operate largely under the same climatic regime. On average this means that the driest and sunniest weather comes in the spring and early summer, followed by wetter weather in July and August when the Atlantic warm and wet airflow is normally re-established once again in these parts of the world. There is then usually a slight reprieve from the rain in September, followed by the wet winters we know so well.
The worst drought conditions generally occur in the rare summers where that summer rain pattern does not re-establish, and we find ourselves with more continental style summer, with a high pressure zone extending over the UK and Ireland keeping the Atlantic rain at bay.
Flooding is a pattern we are more familiar with, and we are almost guaranteed at least one extended heavy rain event every year and annual water-logging in the wet winter, depending on topography and soil type.
The Solution is within the Problem
Without good landscape design these events can have severe negative impacts on a horticulture enterprise. With good planning however, both drought and flood events can become an opportunity. When stored, the windfall of water in wet weather becomes as asset for later drier days, and the warm sunny summer drought weather offers excellent photosynthesising and hence growing and ripening conditions if the water demand can be met. This is a classic permaculture solution of turning a problem into an opportunity.
Rain Water Harvesting for Community Supported Agriculture
As an experienced vegetable farmer, Abel presented on his personal experience of the methods he uses to deal with water issues in his work running a community supported veg box scheme in Wales. Abel primarily focused on his experience in rainwater harvesting for horticulture and in using on-contour beds for vegetable growing in a steep landscape with clay heavy soil. He also presented early plans and ideas for irrigation water supply resilience at his new stewardship role at Lords Park Farm on the southern coast of Wales.
Simple Horticultural Practices for Flood and Drought Resilience
After Paul Jennings set the scene I was free to get into my work of designing in flood and drought resilience using drone mapping and Keyline Design in Ireland.
I started off however with some simple approaches that I have implemented at the Ansa Permaculture Design project in Ireland that are inherently more flood and drought resilient than conventional horticultural practices.
Grow Tree Crops for Water Resilience
This is a classic simple-but-not-easy solution for resilience in horticulture. Trees and other perennial plants have larger, deeper root systems and so are less stressed by temporary flood and drought conditions that may only have dramatic impacts on the surface layers of soil. Like all elegant design solutions trees solve many problems at once. Tree roots will increase the depth of living soil and the leaf fall will act as a natural mulch increasing soil humus, carbon content and ability to hold water (and nutrients). Trees are so central to sustainable design that they get their own chapter in Mollison’s Permaculture Designers Manual.
Grow Tree Crops – Simple but not Easy
Growing tree crops is not necessarily easy however as it involves a whole different set of horticultural practices and skills when compared to annual vegetable growing. There can also be significant investment needed in setting up and a lead time of years is needed until cropping even begins. Like all good things though, tree crops are well worth the effort and once set up and mastery of the skills is obtained, generally tree crops are less labour intensive than farming annual plants.
Contouring and Terracing for Resilient Horticulture
Landscape features that run along an elevation contour of the landscape have the effect of holding up water that would otherwise flow down hill. Think of a sand dam on a sloping beach holding back water for example. On-contour features provide an opportunity for water to soak deep into the soil and improve resilience to drought, while simultaneously slowing the rate of water flow further down the valley, ameliorating flood conditions.
Aligning vegetable beds on-contour or slightly off-contour is an easy way to achieve this. It also aligns well with on-contour paths which are energy efficient in terms of movement and are more impervious to erosion. In the rainy west of Ireland I personally prefer orienting beds slightly off-contour to get good water retention and absorption properties without water-logging the growing area.
Developing this idea further we get terracing, where in hilly areas retaining walls are built to hold back soil and compost to creating flatter growing areas and a stepped landscape. I began my growing career using beds but as an engineer and keen natural builder I have become more fond of terracing for horticulture. I also find terracing more amenable to hoeing as a cultural practice and easier to maintain overall than vegetable beds which often suffer from weeds encroaching from the high density of paths.
Drone Mapping and Keyline Design for Flood and Drought Resilience
Once the simple methods were dealt with I delved into the not so simple but very powerful design tool which is Keyline Design. This is such an important and large subject that I will cover it in its own article coming soon, to be linked here.
About Lantra and Farming Connect
Farming Connect is a service provided by Lantra Wales. Lantra is one of the leading awarding bodies for
land-based industries in both the UK and the Republic of Ireland. Website: https://www.lantra.co.uk/
One thought on “Flood and Drought Resilience in Wales and Ireland”