I'm sharing the announcement of what is one of the more sophisticated tools that I have built on my website under the tool section so far.
It is an irrigation and survival water storage inventory calculator for the acquisition of water storage tankage, and then the appropriate ratio of rain catchment square footage that is affected by factors such as average annual rainfall inches.
This calculator was actually applying to my circumstance so that I could arrive at the water budgeting formula that I need to use to feel confident to irrigate crops.
I think it's pretty straightforward and intuitive, but this reference episode is so that anyone using the tool can listen to this and then get more of the background and more of an explanation on it.
The longer form description is calculate how long your group and your crops can survive on your water tankage supply, and calculate how long it will take for your rainfall catchment surface area to refill your tankage.
So to expand on that a bit and to kind of describe the interface, you have a number of input fields and selection menus, a web form at the top of the page where you input those factors, you have your calibration of your site.
You put in that info, and then below that, you get a bar chart, a display that shows four different visual illustrations or indicators of various factors that that are gonna change based on the parameters you put in.
So how much rainfall you get, how much square footage you're planting, these are all things I'll get to, but you sort of have a dashboard interface where as you change parameters that you put in you're gonna see a visual change in the display gauge or the charts.
The core function of this calculator is the ability to add up to 40 different distinct types of water storage tankage.
So you've gott X number of one gallon water jugs, you've got some five gallon jerry cans, or other five gallon type of water storage containers. Then you have 20 gallon barrels, and then 55 gallon drums, and then up and on from there, IBC toes and whatnot.
So it gives you the ability to enter in this sort of table. You can select the quantity. If I had 50, 55 gallon drums, then I would just select the quantity of 50 and I would describe the type.
The basic layout, top of the website, some parameters that you put in middle of the website, the display of the charts and gauges at bottom of the website, the expanding table, where you add tankage and you specify the parameters of it.
That also affects and interacts behind the scenes in formulas with the information that you put in above. Ultimately it gives you a status report within that section that crunches all the numbers and gives you your results so from the top I'm gonna explain the fields and menus.
The first is people in group. Which means how many people are you? Let's say it's a unit, let's say it's a group some sort, of mission or operation or project, from being a naturalist and an explorer on an expedition or doing some kind of research this is about logistics and supply to people in remote areas.
That's the number of people who are gonna be relying on the water supply that you have.
Then next one is average annual rainfall inches. It would be relatively trivial for me to allow the user to enter some geographical information about themselves, and then that would draw and pull the annual rainfall inches for them.
However, my choice is that the user would get that information elsewhere and just enter the annual rainfall inches, without using me as an intermediary where I need to have any handling of their geolocation information.
So that's indicative of the privacy objectives that I have, and it's not hard to find that out. There are all kinds of ways to find out what your annual average rainfall is an inches.
So you put that in. And then next is square footage of rain catchment.
So that would be for most people, rooftop square footage with gutters that feed into the tankage, whether above ground or underground.
We say square footage of rain catchment. That could also be ponds. That could also be surface flow, it could be your whole watershed, depending on where you're located.
So if you were able to reliably channel and safely channel surface flow into tankage, and obviously requiring some in most places, extra steps to process filtration and whatnot.
It's generalized in the sense that, for me, I have minimal rooftop rainwater catchment surface area.
Most of my rainwater catchment comes from digging giant pond pits and lining them when it rains with these 20 by 20 foot, 16 mil tarps that have anchors with carabiners and parachord into the sand in the desert.
That becomes my inverted roof catchment that's far more affordable than a lot of buildings and a lot of rooftop surface areas.
Next you have the square footage of the site, which I realize a lot of places, agricultural scale, you're gonna be measuring that in acres.
So this is more intended for people operating on a smaller scale. But if you did have acreage, I have acreage, but this is more intended for people who would be on the less than an acre or not that many acres.
I will eventually add an extra field that says, do you know the acreage of the square footage? I'll do the math for you. No problem, as far as just the way the website would work.
But for now, it's assuming that you are able to ascertain, on your own the square footage of the site that you're on or that you're planning for.
Then there's another field, which is square footage planted, which also could be converted from or to acreage, but that would mean the amount of gardens, or fields, where you've got horticulture of some kind going on.
