Light, Water, Soil & Life – The 4 Pillars Of A Productive And Profitable Homestead

There are 4 universal homestead productivity leverage points: Light, Water, Soil and Life. Each is present everywhere on the terra firma of planet Earth. Each is a distillation of one the the fundamental ecosystem processes as defined by Allan Savory in his book Holistic Management – A New Framework For Decision Making.

• Light = Energy Flow – How Much Sunlight Your Landscape Captures And Turns Into Usable Biomass
• Water = The Water Cycle – The Circulation of Earth’s Lifeblood
• Soil = The Mineral Cycle – The Circulation of Life-Sustaining Nutrients
• Life = Community Dynamics – The Living Organisms That Leverage Light, Water, Carbon And Soil Minerals to Produce The Primary Forms of Wealth

These 4 processes undergird all human endeavor. We humans are utterly dependent upon them, and they are the most universal leverage points for creating healthy, resilient ecologies capable of supporting abundant life. No matter where you are, or what scale you are working at, how you manage these four aspects of your landscape will determine its baseline productivity and function. Each ecosystem process is a different aspect of the whole system that is your homestead landscape – making a change to how you manage one will affect them all. Think of each ecosystem process as a different window looking into the same room – each showing it from a different perspective. When managed together as a whole (i.e., holistically) the potential for creating positive compounding cascade effects is HUGE.

Light (Energy Flow) – The Flow of Fuel That Animates All Life

Everywhere on Earth’s surface receives light energy from the Sun. This photonic energy is the base energy input for ALL life on Earth, and all of human economy and civilization depends on it.

Plants are the foundation of the natural food chain – their bodies are the storehouses for solar energy. Plants feed everything that lives above and below the surface of the Earth. Our goal as homesteaders is to manage our landscape to “be a better solar panel” – to capture, store and utilize more solar energy in the form of living plant tissue – and thus provide a greater pool of usable energy for other life forms to utilize. There are 3 ways to optimize a landscape’s ability to capture and store solar energy; by managing Time, Density and Area.

• TIME: the amount of the day and year that vegetation can grow, or increasing the rate at which it can grow.
  • The more times plants are able to grow, the more productive the living community will be.
  • There are 2 ways to increase the TIME component of optimizing light:
    • LENGTHEN THE GROWING SEASON: The more days of the year plants can grow, the more solar energy they can capture, and the more yields they can produce. The growing season can be lengthened by:
      • Having adequate water stored in the soil profile (The Water Cycle) early in the growing season (i.e., before the spring rains) when temperatures are warm enough to begin germination and growth. This way temperature, not water, will be the limiting factor determining when plant growth can start.
      • Modifying the local microclimate to allow growth to start earlier in the season – this can be accomplished by modifying air drainage patterns with earthworks, water bodies or tree planting; growing under cover (coldframes, hoophouses, greenhouses), and supplementing with electric light (grow lights etc).
    • INCREASE THE GROWTH RATE: Plant growth rates are increased by good nutrition (The Mineral Cycle), proper hydration (The Water Cycle) and beneficial associations with other forms of life (Community Dynamics).

• DENSITY: How many plants are within a given piece of ground. More specifically, the number of layers of photosynthesizing leaf tissue are there between the open sky and the soil (leaf density).
  • LEAF DENSITY can be maximized both horizontally and vertically.
    • Think of all the photosynthesizing layers in a mid-stage forest; overstory, midstory and understory canopies, vining layers, then bushes and shrubs, then the herbaceous layer and finally groundcover plants. All are capable of capturing solar energy and converting it to usable carbohydrate to feed life above and below ground.
    • This is true also of aquatic environments (ponds and lakes) as well, though more care needs to be taken to balance nutrient levels so the water body does not become clogged with dead plant material and become anaerobic.
    • A diverse plant community (i.e., a holistically-managed pasture) has a much greater DENSITY than a monoculture (i.e., a lawn), and therefore has much greater potential to capture and store solar energy.

• AREA: The leaf area of individual plants – the more leaf surface area, the greater the potential to capture solar energy.
  • Broad-leaf plants will capture more solar energy than narrow-leaf plants.
  • Like how we optimize the angle of a solar panel relative to the sun to expose the greatest amount of surface area to direct sunlight for the longest portion of the day.

