Soil Stabilization in “No Man’s Land” high winds

I’ve recently been on a kick of thinking of & imagining ways to do off grid/permacultural homesteading in the Texas/Oklahoma panhandle areas. I happened across a forum on another site from a weary homesteader who was having issues with the notoriously high winds in the area blowing away his top layer of good soil & mulch. Several solutions were posted into the comments but the one I found most interesting was a technique invented in China to hold back the sand dunes in the Gobi desert from encroaching on the city of Zhongwei. They would take uncut straw & lay it on the ground flat in a line perpendicular to the direction of the line. Then with a flat shovel type tool you press the straw into the ground, creating a grid of 1 square meter lines of straw across the area. I imagine I didn’t explain that very well so let me link a video that shows it.    si=VLvhQq4VAV__FBug. Any other ideas for ways to take these types of land that were once claimed to be untamable?

Welcome to the forum, Alex!

That is one way for sure.

Things that I have done is to grown plants such as winter rye.  sweet Alyssum is also a good plant for erosion and smells lovely.

Mulch is another method that I have used and of course that method is similar to your video.

While I have not used this method planting a hedgerow of trees or shrubs will break the wind by reducing wind speed.

Are you aware of vetiver grass? It may need some help to get established if it is very arid, but forms dense hedges that stop both windblown and waterborn sediment movement. It has a very dense root system that goes deep for water once established and is an excellent companion plant for other species. It is used for stabilising land all around the world.

The only real climate requirement is that it can be killed by prolonged subzero temperatures. It can tolerate short frosts, but it may kill the top foliage and regrow from the roots.

In this image you can see the depth of soil that built up during seasonal rainfall over a 12 month period. The dark line is the original soil level.

Michael Cox wrote:Are you aware of vetiver grass? It may need some help to get established if it is very arid, but forms dense hedges that stop both windblown and waterborn sediment movement. It has a very dense root system that goes deep for water once established and is an excellent companion plant for other species. It is used for stabilising land all around the world.

The only real climate requirement is that it can be killed by prolonged subzero temperatures. It can tolerate short frosts, but it may kill the top foliage and regrow from the roots.

In this image you can see the depth of soil that built up during seasonal rainfall over a 12 month period. The dark line is the original soil level.

This looks great! But like you said it may need help to get established in an arid environment, no man’s land & the Tx panhandle are notoriously arid. Establishing any type of plant takes a lot of extra work so the straw grid alternative seems very promising.

Besides soil stability I’ve also been trying to think of ways to have reliable water. Homesteading & permaculture lifestyles would be a real challenge out there which is why I’m posting here for inspiration on how others would try it. Rainfall is very intermittent & not reliable at about 25 inches on a good year, west of the 100th meridian. I suppose you could set up a very large rainfall collection system but would just a rooftop work good? Also this is an area with absolutely no trees whatsoever, any lumber for building either has to be hauled in or you need an alternative. I’m personally interested in compressed earth blocks for building if you’re trying to fully or majority get your resources from your own land. I plan on using these for a lot of my own future builds but I will be somewhere with a lot more lumber available.

I remembered an awesome project - Mikhail set up 'water lenses' to concentrate the intermittent rainfall in the Sonoran desert and capture it into the ground - Awesome results so far, but not updated recently. It would be interesting to see how it's getting on this year.

Nancy Reading wrote:I remembered an awesome project - Mikhail set up 'water lenses' to concentrate the intermittent rainfall in the Sonoran desert and capture it into the ground - Awesome results so far, but not updated recently. It would be interesting to see how it's getting on this year.

I hadn’t seen this! I’ve seen the “water boxes” before but the “water lens” idea is neat. I wish those water boxes weren’t pricy, also looking into the videos & posts from Mikhail they aren’t the most reliable either. Someone should make an open source alternative, maybe something 3 D printable. I’ve always been a strong proponent of a 3D printer or many on the homestead.

This Chinese system is fantastic.

John C Daley wrote:This Chinese system is fantastic.

It’s super cheap & instantly effective. Grasses & hedges would take too long to establish & be a bit more costly. I can also think of some sort of wheel barrow type tool you could wheel around that could do this a lot faster than just 2 people going around & putting down straw & then pushing it down. If you had some sort of device that could feed the straw under a large pizza cutter type flat metal heavy wheel, perhaps with some sort of cog type indentations along the wheel to carry the straw along it as it rotates, you could get an acre or so stabilized in a day easily.

Alex Black wrote:I can also think of some sort of wheel barrow type tool you could wheel around that could do this a lot faster than just 2 people going around & putting down straw & then pushing it down.

I believe they have recently been making sort of giant hairy straw rope and laying this across the dunes - like a giant biodegradable tinsel strand perhaps :)

Nancy Reading wrote:

Alex Black wrote:I can also think of some sort of wheel barrow type tool you could wheel around that could do this a lot faster than just 2 people going around & putting down straw & then pushing it down.

I believe they have recently been making sort of giant hairy straw rope and laying this across the dunes - like a giant biodegradable tinsel strand perhaps :)

Is there a link to this somewhere so I can get a look?

I just did a (duckduckgo) search for something like "checkerboard desert stabilisation" and various Chinese stories popped up. This might have been it:


source: chinadaily.com

They've also made a walk behind straw machine as you suggested!
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202102/05/WS601cb6d0a31024ad0baa781a.html

Other hits hint at improving the soil aggregation by culturing the bacteria on the crust of stabilised sand areas. That might be worth some more experimentation too.

Nancy Reading wrote:I just did a (duckduckgo) search for something like "checkerboard desert stabilisation" and various Chinese stories popped up. This might have been it:

source: chinadaily.com

They've also made a walk behind straw machine as you suggested!
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202102/05/WS601cb6d0a31024ad0baa781a.html

Other hits hint at improving the soil aggregation by culturing the bacteria on the crust of stabilised sand areas. That might be worth some more experimentation too.

Thank you! I wish they’d show the machine in the images provided. I’d read a bit I it the bacteria culturing & some other efforts they’ve had going over there. Interesting stuff.