Area under cultivation is probably the best way to say square footage planted.
There's the four different charts and the first one, its title is tankage level.
Below its title, you get a running total of gallons of water in reserve.
The total capacity of all your tankage in gallons, the percent of your total capacity that's emptied.
I said, is it possible for me to say glass half empty, or glass half full?
It actually made sense in this circumstance to depict the percent empty, and title it as such.
That's what you get on the chart. So what you see if it's filled to the top, then all your tanks are full, and the percentage empty is zero.
But then you see, as the chart is displayed, if it's halfway empty or halfway full, you'll see on the chart it's half empty, or half full.
It tells you that percentage numerically below the last field for that chart, that bar is person day based on the survival mantra that it's one gallon per person per day on a survival budget.
Under most circumstances, depending on the extremes of the climate, in extreme austerity, that should be at least enough to take care of what you gotta take care of, from hydration to hygiene, etc.
Obviously, on a budget, very austere, but a gallon per person per day.
I have not limited myself to that but I would say most of the time, because I am living in those austere settings, for real and have been for three years now on a real time water budget for the last year, almost year and a half, I've had no external water. The last of the water that I brought in, and the rain water that has refilled, I have been able to capture enough rainwater to refill everything that I had brought in from the outside.
So that technically, possibly maybe the last time I ever import water from anywhere else but the sky, which is a great feeling.
I can validate that a gallon for me per day, most days, even on the hottest days where I am expending water to keep damp cloths wrapped around my head and neck so I don't die. I've managed to do okay with that. So I would say it's not glamping to have one gallon of water per person per day but I will stand by that metric I think it's a good metric
If anyone wants that changed or make it possible to change then that's no problem and then moving along to the next to the right, the next chart is the indicator of rain catchment, and that's the title Rain Catchment.
So that is where you see in these following metric readouts and say square feet of rain catchment, that was the number that you entered above.
Now you see it again displayed lower, where you see how it interacts with other, metrics, you get percentage of land that is catchment.
That's what is displayed on the chart. So if that bar were filled to the top, then 100% of your land would be rain catchment surface area.
I guess if you, if you built the house boat, lived on a pond, then that would be true hundred percent of your site.
But you see how these interact, you get a sense of the emergent properties that come from seeing all this data together and affect decisions like, should I expand my catchment area? How much room? How is it possible to stack functions to get more catchment area out of what I have?
Because you'll see later how it affects things. There are only two metrics under the rain catchment, square feet of catchment, and percentage of catchment.
The next one is actually where that comes into play more, which is the tankage refill meter, which tells you how many inches of rain it will take to refill, how many years to refill that's what the chart is indicating.
It's not quite as scientific as the other ones. It's not indicating an exact percentage. It's just sort of showing you, is it a lot of years or not a lot of years based on how full that chart is.
This is where you see the inches of rain to refill, years to refill when your tankage is totally full. These figures are zero, obviously, because everything's full. Once you start to adjust the percent the calculations are done on the total water you have stored, then as you deplete that supply of stored water, then it automatically updates to tell you how many inches of rain, and furthermore, that breaks down into, I believe it's one decimal point to the right of the dot, so to speak. That tells you how long it's gonna take to refill.
Then the final bar chart is irrigation. What that tells you is the number of square feet planted, and then percent of land. That's what is shown as the visual chart.
So if you had a hundred, this is a small number, but if you had a hundred square feet and you were planting 10 sq ft. Then that would be indicated as the percentage of land and appear so on the chart.
Below that is the weeks, months, or years of irrigation that you have. So that is similar to the person days forward, there is a formula behind that.
First of all, the what's hard coded as I mentioned before, the one person, in addition to the one gallon per person per day, the assumption, and this also is something that, if upon request, I would expose this control so that you could adjust this ratio.
But as it stands, it's hard coded for there to be 50/50, meaning half of the water supply is split between the people on the site and the plantings.
I had to reason with myself, and it's happened before, where I said, okay, actually, I need to change that ratio to 100% of water that goes to me, and 0% goes to plantings. There were things that are annuals, and they were gonna die anyway.
I had to have one of the most gut wrenching experiences of my life as a permaculturist and survivalist, which is to actually sacrifice perennial plantings and let them die, because I wasn't certain that my water supply wasn't gonna run out before I was able to replenish it by the rain.