Modern, industrial agriculture increases the Energy Flow in a crop field by adding petroleum-based fertilizers (i.e., fossilized solar energy). Our goal as sovereign homesteaders is to manage our landscapes intelligently to increase the length of the growing season and the rate at which plants grow (TIME), the number of plants growing within a specific area (DENSITY), and the amount of leaf area each individual plant has photosynthesize (AREA).

Auditing Your Homestead’s Current Energy Flow

• What types of energy are you buying in? (fertilizer, animal feed, bedding etc.)
• Of what you are buying in, what could your landscape be producing and cycling for itself with either a change in management, enterprise selection, or both?
  • i.e., Are you currently running an enterprise (commercial or not) that requires you to source necessary inputs from outside your landscape? Could a different production model (different species, different breeds, different numbers) allow you to grow your own inputs?

Ways To Increase Your Landscape’s Energy Flow

• Trees: Trees are a keystone element in any functional homestead landscape. Trees will improve the TIME, DENSITY and AREA element of increasing Energy Flow on your homestead by their very nature. When integrated into a holistically designed and managed living system of productive elements, they can be an exponential leverage point to increase the productive capacity of your landscape. See our post High-Value Livestock Fodder Trees For Temperate Climate to learn about specific trees that can help you dramatically increase the number of calories you grow per acre.
• Management-Intensive Grazing: If you have grazing livestock, manage their grazing impact with regular movement to maintain 50% litter cover on the ground and keep pastures in Phase 2 growth (plants grazed before seedhead production, “first bite” grazing that leaves ample leaf area behind after grazing to still harvest sunlight for the fastest possible regrowth) for as much of the year as possible.

Water (The Water Cycle) – The Circulation of Earth’s Lifeblood

To sustain humans and the maximum amount of life (in all but wetlands and true deserts) an effective water cycle must be maintained. What distinguishes an effective from non-effective water cycles?

• EFFECTIVE WATER CYCLE: high utilization of water by plants, low evaporative losses, run-off is minimal and slow and carries little organic matter, the soil has a good air-water balance (O₂ and H₂0 both being necessary for healthy root growth).
• NON-EFFECTIVE WATER CYCLE: minimal utilization by plants, high evaporative losses, run-off is high and happens quickly and carries with it organic matter and soil particles (erosion), what water does soak into the soil isn’t available or helpful to plants due to poor air-water balance (i.e., waterlogging creating anaerobic conditions, or excessive drainage creating overly dry conditions to support healthy root growth).

Managing For Effective Water Cycles

Effective water cycles even out the highs and lows experienced from year to year to create a consistently hydrated growing environment. The first step in managing for an effective water cycle is to improve the effectiveness of rainfall. Effective rainfall is that which soaks in and becomes available to plant roots, insects and micro-organisms or that replenishes underground aquifers – very little is lost to evaporation or run-off at the soil surface.

Think of your landscape’s hydrological health as a bank account – it has income, deposits, savings and expenses. Each of these impacts the overall function and balance of a bank account, just as they can for a landscape.

These are the 4 R’s of Regenerative Hydrology.

• RECEIVE (Income): This is the amount of precipitation your landscape receives annually. It may also include run-on water flowing onto it from off-property. There is generally not a lot that can be done to change this number at the individual property level, but when larger areas of land are managed holistically at the macro-watershed level local, the pattern and amount of precipitation can be increased. For an example of regional-scale restoration of effective rainfall, see Willie Smits – Samboja Rain Machine video.

• RECHARGE (Deposit): This is how your landscape refreshes its hydrological ‘bank account’ – with the deposit slip of infiltration. To improve infiltration (recharge):
  • Most importantly – plant trees and establish perennial vegetation wherever bare soil exists. Trees are far and away the best producers of future rainfall, in addition to being the best protectors of soil from the impacts of unimpeded rainfall as well as the most effective means by which to infiltrate precipitation into the soil and increase soil moisture to the benefit of all lifeforms. Trees and perennial vegetation are critical to increasing the recharge capacity of the landscape.
  • Limit impervious surfaces and the wholesale conversion of native vegetation.
    • Common modern development practices (creating impervious surfaces, channelizing stormwater, etc.) tend to increase the rate and volume of storm water’s return to the ocean via excessive runoff and heightened flood discharges. This directly reduces the landscape’s ability to retain water and diminishes the amount of water available for later release during the dry season when it is most needed.
  • Pacify and re-pattern stormwater run-off with structures designed to slow, spread, and sink water into soil storages.

