Water For Any Farm: Engineering Field Manual

 A book with so much detail, it took three years to create. Including dozens of detailed illustrations to help you solve real-live problems on your farm, bestselling author Mark Shepard offers landowners a guide to implementing a Master Line System of farm water management.

He clearly explains this whole-farm approach to understanding water flow and retention, which works on farms of various scales and in diverse climates, and which enables the landowner to cope with a wide range of real-world problems, such as property lines which don’t align with topographical lines, complex landforms, utilities and pre-existing infrastructure.

In times of drought, this system enables producers to catch, direct and hold water high where it can be put to work, and in times of severe rain or melt, these strategies help prevent erosion by directing water on a meandering journey using a series of retention and distribution features.

The book offers detailed diagrams and clear instructions, problem-solving and system maintenance guidance, and up-to-date reference data and information about relevant software products to ensure the accuracy of runoff calculations and construction parameters. The ROI potential on this book for any farmer and rancher is exponential.

#7762 • Copyright 2023 • Softcover • 152 pages 

About the Author

Mark Shepard is a Wisconsin-based permaculture designer, agroforester and ecological farming consultant. He and his family have transformed a typical 140-acre row-crop dairy farm into a permaculture-based perennial-agricultural ecosystem using oak savannah, successional brushland and Eastern woodlands as ecological models. In all, they have planted 100,000 trees on this property. The result is one of the first and finest farm-scale models of permaculture in the United States. New Forest Farm features chestnut, hazelnut and fruit trees, a variety of other fruits and vegetables, chickens, ducks, pigs and other animals.