Hence the souls of those dead perennials, I have had very ceremonious relationship with them, living and dying. They're gonna haunt me forever and say, you need to learn this. You need to live by it. And as of this morning, the first new plantings are sprouting up and coming up after, I don't know how long it's been, at least a couple of seasons there's been nothing growing except for ferments, wine and brine and a little bit of soaking and sprouting.
But my horticultural endeavors were devastated, not only by the record heat, but my being debilitated in my attempts to rescue as much rainwater as I could.
I ended up injuring myself so severely in that process. Luckily, I've recovered, but that forced me to miss a couple of seasons. The good news is, I captured hundreds of gallons before I was devastated and couldn't move or couldn't walk. Couldn't stand and not knocked me out for two months. I couldn't walk.
Luckily, I didn't lose too much rain when I couldn't move or I couldn't stand and walk.
But since then, I've been blessed, and there's been a number of rain events, and some of them significant enough to where literally I've been able to refill everything, and now I'm planting again.
Based on this tool, I know what my water budget is to where I don't have to worry.
I may have to be more careful with perennials, and I may have to accept that based on the calculations where I'm at, knowing this is what I need for a year, the one gallon per person a day is about right.
So looking at my tankage, looking at my catchment, looking at the rainfall, I know now how much I can spare.
I've set aside the ratio. For me, it's not exactly, it's not perfectly 50/50.
I've got emergency water in reserve that I'm not even gonna put into this calculation.
I know what I can afford in my water tankage right now. I can afford to be very generous, not over generous, just to be sensible with watering a small square footage area of crops getting that yield.
If I run out of water, and I can't replace that with rain, then that was my yield for the season, or even possibly the year.
This is very important for me after those horrible experiences.
I knew if I cut myself off, if I wean myself off of driving to import hundreds of gallons of water at a time, and which I have done, and I said, for the foreseeable future, I'm not leaving here, I'm staying here to secure the site, what I've done here, what I have here...That means I'm living off of a real time rainwater budget, real time solar budget, and importing food once or twice a year until I can grow enough of my own.
But I am 100% energy independent and 100% water independent as of the last rain, which I was very happy about and celebrated.
Now I have the ability to meter out, to expand or contract the square footage under cultivation based on my water budget that I've set out.
Now, I have decided that I'm gonna scale back, go back to the drawing board, live by these calculations, and try to grow enough vitamin and phytonutrient, mineral crops and medicinal and culinary herb crops, so that I only have to import caloric food products which are pretty cheap even to be paleo. I think I have figured out the cheapest way to be paleo, not a hundred percent organic, but a significant percent organic as well.
I want that all to go away. But growing calorie crops and bootstrapping calorie crops, that's not at a garden scale. I have plenty of square footage of a site but in order to get that ratio of planted area to total site area in order to work that ratio better and become food independent. I'm gonna need more water, and I'm gonna need more tankage and more catchment. But the water is there. And every time it does rain, I realize if I only had more tankage and more catchment, then it would be a no brainer to grow all my own food.
That's such an important revelation, getting to that level of understanding with this. The hard part is at this site, because there's no spigot to turn on, and there's no sort of being tricked and fooled by a water supply that's actually not sustainable and doesn't really exist without extreme geopolitical political ecology kind of nightmares in southern California, it's a bad, but we just got record rainfall. So what the H, what the F, you know, what are we doing?
I'm figuring this out. So moving right along, this is where it gets a little bit more interesting and nuanced. Knowing that if my system continues the way that I have designed it, and it doesn't fail, I'm actually gonna be adding more catchment area very soon. Then I should have no problem splitting the water that I get with crops. I will be surviving on those crops. So it'll be as if we will be one happy family of me and my crops.
Right now, I have enough imported food to where I was able to survive. It was not as happily as I would have been with the garden growing. But I did survive on imported food. The whole point is to get to where nothing is imported, everything that I use, that I consume, I rely on, is a product of the land where I'm standing right now. And that's a process to get there. It won't be symbolic for much longer.
And the way that I split the drinking water will be the same as the plants that I'm gonna eat. It's a one man ecosystem at this point, closing the gaps that exist in that one man ecosystem will be a process of eliminating imports from the outside.