• RETAIN (Savings): This is how much of the water infiltrated into your soils is available for use by plant, animal and soil life. To increase the retention time of water in your homestead landscape:
  • Build living soil (increase the organic matter content) as rapidly as possible. Each 1% increase in soil organic matter results in an additional water storage capacity of ~20,000-25,000 gallons of water per acre.
  • Create texture in the landscape to allow water a place to settle.
  • Infiltrate water at the first and last chances available.

• RELEASE (Expense): The expenditure of stored water. Water can be ‘spent’ in many ways – it is released naturally to the ocean, land and atmosphere in a process known as the water cycle. Through seasonal snow and ice melts, groundwater springs and seeps, water is returned to creeks and rivers. Solar evaporation and the evapo-transpiration by plants help to form new clouds and feed the cycle anew. The infinite nature of this cycle is to continually flow and be in flux as the expense of one stage produces income for the next.
  • From a homestead management perspective, water assets should be spent to further increase the reception, recharge and retention capacities (the first Three R’s) of the property and thereby increase it’s overall capacity to support life.

Basically, managing for an effective water cycle on your homestead landscape boils down to doing 2 things:

1. Keep Your Soil Covered: Ideally with living vegetation, at minimum with mulch. If soil is left bare, aeration, drainage and soil cover will all be negatively affected. Bare soil hit by unimpeded raindrops is like an artillery barrage – fine soil particles and organic matter are literally blasted into the air, sifted to the surface, and ultimately carried away by surface run-off.
2. Slow The Water Down, Spread It Out, Sink It In: Design your landscape such that water must follow the longest path, moving at the slowest speed, encountering the greatest amount of surface area (ideally living surfaces – roots etc.) to maximize your homestead landscape’s infiltration potential.
   • NOTE: Think at the scale of an individual raindrop! Living vegetation is by far the most cost-effective way to do this – not large, medium, or even small scale passive water harvesting earthworks (which have their place in a hydrologically savvy homestead, but not at the expense of living vegetation!).

Soil (The Mineral Cycle) – The Circulation Of Life-Sustaining Nutrients

“A good mineral cycle implies a biologically active living soil with adequate aeration and energy underground to sustain and abundance of organisms that are in continuous contact with nitrogen, oxygen and carbon from the atmosphere.”

– Allan Savory, from Holistic Management

The soil organisms that are responsible for creating healthy, living soils require energy derived from sunlight (root exudates in the form of carbohydrates and dead plant bodies) but the majority do not come to the surface to obtain it directly. Instead, they depend upon a constant cascade of decomposing plant and animal residues.

The Mineral Cycle cannot function in a dead soil. If chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides or any other -ides are being applied to the soil, its ability to provide the essential nutrients that plants and animals (including us humans) need is decreased or destroyed entirely.

The goal for us as managers of our homestead ecosystems is to keep nutrients from escaping the cycle and to steadily increase the volume of those cycling in the upper soil layers that sustain plants. There are two pieces to this:

• FIRST, plug the holes in your bucket. The ‘holes’ are soil erosion and compaction. These processes need to be stopped where they are happening and prevented where they are going to happen in ways that leverage Nature’s capacity to heal damaged soils. Any active erosion sites need to be repaired to water flows re-patterned or pacified such that healing (i.e., revegetation) can begin.
• SECOND, fill your bucket. Using good design and holistic management, aid and abet the natural processes that build soil throughout your homestead landscape. Align your property design and management of your enterprises with the generative natural patterns present. Soil is the ultimate wealth creation and preservation vehicle. It is the ultimate inheritance and a true legacy to leave to one’s descendants.

Managing For Effective Mineral Cycles

There are three parts to a complete soil mineral cycle. Each part can be optimized with good design and management to create a soil mineral cycle that supplies all necessary nutrients to support vigorous and healthy plant growth, that in turn supports vigorous and healthy communities or organisms that eat those plants.

