Yeah, I was afraid of that. When I made the shapefiles I couldn't find the coordinate system that you used, so I asked the person who's helping me with GIS if using a different coordinate system would be a problem and he said no, but I guess he didn't know what you would be using it for. Re-doing it in a different coordinate system shouldn't be a huge problem.
I can't post the spreadsheet because it is 105 KB and the max file size to post is 50KB, but I'll email it.

Here's a shapefile with the drainage lines for the property- does this look pretty realistic?

Do you have the shapefile with the different land uses you and Greby are planning to send me whenever you get a chance?

Also, as I’ve though about it a little more I don’t think I’m totally clear on why you want to use a branching system of canals instead of a more “Keyline-esque” system. The Keyline system is designed for larger areas and less labor, but I think it can be adapted to smaller-scale, more intensive agriculture. The flood-flow irrigation is not a necessary feature, and I agree that on an area this small it may not be practical. But the advantage of having a series of interconnected atajados at different elevations is that then you can gravity irrigate out of them, and release water from one atajado to another depending on where you need the water. I know you don’t want to worry about irrigation at this phase, but it makes sense to me to design the water catchment system to have the most options in terms of irrigation (even if we’re not designing the irrigation system yet). I guess I’m not just clear on what features of the Keyline system you want to keep, and what features of the design you don’t think would work.

I started designing a more branching system of canals, but it’s not really coming out the way that I envisioned during our conversation yesterday. I’m aiming for a slope of about 0.02 on the canals- from my calculations it looks like a canal with a width of 1 meter and 0.02 slope would have flow rates of about what we’d need during November rains. I tried steeper slopes but it looked like it would cause major erosion problems in the canal. Let me know what you think of the design (it's not done yet).

The canals you made look fine. I'll go through each land management area included in the shp file I sent you.

The fruit tree alley cropping system will be a combined fruit-forage system. We will experiment with different forage crops, and use some terracing, especially live barriers like Paraguay grass, vetivier, and Phalaris within the tree rows to reduce erosion and get some slow forming terraces going along the contour. Moises has a brilliant low tech idea to use 10 liter plastic vegetable oil containers, make little holes in them, bury each one in the ground beneath the tree so only the opening is sticking out, and attach them to a polytube system from the atajado as a "drip irrigation" system.

Grains-grasses-legumes will be a mixed, rain-fed system using primarily local species, like amaranth, quinoa, and maize, but perhaps also some perrenial forage crops mixed with legumes like lablab bean, soy, and other nitrogen fixing legumes. Ideally we'll install some kind of terracing system there as well. The system will rely heavily on green manures to recover soil fertility.

Above that on the slope is a reforestation scheme, which will primarily use native species for erosion control, forage production, and other useful forest products like resins and natural pesticides. Take a close look at the V shaped water catchment and reforestation system in the slide show I sent you, as they will fill up the reforestation area.

The silvo-pastoral system will not require any atajados or canals, per se, as the soil type isn't appropriate, the slopes are steep, and there isn't much water to capture. We'll be looking more to build infilitration ditches along the contours combined with a rock-live terrace system, and then plant drought tolerant grasses, legumes, and bushes/trees for seasonal forage production with low labor inputs (once the system is established).

Productive infrastruture will include things like CEA, but also a place to produce pigs, a cattle corral, and a check-dam/gulley control system like you see in the slide show, maybe with some eucalytpus trees at the fanning mouth of the gulley.

The ram pumps will be used in combination with the irrigation canal during the wet months of jan-feb, as people don't even take their watering turn in those months. We can pump water up to the potential atajado in the productive infrastructure area and the ferrocement tank in the nursery. Also, you can build a canal to catch the water from the catchment area above the actual atajados to the potential atajado in the productive infrastructure area, as all the water filling the actual atajados will come from the ephemeral stream.

The ram pumps by the canal Moises built will be used to pump water from the ephemeral stream up to the potential atajados in the reforestation area.

The canal you have that comes around the gulley will work well, try to find some ways to capture some more water from the silvopastoral area and bring it around to the atajado(s) on the other side of the gulley.

Connecting the atajados won't be necessary, as we'll lose water as we move it from on atajado to the other.

Also, you might want to consider putting another atajado in the area where we have the "meliponas", if you think it could be useful or necessary.

We can start wrapping up now, I think we've done pretty well. If you have questions, ask them now, as I'll be going to Mizque for a much needed three day weekend this afternoon.

Thanks, that's really helpful. I'll finish up the design this weekend and get it up here on the forum.

For the grains-grasses-legumes area, you might find the Keyline contour cultivation method useful because it spreads the water out over the area (it's similar to regular contour cultivation, except that instead of following the contour of the land where you are, you follow the contour line at the "keyline" of the valley). I'll include some details about it in my write-up about the design in case it's something you might want to use.

Enjoy your much-deserved weekend!

Here's the new design. What do you think?
Some notes on the canals:

1.Canal 1 flows into atajado 1
2.Canal 2 flows into canal 1
3.Canal 3 flows into canal 1
4.Canal 4 flows into atajado 1
5.Canal 5 flows into atajado 2
6.Canal 6 flows into canal 5

7.Canal 7 flows into atajado 3 and then leaves atajado 3 and flows into atajado 2- this collects water from the area above the existing atajados (the grass/grains/legumes area) and stores it in atajado 2 in the productive infrastructure area. Atajado 3 is optional, but would allow for more convenient irrigation of the fruit trees.

8.Canal 8 flows to the ram pump site at the galleria to be pumped to atajado 2. This is the only way I can see to get water from lower down in the silvopastoral area to the other side of the gulley without building another atajado. Depending on how much water there might be, this canal is also optional. If there is a lot of water, it might also be possible to build another storage tank at that sight for irrigation of the fruit trees (or move atajado 2 to a lower elevation spot).

9.Canal 9 collects any extra water not used by the fruit trees, and runoff during the rainy season and brings it to the ram pump site for storage in the ferrocement tank. Again, this depends on whether or not you there is enough water to warrant building the canal.