Darren Doherty Discusses Using Swales and Cost Comparison vs Keyline Plowing

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Some things he is not mentioning here, which are important for those people first encountering these concepts: - Swales can move large amounts of runoff water from one area to another and at the same time spread it out over a landscape. This means that if you have a road, a building, a pond or other large runoff area on, or nearby, your land you can harvest that tiny river of water that runs on it and bring it to places that a keyline plow won't take it. - Keyline design can function in places where swales will fail miserably. Mainly in land where the bedrock is very close to the surface. If you infiltrate a lot of water in one area through a swale, you can cause a mudslide. - Swales can function as part of a nutrient flow system. So for instance you can have a duck pond at the top of your property, that the ducks manure in every day. If you run water into that pond, the overflow of it can be channeled into swales which will spread out the nutrients from that pond. - Swales are a tree growing system. Keyline design is often used in grazing land. Keyline design works its wonders in large scale properties that focus on grazing, or agroforestry. If they have runoff it is largely due to compaction of the soil or bare ground above the property. Gulleys are often turned into dams using keyline design. The end result is to get rid of runoff all together and infiltrate like a blanket. Swales work their wonder in smaller properties that are able to receive a lot of excess runoff water, they will plant that water and put it to productive use. They also shine when working with trees and nutrient flow systems like ponds or cattle yards.