I would not split the water equally with the plants, only if there was like another injury situation or severe drought, where I would have to let plants die again in an untimely manner.
The other hard coded feature is the most tricky part of this, which was to try to find a universal metric for irrigation that would be suitable in terms of the function of it, like the one gallon per person per day metric.
I did some consulting and research, and arrived in various ways of looking at this and formulating the math behind it.
It would be ill advised to throw a number out the way that I've chosen to and not put a caveat that this is a very crude and very provisional estimation with the purpose not of trusting and relying on it as being totally sufficient and adequate in any climate in any soil type, all of the nuance and permutations including the soil type, how fast it drains, how high the water table is, the annual rainfall, how close are you to any other bodies of water? Could you irrigate by any other means? Um, is there dew or fog? What are you planting? How deep are the roots?
So those are just a few of the more prominent, more obvious, nuances that make it difficult to treat this process as easy as it appears to be for landscaping professionals and home garden care enthusiasts, where it appears to be the rule of thumb, as it were, for lawn care.
What I arrived at was the rule of thumb recommendation that was for lawn care.
Let's just start with that, for grass, for growing grass, which, again, I was reminded there's great nuance in even the types and water needs for different types of grass.
You could say all these things about people too, some people need more than a gallon of water per day. Some people need less. Some people stink and need to wash more. Some people are not into roughing it. So they wanna wash their clothes everyday. I understand there's all that nuance, but for you to arrive at one gallon per person per day, you have to round it out, and you have to average it out.
So what that looks like for a lawn is essentially one gallon per square foot of lawn per week in temperature below 90 degrees, and two gallons per square foot of lawn per week in temperatures above 90. When I found that, I said, okay, now that's something I can work with.
Even though it's not perfectly applicable to gardens, which have all kinds of different and far more diverse arrays of plants.
Then if you're doing agroforestry, you're gonna have all kinds of different root depths. And also with mulching, that's gonna affect it as well. So it's not as easy. It's not as easy as budgeting water for a lawn.
Anybody doing permaculture should be able to grow quite a bit, do very well with far less watering than the average lawn requires just to be aesthetically pleasing.
What Bill Mollison would say, tidiness is maintained disorder, most of the ornamental landscaping that's done, which I've been forced to do alongside my permaculture career, a lot of it is very shallow aesthetic tidiness that is based on human projections of what seems to be orderly and what seems to be pleasing to the eye.
The the trade off with permaculture is that you really were trying to plant the forest or a jungle. There's chaos, but it's a beautiful chaos. It's an acquired visual taste and that edge, if you will, the interaction between the modern ornamental sensibility and the permaculture ecosystem design, that's where I've had the most fun.
Because if you can take chaos and work with it and make it appear orderly without taking away from the resilience that grows from that natural chaos, then you have a happy client, and you have a happy neighborhood association, you have happy inspectors. You have happy neighbors, and you have yields and products.
Some of those yields are social value. Yields like a place where you wanna spend time and hang out and be social, that's also productive.
It's not this militarized, squared off, squared away, totally Border Patrol looking disintegrated, antisocial garden set up.
I was always about the social scaping of the garden so that you pick your lunch while you're having tea and playing board games or having a home school or something, everything is human scale, integrated within reach.
I went with this the metric to be generous, and to accommodate and account for and annualize that above 90 degree need for two gallons per square foot.
I just said, let's be generous, and let's just call it two gallons per square foot, planted per week period. And to have that budgeted means for most of the year that you would only need one, great use one, or even less.
Then when you get to the point where there's no way around the maximum allotted per plant per foot planted per week, then, even if you had to go over that, you could.
So I'm not giving a rule of thumb on how to dispense that water. I'm just saying, let's plan for an impossibly worst case scenario, maximize the generous budget to that level and then, without being unreasonable, it's not an astronomical overage, it's not excessive to say if the range is between one and two gallons, then the average of that would be in the middle, one and a half gallons.
So you could just say, okay, I'm gonna budget one and a half gallons and it's still being generous, because theoretically, only three months of the year could possibly be above 90 degrees.
