“Leaky weirs are designed to slow water and sediment moving down a slope, and spread over floodplain areas, to allow more of the sediment to drop out instead of being carried all the way down to a creek or river.
Basic explanation of why leaky weirs are needed:
Videos
Leaky Weirs – Bringing a Creek Back to Life with Natural Sequence Farming.
Using the excess rocks from paddock clearing, we decided to look further into the idea of bringing a dry creek bed back to life. Using the rocks to hold up water and hydrate the surrounding soil in the flood plain. With the seasons passing the water hydrated the flood plain and turn a baron area into a high functioning natural ecosystem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi4kswRicR0
Turning a dry gully into a semi-permanent watercourse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_7TbETgleo
ARTICLES
A leaky weir and regenerative farming
Australia is the driest inhabited continent on earth and only 6% of its land mass is arable land. Large areas of that arable land have been cleared for agriculture since the arrival of Europeans. The fertility and stability of those soils has been eroded as a consequence of this loss of vegetation. Many regions have compacted soils or are eroded to bedrock, due to hard-hooved animals, wind erosion, over-grazing (so plants can’t recover), over-tillage (which disturbs the organic life in the soil), mono-cultural plantings, and the use of herbicides, pesticides and chemical fertilisers. This means that water rushes off the land, taking topsoil with it. This produces the incised creeks and deep gullies we see around regional Australia.
These activities have brought about dramatic changes to Australian hydrology, ecology and climate. All over Australia farmers are struggling with the declining quality of their soils, irregular rainfall, high temperatures and reliance on costly chemical inputs.
Even though we don’t hear about it much in our public debates about climate change, many farmers are adapting and innovating. They are responding in practical and ingenious ways to the climate change effects they’re experiencing on their farms. One such innovation is Natural Sequence Farming. NSF was devised by Peter Andrews, and is being disseminated as a model of land rehabilitation by his son Stuart Andrews, and by organisations such as the Malloon Institute. It is a farming practice that focuses on hydrology, soil fertility and biodiversity in order to rejuvenate eroded farming landscapes. Significantly, it takes the pre-European hydrology of the Australian landscape as its starting point.