1. Bring sub-soil minerals to the surface. Plant roots and their mycelial companions are Nature’s miners. They bring subsoil minerals to the soil surface by absorbing and translocating minerals to above and below ground plant tissues. This means we need healthy root systems that go DEEP to access varying topsoil and subsoil strata. We also want to manage to encourage polycultures (Community Dynamics) because different plants specialize in ‘mining’ different minerals in different forms. Small animals like earthworms and soil-dwelling insects also work to move mineral-rich, biologically active soils from below ground to the soil surface.
2. Bring above-ground vegetation down to the soil surface. Dead plant material is of the greatest value in building healthy soils when it is brought into contact with the soil surface and broken down biologically by the macro- and micro- soil biota. If dead plant matter is left standing above the soil surface, it will break down chemically or physically and will not feed the soil life beneath it. It will also block sunlight from reach younger growing tips and seedlings below it, leading to a stagnant landscape with a lot of standing carbon but very low biological activity in the soil.
   • In drier, more brittle environments where water is a limiting agent on active soil life, ruminant grazing animals are the best way to get standing carbon broken down and returned to the soil – via digestion in their rumens and by the trampling action of their hooves. Standing dead plant material in these setting can persist for years, to the detriment of the ecosystem at large and soil microbiota in particular.
   • In moist, non-brittle environments where water is not a limiting agent on active soil life, standing plant material will start decaying even before death.
3. Bring surface material underground. Water infiltrating into the soil is the primary way this occurs (The Water Cycle). Healthy soils are friable, with adequate air pockets to allow for infiltration while also having ample organic matter in the topsoil to store water in a bioavailable way for the long-term. If soils drain too sharply, they can leach nutrients out of the topsoil into the groundwater. The best way to solve this is to increase soil organic matter. Small animal life, such as worms, soil-dwelling insects, and small burrowing animals all move surface material underground (Community Dynamics).

Life (Community Dynamics) – The Living Organisms That Leverage Light, Water, Carbon And Soil Minerals to Produce The Primary Forms of Wealth

Life is what creates the conditions for more life. Photosynthetic life is what captures sunlight and pulls carbon from the atmosphere and ‘transmogrifies’ them into the base feedstock (plant material) that supports all other trophic forms of life. With the base inputs of light, water, carbon and soil minerals, life generates meat, milk, fiber, fuel, medicine, beauty, all of which can be exchanged for the uniquely human life-energy accounting system called money. These things are the foundation of true wealth.

The question here is, how can we design and manage our homestead landscapes to increase their life-expression (i.e., wealth-creation) capacity?

For starters, we can optimize our interaction with Light, Water and Soil. We can also select appropriate species for our context and goals. This is especially important if you are working with an already degraded landscape.

Principles To Guide Management Of Community Dynamics

1. There are no hardy species. Everything is adapted to an environment where it thrives. Find the things that thrive where you are given the current state of your land that will help it success towards a greater life-expression capacity!
2. Non-native species have their place – a very important one! The term “native” is very bureacratic – a great way to “other” forms of life that are not currently endemic to a specific bioregion. Governments love to classify various forms of life as native and non-native (sometimes calling them invasive, or alien). When something is deemed “non-native” or “invasive” it becomes the enemy, something to fight and declare war against – hence all the government funded eradication efforts “battling” non-native species (most of which were introduced by us!).
   • NOTE: This isn’t to say that “non-native” species never cause ecological harm. Introduction of a novel species within a bioregion should always be undertaken with great caution and care. However, once an immigrant species is established in a community, we are better off learning to work with and manage it productively than trying to eradicate it.
3. Collaboration is more apparent than competition. Science calls collaboration between species symbiosis – a mutually beneficial relationship that exists between and among different species to the benefit of both. While the dominant paradigm has been that competition is the primary driver of species evolution since Darwin’s work, there exists ample evidence that is becoming increasingly hard to ignore that new species will evolve in order to avoid competing for the same niche. Competition is costly, and collaboration can have exponential upsides.
4. Ecosystem stability tends to increase with increasing complexity. Generally speaking, the greater the diversity of organisms with a certain ecosystem, the more stable populations will be. We can manage our homestead landscapes to increase the stability of our production base by intentionally selecting species for their beneficial relationships with one another (think leader follower managed grazing with cattle and sheep followed 3 days later by chickens), and then watch as more form organically by Nature’s own accord.
5. Most biological activity happens underground. Don’t discount it because you can’t see it! Think of everything you do on the surface being mirrored and amplified 10x below ground. What species can you select for and encourage by good management of your living systems to build a legacy of living soil?

Increase Your Homestead Sovereignty By Optimizing Light, Water, Soil And Life

Light, Water, Soil and Life – each is a window through which to view the overall productive capacity and health of your homestead ecosystem.

Nature is giving these gifts for FREE! Optimize them!

If you don’t, you’re leaving time, money and your life energy on the table!