Existing Water Catchment Infrastructure at Target Site

The Project Permaculture water harvesting project has taken a new and interesting turn.  Today we are Open Sourcing the entire design process.  We hope this will bring interesting commentary, insightful suggestions, and harsh criticism from our small but growing user community here at agroinnovations.com.

Project Background: The site is located in the community of Tipa Tipa, in the Tipajara watershed between the larger towns of Mizque and Aiquile.  For a more detailed account of the site conditions, you can have a look at my Master's thesis.

The environmental crisis in this sector, and in the Bolivian valleys and highlands, is manifold:

• Massive soil erosion, deforestation, and land degradation

• Economic collapse and subsequent migration due to poor farm systems management

• Extreme scarcity of water and arable land

In an attempt to find an integrated, ecological and socioeconomic solution to these problems, Agricultural Innovations has been working in close collaboration with Meryl Richards of Dartmouth University to design an integrated waterharvesting scheme as a model for demonstration and future implementation. 

The dialoge between Meryl, myself, and any other interested participants is now completely open and transparent.  We will be communicating back and forth as we develop the design via the agroinnovations forum.  

Also, different iterations of the GIS dataset are available via our downloads section.