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The Keyline Plan: New System Farming Reclaims Poor Soil
Almost every Sunday agriculturalists and pastoralists from all parts of Australia
and other countries too come to a property at North Richmond, New South
Wales
to learn about a new method a farming from a man who is not even a farmer.
The man is mining engineer and businessman P A Yeomans
and his theories could revolutionize Australia's primary production methods.
Some years ago Yeomans found himself possessed of some land that most
people considered more or less worthless.
He decided to apply some usual theories
and some engineering principles to its development. On this type of hopelessly
poor country
Yeomans put his ideas to work. New water conservation methods,
drains collecting water for big dams and new cultivation methods
made soil instead of causing erosion.
Sun, air and rainfall work to make fertile soil
and good pastures, where previously no soil existed. So the Keyline Plan was
born.
In three years, only three years,
this beautiful pasture was won from a wilderness a barren
almost useless earth.
Now Yeomans passes on the knowledge that he's gained, confident that
his theories can make great tracts of low grade land productive and good land
better than ever.
He put it all down in a book, now a best seller among farmers.
The Keyline is a specially selected contour.
Every point on the line has the same height and once the Keyline has been
plotted on the land,
it is permanently marked. A belt of trees is suitable,
and trees play an important part in Keyline soil fertility.
By simply cultivating parallel to the Keyline first
all the land above it and then below it with this chisel plow,
rainfall is controlled to improve the soil not wash it away.
Yeomans calls it Absorption Fertility.
The chisels themselves can be set at any desired depth.
Rainwater actually shifts away from the valleys to the dryer ridges
automatically with this Keyline cultivation,
forming in the friable aerated earth, rich humus from the dead roots in the
soil.
All runoff water from the higher land and roads
is collected by contour drains and stored in the Keyline dams at the head of the
valleys for
irrigation. Many dams are over ten years old
and no silting has occurred.
From each dam there's a pipe that controls the flow of water for irrigation.
The difference is that this pipe comes through the bottom up the dam,
saving cost in pumping water over the top as is usual.
All the land below the Keyline dams is falling away
so that gravity does the work. Yeomans claims this Keyline Pattern
Irrigation is second only to rainfall in its low cost irrigation. This land
recently of little value
now nourishes fat cattle. It's the same land,
with the same rainfall, but Keyline has covered it with a mantle of
deep, rich soil. What has been achieved by Yeomans with his Keyline Plan
is even now setting the pattern for many properties throughout the Commonwealth.
It is improving the fertility and balance of
good land and bringing thousands of next to worthless acres
into high production to increase Australia's vital primary product.