So if you wanna be a little bit generous, you would say, okay, we'll just go 1.5 gallons per square foot per week of planted area, and just extend that across the whole year and you're being generous.
To make it two gallons per square foot per planted square foot per week, and then distribute that, typically on the lower end of that budget, so that you're always under budget.
I wanna pad and buffer these calculations so that I'm always under budget, and I always have reserves. And every time it rains, just the other day, I got to the point. I said, if it rains again, I will have maxed out my tankage.
I'll have to figure out what to do with it at that point. Some of it may may go to waste, or at least be re-evaporated into the atmosphere until I get more tankage. I'm at that point.
That's a good feeling to have. That means that I will be able to be confident that this generous budget is gonna do well. And I've already started living by it. I've already started dispensing by it.
I'm not saying drown the soil and use every week those two gallons. I'm saying, just have some reasonable estimation of what worst case scenario could be.
Redundancy is an important thing. What if any of them are breached or contaminated in a way that you're not comfortable with? What if you have refugees that you end up sharing some water with? There are scenarios where you would want to have leaned towards the upper end and not the lower end.
I don't wanna shortchange my crops and be forced to let some of them die ever again. So I'm looking at this, and I'm saying there are so many strategies to be extremely frugal with water and go a long way, things like having drip irrigation that runs underneath the mulch and even is piped with ollas, the clay pots that allow you to have water seep slowly through unglazed pottery so that it will slowly fill the base in it, or you fill the vase that goes underground. You fill it up slowly. It leaches water at the root zone.
With overhand watering with a hose, if you're doing the amount of mulch that you should be doing in permaculture, I'm expending a lot more water than I would have to get the water through the mulch, which is doing a great job of what it's intended to do, keeping the moisture beneath it from evaporating, keeping the soil from drying out and therefore the plants. But if I am having to basically totally saturate all of it every time I wanna get a drop of water below it, there's more efficient ways to get the water below. It doesn't always require a lot of plastic, which I'm against. I like using split bamboo for irrigation. I like using ollas.
I've even seen people take beer bottles, fill a beer bottle with water, turn it upside down and stick it into a little planter tray and just watch it slowly percolate out, that is their irrigation strategy.
So I'm all about Macgyverring and hacking up ways to avoid plastic irrigation, and even, sub irrigation and wicking beds, all of those innovations, ancient and modern, if you can do it with minimal plastic, which is my goal.
This is as for real as it gets in terms of my survival economics and my ecological economics. So I'm speaking with passion about this because it is life and death.
I've almost lost my life, and I've had to experience the death of some perennials.
So I'm dead serious about this and going, in detail on this tool.
So the last thing is far more straightforward. This is the final, the lower section of the page where what you're doing is you are entering in your inventory of tankage, almost like you're creating a profile for the different tanks and types of tanks that you have.
So very straightforward fields to fill out. You can give it a name, you could say, 55 gallon drums, and then the next field is the quantity. So let's say, I've got ten of them, or 20 of them. Whatever you set the quantity, you set the number of gallons.
This is the sort of ongoing process of maintaining an awareness, if you wanna rely on this tool, then it would be a process of, okay, well, we started the process, and everything was all full because we had a water truck come out and fill everything up. Now we're on our own.
Or it's 0%, you got all the tanks and you've got no water, and you can't even be out there until it rains, like you set them all up and you're like, okay, when it rains, I'm going out there. And that's the beginning of the project, or whatever. So it could be a hundred percent full at the starting point, it could be 0% full, But maintaining and updating that.
For this tool to be useful beyond a snapshot, I'm gonna be having to build in the ability to save the status and resume where you left off. Could be six months or a year, or a day or a week, doesn't matter, as long as you have a way, which is doable on my end of development to make it so if you close the tab, you have a way to save your work, and then you can pick up where you left off.
But the percentage full, that's a very important factor, and that would be based on if you knew that all the tanks were empty because you just brought them and there's nothing in them, or you knew you just topped them all off, then that's easy, where it gets more involved is if you're going to, let's say, have someone assigned to walk around all of the tankage, and either visually or by opening them up, or whatever is necessary, depending on the type of tankage, actually, maintain the inventory, maintain this worksheet, this calculator, maintain the status of that.
