The Great Green Wall - food forests in the Sahara

I want to share this video that popped up on my feed.
I like that it shows the effects a food forest can have over years, especially when using local plants and with community support.

Thanks for sharing this, it's a great project and an excellent video presentation of the scheme.

Awesome video! I can't wait to be using techniques like these once my partner and I find land.

Does anyone have thoughts on how semi-circles like these compare with longer swales and berms for similar purposes?

They need less precision when laying them out. Long swales pretty much need to be perfectly on contour, or they turn into flowing streams with erosion. These half-moon swales don't need that level of precision, so are likely better suited to situation where equipment is minimal and hand tools are being used.

Plus a single one of these structures is effective in isolation. If digging by hand you could make one in a day, and just keep expanding the array in increments as time allows. Harder to do with linear swales that need to be perfectly aligned to contour and spaced and sized more carefully to handle peak rainfall events (avoiding erosion).

Michael Cox wrote:Thanks for sharing this, it's a great project and an excellent video presentation of the scheme.

Thank you for sharing. I'd never heard of this. The technique is simple and this is a great place to share it. Anyone with disturbed land here in North America could adapt the principles and make it work. I'd say that with time, the Sahara itself could be transformed back into productive land. It's just a matter of time. Combine hydroponics and greenhouse technology, water reclamation technology and the Sahara can turn green.

Michael Cox wrote:They need less precision when laying them out. Long swales pretty much need to be perfectly on contour, or they turn into flowing streams with erosion. These half-moon swales don't need that level of precision, so are likely better suited to situation where equipment is minimal and hand tools are being used.

Plus a single one of these structures is effective in isolation. If digging by hand you could make one in a day, and just keep expanding the array in increments as time allows. Harder to do with linear swales that need to be perfectly aligned to contour and spaced and sized more carefully to handle peak rainfall events (avoiding erosion).

Nice! Your perspective makes a lot of sense to me. Thank you for sharing!

With experience and machinery, long swales on contour could be more efficient. But I personally feel drawn towards an iterative approach, and have been thinking about shorter linear swales on contour. However these semi-circles have really stuck me too. If you have any thoughts on shorter swales on contour vs these semi-circles, I'd like to hear that too.

Oh, fantastic.  Water harvesting on a small scale, repeatedly...many small flames equal one big fire.  I hope people do this SOON all over the world, because we need change on this huge a scale.

This is kind of similar to the square plots in India, where they dig a deep hole in a corner, to harvest the water.

It's the 30-40 project in this video:  

Jenny, I saw this series about a week ago and thought about posting about it but I was swamped at the time--you beat me to it!  Thanks for doing so.  This was a great little YT series.

Eric

I subscribe to the channel, so saw it recently as well.

What made the most sense to me is that it's an ancient, local practice that was forgotten, so it was effectively a reminder and they used locally native plant species.  Digging by hand makes this well suited to the sort of environment that exists in the Sahel.

It's funny (not in an amusing way) to me that some are advocating new technologies as some sort of saviour for the African continent, yet, results like this are evidence that community based low tech projects make tremendous improvement in a relatively short time frame.  There is always room for improvement (humans are involved so it isn't perfect), but we don't need to immediately jump into some expensive, new-fangled technology when a good "old-fashioned" solution that can be done with hand tools and seeds can make more of a difference.

Yup, most of my life I've felt we need to go back to the ways our grandparents did things, and we'd be much better off.  I'm glad at least that we haven't lost ALL the knowledge, skills, and biodiversity that existed when we were children.  Seems like we might be just in time!