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HOME: Reforesting the desertifying Alentejo

About us

About 3 years go we bought a 33ha piece of land in the rural Alentejo, Portugal. The land was bought in form of a non-profit association HOME VZW so no-one would actually ‘own’ the land. Multiple families would live and work together on the land with a common ground of sustainability, self-sufficiency and respect for nature but each with their own specific focus.

After being here for a while it became very clear for us, Ward and Priscilla, that this region is clearly dying. We’ve already seen the landscape change in so little time that we wanted to focus our energy on preventing the desertification of this region re-introducing biodiversity by replanting, reforesting, creating ground cover and a healthy soil. Though it might seem green from afar, the biodiversity is terribly limited and exists mostly out of the last bushes before desertification.

Situating the problem

Our 33ha of land (and actually the whole region) have been abused for centuries by planting monocultures of grain and cork oaks (and more recently eucalyptus) depleting the soil of nutrients by always taking and never giving back. Slowly the clay soil has been compacted because of animals and later on big machines, into a concrete-hard barren earth that only supports the most basic of plants. The lack of soil coverage leaves the sun to scorch the earth and the air to heat up, dehydrating the land even more. And even if it rains, the water can’t penetrate the hard soil, causing floods and erosion at the surface taking away the little bit of topsoil that has been built up. The landscape is dying.

(classic alentejan soil, hard clay, during summer any grass and plants dry out exposing the soil to direct sun, when viewed from above, you'd just see barren earth)

The effect is being felt throughout the whole region: the lack of rain for the past 6 years has caused a never seen before drought, lakes are at their lowest point in history, springs dry up and any trees and plants that have survived up till now are slowly giving up. Even the symbol of this region, the cork-oaks are dying at a high rate, biodiversity is diminishing and fires are a daily thing in summer. And in stead of acting, everyone is blaming climate change, conveniently forgetting that they are still scratching open the earth with big machines each year, still planting the same monocultures of eucalyptus, cork or pine.

What we are doing

We believe the solution is local change. By reforesting 500ha it’s already possible to create a microclimate with more rain, lively springs and a soil that can sustain itself and us along with it. But to inspire others we first needed to prove the efficiency and show actual results. Imagine all that moisture in the hot air passing over a densely forested area, cooling down the air temperature, releasing that humidity in the form or rain or condensation! This can start a new cycle of rain an regrowth, one strengthening the other. More humidity = more plants, more plants = more humidity = less chance of fire = more production = good life.

(we included vegetables, fruittrees, trees for mulching, for woodproduction,... biodiversity is key!)

We studied different reforesting techniques, looked around, worked with different techniques and found that the  syntropic agriculture is most adequate for what we want to achieve. We started a small test-plantation, a big tractor with a plow couldn’t get any deeper than 20cm so we had to manually dig over 200, 1.5m holes to plant the trees. We looked for local plant and tree species we could use, went out collecting seeds, stakes, anything we could find or get our hands on and started planting.

(1 year old plantation, these trees are already over 2m, there is a multilayered canopy and soil coverage. so even in summer the soil remained fresh under there)

The plantation is exactly 1 year old now and the soil build-up is incredible! We’ve managed to turn a concrete-hard clay soil into a 10cm thick layer of black earth, organic matter and mulch. There are areas where the soil structure is actually changing. Mycelium is spreading everywhere, even between the planted lines, connecting the whole area. Our 3 lines of 35m plantation have more biodiversity than the whole 33ha together. So even with our limited budget and mostly manual labour we’ve got our proof it actually works and our enthusiasm only grew bigger. The beauty of all those plants and trees working together, protecting one another, creating their own mulch on the spot, cooling down the area is incredible!

(the soil and mulch buildup we've managed in 1 year)

And that is where your help comes in

Up till now we’ve been funding everything from our savings account which is running dry. With your help we can continue and even speed up these works by using better tools, preparing the soil in a better way, using better materials, buying more species of trees but still combined with local seeds and stakes that we will hand-pick. Our motivation and effort will remain the same, we’ll just be able to cover more ground and create that dense forest in a shorter time fighting against that desertification and hopefully influencing others to do similar maybe even start projects with the local community to create awareness and slowly change the mindset. It's like the shepherd who's been passing over our land for decades, he said we were nuts in the beginning. Well, now he is starting to adopt our techniques in his own garden because his soil was completely depleted!

Our plan

We are planning this February on having a backhoe dig up 1m deep, 1m wide trenches where the next lines of plantation will come. This intervention is to break up the heavily compacted soil underneath to speed up the rooting process of the trees. Depending on how much funds we can gather we can cover much more area, creating lines that already start building up soil, already protecting the soil from drying out in summer even before we actually redesign them. We’ll need to buy a lot straw to cover the exposed soil after planting, otherwise it will just turn into a clay brick again. And we’ll need to invest in a good form of irrigation to get everything started.

And it would just simply be amazing not to have to count every penny all the time because doing this work is very intensive. We are doing this not just for us but for next generations, we document every step and write extensive articles on instagram and facebook for everyone to read, to get inspired, to see, to enjoy and to bring positivity into this world. Our communication is honest, we don’t try to show ourselves better or 'greener' than we are, so we publish the good as well as the bad decisions, the beautiful and horrible moments, the struggles and the victories. We share all the knowledge we gathered. So I invite you to have a scroll trough our Facebook Page or our Instagram and just have a read.

We want to include people that live in the concrete jungle, and show them there is change and a future for this world and also that not everyone has to go as extreme as this, you can already help just by making it financially a little bit easier for others to continue this beautiful work.

Ward, Priscilla and Joaquim

(thankyou all!)

Some facebookposts to show the evolution:

- Outlining of the plantlines and digging of the holes 
- Planting and adding all the layers of mulch 
- The difference after the first winter 
- A little walktrough video of the plantation in june 

Organizer

Ward Pof
Organizer

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