So while we thought we were only gonna use this much, but we used a lot more, or we use a lot less, that's gonna be a running total that you have to manage and that's very important because you don't wanna just set and forget it.
So the next field this is a field that gets updated automatically. It's the status, that's what tells you per tankage type, what the percentage, what the number of gallons is that you have based on the percentage full.
So if it's a 55 gallon drum, it's halfway full or you put in the percent halfway full, then the status is gonna be 50%, or 25 gallons.
So you have that dashboard that shows you the gauge that appears there.
The last fields are more descriptive, if I had a team working with me.
I would fill this out, and I would say, one of the tanks is here. Ten of them are over there, this one of them is behind this building, one of them is catching rainwater at that building. But to have a map where you listing out the location so that they're easy to find.
I was at a property where there was something like a five or 7000 gallon tank that was empty and collecting dust and in leaf litter in the middle of the site and no one, knew it was there I was there to do the mission of rehabilitating this farm site.
In the process of inventorying all this junk that was there, I'm couldn't believe that had been there in this fire prone area and it wasn't full and it wasn't maintained luckily it wasn't damaged and I was able to fill it and I was Very proud moment.
So mapping the tankage is important, because how many times on an old rural site have I found, IBC totes and 55 gallon drums, just rotting in the sun?
They should be in the shade, they should be covered with something.
So the next field is a description that's obvious. You can describe it for easy reference, and then notes, for example, we need to get another drum pump because it broke or whatever.
Maintenance kind of notes could be apt at that point. And then there is the ability to delete a set of tankage.
The cool thing too is that the fields are editable. I believe most of the fields are editable so that this whole thing can be adjusted, and a calculator can do it's thing. That's great because it updates behind the scenes.
It is important that all of the fields do have some input in them. Parts of it will obviously not work properly if you omit any of the fields.
If you're on the water grid, and you've never had to think about any of this before, but you've imagined, what would it be like to be off grid and off the power grid, water grid, this might be very useful and helpful.
I'm already immersed in it and I'm reverse engineering my own circumstance by building this tool. If I had this tool before I came out here I would have definitely gone far more extravagant with catchment and tankage. It was my inexperience. Now I know the more the merrier, and that's the rule of thumb, the more the merrier, tankage and catchment.
It took time to discover the strategy that worked. There is part Of me that says how could you not have gone far more extravagant with catchment and tankage, just to be safe, just to be certain? And part of it was the pandemic situation. Part of it was finances. But I do wish that I would have been more extravagant.
Now I'm making good on that. I am realizing that this can scale.
For some people, it could be more tankage and less catchment. For me, it's a desert. It doesn't rain often. I gotta make sure I get as much as possible when it does rain.
Everything adjusts, depending on, obviously, the number of people, too.
If you were responsible for a number of people, your numbers are gonna be much more demanding with this.
But I will say, of all the things in my life that I underestimated, it wasn't the need for water. I had a good sense of that but this has been the first time in my life these last three years plus that I have not just been able to do horticulture by turning a spigot with no sense whatsoever of the preciousness and how finite and limited a supply would be if you were relying on the rain solely for your supply.
So this evolution for me, I could have buffered myself more from day one. But what arrived at is the leanest, possible, bare minimum set up.
And if I've made it this far with that, then I know I can do so much better and be so much more ecologically rich by scaling out and doing it after learning hard lessons.
Money doesn't solve everything. I don't wanna come to the site and just say, oh, I'm gonna buy a ton of this and that, whatever I can afford, only to find out that none of it works, or none of it is appropriate for this climate. None of it is gonna last...so it takes time. You have to learn hard lessons.
I will forever be haunted by the perennials that I was forced to let go but part of that was because I was injured in the process of capturing the rain to keep them alive so it's Very ironic and sad in a sense that it wasn't that I was lazy or that I wasn't willing to do whatever it took to get them as much water as they would be happy to have, it was literally that I almost died trying to do it.
There's been some evolutions of what I call flood sport, which is my way of describing the athleticism of this process out here, where I'm very low tech, as low as I could possibly get with the tech.
Trying to not appear like a wasteland disaster zone, try to make it be aesthetically interesting, at least living in some art and actually flowing with these patterns of nature and trying to be less of not more of an eyesore while I'm doing it. That's a process. That's a project.