how do you turn a desert green to find out I traveled to the tar desert of Northwest India the world's most densely populated desert where 25 million people survive in some of the most extreme conditions on Earth it's one of the hottest places in the world but amazingly they not only survive this harsh landscape but actually created a thriving agricultural system by carefully using their small amount of Rainwater it tastes like a miniature Apple very good places like the tar desert have proven that you can create water resilience food resilience and climate resilience even in a place with these conditions and in this video I'm going to show you the three major techniques that make life possible here and it starts by building the perfect Pond pretty nice huh right here in the middle of the desert normally in a hot desert like this you would not want to have a big open body of water because of the high evaporation you'd want to soak the water into the ground and build a groundwater Reserve to draw from but here because of the geology no wells will really function because the water's salty beneath the ground besides that a lot of the areas that we visited are literally surviving on one two or three rainfall events in the year where short intense Monsoon rains dump over the whole landscape and a large volume of water is Flowing everywhere for a very short period of time that is all the water they have to live on for the entire year in these conditions large surface ponds are the answer and these large ponds need to be perfectly placed within the landscape to maximize water collection during the brief rainstorms and then the Overflow from the ponds needs to be perfectly managed to take maximum advantage of that resource there's enough of a w water shed feeding this Pond that it'll fill this Pond up and this Pond actually never goes dry so it really speaks for the very wise placement of this Pond they worked with the Villagers to dig this Pond out and they basically created a permanent water source prior to this Pond being here the closest larger water source was 10 km away when people are needing to refill their domestic reservoirs at their homes tanker tractors come pull up here and pull water out of this Pond right here and then distribute it out to local villagers for their domestic Supply but the most fascinating part is the way this Pond is connected to an entire agricultural system this field is actually the Overflow from the pond that we just saw so when that pond is full it spills over it floods this field and then you'll see on the bottom boundary of this field is this BM so each field is like its own shallow rainwater collection Pond this is the second crucial technique every farm field is a water harvesting Basin right here this is a Spillway and this Spillway will lead it down then to another series of agricultural fields and these field basins overflow from one to the next during heavy rains the farmers have only one narrow window of time to get their crops in the ground but the rainwater farming technique ensures that even just one rainstorm will allow a crop to be planted and then they grow from the moisture that's stored in the soil during the rains you can see that they have a diverse tree Plantation along the Buns that helps to hold these berms when there is a lot of water here to stabilize the soil and lessen the erosion it's really interesting actually in a desert climate seeing the integration of field cropping and tree cropping it's sort of like a lowkey aggro forestry system so this we have Ked and we have bear both of these have a a food component to them that people can eat but they are also for fodder wind protection erosion control firewood shade all of this has been made possible by their ingenious management of surface runoff and storing water in surface ponds and surface tanks and surface catchments for direct use from those reservoirs this Pond was built in 2003 by gravis gravis was founded in 1983 when the principles of mahat mandhi to serve and uplift the poorest and most marginalized people as part of creating a just and nonviolent Society we are teaching Farmers if you harvest the rain for drinking purpose for livestock for agriculture purpose you can use this water for Good Farming so they've been deep in the tar desert for the last 40 years and their work here is so vast you can see it from space Greening the desert communities with a wide variety of water harvesting and natural resource management strategies gravis is really encouraging rainfed agriculture so if you don't have the means for storing water for irrigation to grow a second crop then you only are growing a crop during the monsoon season it's a marginal life because if the rains fail one year and your crop fails you have no income but if farmers use these techniques to catch almost every drop of rain when it does fall the fields flood and the result is a lush wet landscape that we see here so we are teaching those farmers who are not knowing such Technologies how they can adopt and then use these Technologies in their Farm field so now you are seeing lot of greeny hair and other side dryness so we are going to the driest part of the driest part of India to see some water security work by bravis jport the third technique is home scale water harvesting having rainwater collection and storage at the home is so critical when people lack a domestic water supply then traditionally the women have to walk a great distance every day to fetch water from some Source this impacts the educational prospects of young women because they're busy fetching water all day and can't go to school so these rainwater harvesting tonas are so important for the Society of the tar desert dwellers the tonas are underground systemns constructed by gravis out of Ferro cement that have become the household water source for many people in the tar desert there are those that collect water directly off of the RS of houses and also those that collect run off directly from the ground surface this is a 20,000 L underground tank right here this is what they called a Tonka and there's this small catchment area right here these diversion drains basically collect all the runoff from this Hillside and then the water is taken through this zigzagging silt trap to get the sediments to settle out of the water and then the water overflows into this tank here they said the last time it rained this tank was filled up and it lasted for about 5 and 1/2 months and now they're filling it with water tankers from places like the pond that we just saw Village of baki population 3 to 5,000 very arid very Sandy this is actually rainwater from the roof to this channel into this Tonka right here and as you can see a simple pump gets it up into a bucket oh look at that how they built this rainwater harvesting tank right into the deck of the house it's part of the [Music] house this family here used to walk four kilom to get water basically they would spend a good deal of their time just fetching water to this very dry location the groundwater here is very saline but with the help of gravis they constructed this Tonka a bad year here is like 2 to 3 in of rain and a really good year here is about 15 in of rain so basically given the roof surface here and this 20,000 lers they're hoping for a good year to fill this tank up to to last them through half the year when they get water from tanker trucks they've had situations in the past where the water had poor quality uh it was high in minerals so it gave them joint pain now they put in this sand filter here so when a tanker truck comes the water's actually filtered before it goes into the tank the last structure we visited was like an ancient version of the Tonka where a well had been carved into the Bedrock but the well was not reaching the groundwater table it was just collecting surface run off and storing it in the excavated hole most places that you see a well like this it is to reach the the groundwater table but here it is just to store surface runoff into a deep underground reservoir it's not really a well that accesses the groundwater it's a excavated tank into the Rock your grandfather built this and it's been here for 60 years it holds through 300,000 lers of water here and gravis came and put in the silt trap and made the structure more whole but this is an example of a successful ancient technology this supplies water to two families and it lasts all year round so we are creating pastures we are creating farming dkes we are creating underground drinking water storage tank we are creating cace Wells we are renovating and Regional innovating the community rainwater harvesting ponds and we are also creating so many Village level institutions visiting the work of gravis who's been working here for nearly 40 years we visited many sites and saw so much work that they've done and how they have changed the livelihoods of the people here that I get some inspiration and hope because what gravis has shown here is that you can actually make an area that is this harsh this hot with this marginal rainfall you can make it inhabitable for people you can create water resilience food resilience and climate resilience even in a place with these conditions are you ready to transform deserts create Lush backyards and feed communities in my almost 30 years as a permaculture designer traveling the world I've put everything I learned into Oregon State University's online permaculture design course or PDC the PDC and PDC Pro are the ultimate ways to begin mastering permaculture Me and My Team guide you through over 20 assignments with more than 100 hours of top quality video lectures and resources all focused on developing your own property or project throughout the course you'll get personalized feedback from a dedicated instructor in a small group setting people are always asking me how can I be part of the solution this 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