Water for Any Farm

Applying Restoration Agriculture Water Management Methods on Your Farm

By: Mark Shepard, Jack Spirko - foreword

Narrated by: Matthew Boston

New from best-selling author Mark Shepard! Written as a companion to the best seller Restoration Agriculture, this book will help farmers capture water in areas they want to and avoid having water flow immediately to the low point. The result? Less water expense, healthier crops and livestock, and less erosion...just to name a few.

What you will listen to in this audiobook is a distillation of more than 25 years of on-the-ground experience working with and modifying the Yeomans Keyline Plan. From the backyard suburbs to 10,000-acre ranches and everywhere in between, from permafrost mountainsides just shy of the Arctic Circle, to equatorial boulder fields of East Africa, areas with 300 inches of rain per year to those with less than three inches, I have personally installed systems based on the Keyline design methodology and its modified forms. What you will listen to in this audiobook is tried and true. It is intended to give a sufficient background to any landowner so they can optimize their water resource for higher site productivity, have greater drought resistance, and just as importantly, to know deep in their heart that they have made even one little piece of earth a little more life-filled, livable, and green.

©2020 Mark Shepard (P)2020 Tantor

A necessary addendum to Yeoman’s “Water for Every Farm”

Excellent book with clear narration and practicable guidance for implementing contour farming and water catchment principles on a farm. Shephard describes what he has learned from 20 years of key line design in the continental US, making key-line principles more accessible and less intimidating along the way. Shepard also offers ways legal advice and terminology to make contour farming follow USDA guidelines and provides links to crucial soil and climate data and other resources.

For the audio version, it is helpful to have a basic understanding of key line design before reading this book. The referenced .pdf’s were not available at the time I bought it but was able to follow most of his guidelines without then regardless due to having read Yeoman’s book once years ago.

I will be recommending this to people often.

Better in Readable Form

Like Restoration Agriculture, this book is pretty awesome for someone looking to work a "larger" piece of property. I do a lot of audiobooks, and books like this, with lots of figures, diagrams, etc. are best visually. some business books I have listened to have websites where you can download for free the accompanying visuals. If that is available for this book, it isn't advertised in the book, but would be nice. That said, great information.

Be advised; skip the audible version. PDmuthafnFs!

Come on Audible. This is fascinating information that very much needs visual aids to make sense. The text is always referencing figures and diagrams that seem to be unavailable. The narrator mentions how important it is to get the accompanying PDFs, but there is no way to access them. No option from within the app, no option from the website. GIVE ME MY PDFS!! GIVE THEM TO ME!!! I WANT I WANT I WANT!

Listen and practice

so much wonderful information. a must listen work of art! I'm going to implement varying practices explained in this! thank you!

Great

great compliment for Regenerative Agriculture. Went into detail on many important water management considerations for designing the water flow, as well as concepts related to hydrology.

Croikey, bloody good book, mate!

Even before I had heard of Mark, I saw a problem with the official Keyline pattern. It had to be tweaked in all but “ideal” landscapes, which make up an astoundingly rare minority in my part of the world. I thought it would be interesting to try and find a solution to this problem that was widely applicable. Mark delivers that solution here and wraps the whole thing up in a package that is not only effective, but actually comprehensible on the first pass.

Awesome book

This book has great content and it was very in-depth but easy to understand. This book has illustrations that would be helpful to see to get a complete understanding of what everything he was talking about. I would still recommend listening to it though.

Need the figures

Love the book but it is super hard to understand without the figures. Purchasing the physical copy so I can get this content. Have listened to other books that used figures to illustrate and they were included as PDFs. Wish this were the case with this book.

Great book not great for audio

Lots of information here, but even though I am familiar with this concept, I found it very hard to follow. Trying to articulate the way water moves over land, without illustration is nearly impossible. If you are designing your own water management system, I would purchase the paper copy to keep as a reference guide.

Excellent key line primer

Could have done without the repetition and website addresses in the audible version. The balance of technical and inspirational content was wonderful