Stop the Flooding with Cover Crops. Stop the Droughts with Cover Crops

 Pocahontas, 2011. Floods are getting worse, for a reason.

Starting in the upper Midwest, the solution for excess snowmelt and rain has been drainage tile for the fields and levies for the towns. That is the reason for increasing floods from the same amount of rain.

Perhaps we cannot end all flooding, but we can certainly stop making them worse. The best soil is also washed away from flooding, so the waste and damage easily adds up to billions of dollars.

Cover crops that follow or precede cash crops not only eliminate drought, but also decrease run-off. When the soil is deadened from excess plowing and the use of toxins, the snowmelt and rain do not penetrate deeply.

Note that at 1 hour Gabe shows his water infiltration rate, which is very rapid, 
due to cover crops and no plowing.

This video is worth careful study, because it goes against all the 

"modern methods" that destroy the soil.

If anyone wants confirmation of this, look at the sidewalk in front of the house. Rain runs off the lawn and deposits the best, finest soil particles on the sidewalk, where weeds take root and grow. When yards have bare spots, the sidewalk soil is deeper and the weeds even more robust.

Cover crops push deep into the sub-soil and let water penetrate, which forestalls drought and flooding. The rain should be saved in the soil, not drained downstream floods.

Some will object and say, "But I cover the soil with thick, green grass. That is my cover crop at home." But those gardeners - more or less lawners - tend to pull or kill every Dandelion and Dutch White Clover plant, not to mention those wildflowers often loathed for interrupting the monotony of thick, green grass.

Those who use chemical fertilizers to add green-grass-producing nitrogen must water their grass even more, which is a double waste. Here is the joke - clover is one of the best providers of usable nitrogen while attracting and harboring beneficial insects. People kill the source of free nitrogen and wonderful beneficial bugs so they can pay for nitrogen and insecticides.

So what I am expanding is this - cover cropping the mulch. All my gardens are mulched, either with shredded cyprus or pine needles. I can grow low-growing Buckwheat among the roses, in the bird feeding area, and the Hosta garden.

Cover crops stop flooding and drought by keeping water in the soil, in the plants, where it belongs. That is God's Creation versus man's so-called ingenuity.

Flooding in Arkansas 2015.