Category: Articles

March 20, 2009. Story and Photos by Mary McCann for MastersConnection, LLC, ©All Rights Reserved.
Sepp Holzer is a story teller. As a teacher he has some favorite stories that illustrate the core issues he teaches. This story is a fish tale.

Little Sepp lived on the family farm high in the Austrian Alps. His family farm was and still is called at The Krameterhof. At 1500m it was a one hour walk downhill to get to the nearest town. Nobody kept fish at those altitudes so Sepp was in school before he ever saw a live fish. His school pal had brought one to school and it completely captivated our little thinker. The next day he traded his lunch for the fish. He carried the little trout home up up up the Alpine slope to the pond-less Krameterhof. Now what?

He corralled off a little spot in the family well and camouflaged it so dad wouldn’t see this foolishness and spent hours every day watching his new buddy. One day he came home and dad had flushed the fish out of the trough. The only fish little Sepp ever knew became the first of thousands of fish he would steward at this unlikely altitude.

Sepp dug a pond with his bare hands on the rocky slope for the next fish. He filled it with water and in a short time the water drained. He tried a couple other experiments to keep water in the pond and having no success, sat back to mull it over.

At this point in the story I interject a leitmotif to the work of Sepp Holzer, Rebel Farmer. Listen, observe, try things out; if they don’t work ponder a similar situation in nature and see what you make of it then. Keep in mind that several times over the course of two weeks with Sepp Holzer he referred to coming up with solutions in his dreams. There is the earth berm shelter for one, which we’ve seen.

There are also his food snakes for people who do not have a scrap of ground, which we haven’t seen on these pages. These are tubes made of scrap felt from the dump, filled with humus and suspended across walls or draped over lean-tos and planted with herbs and food.

What did he dream up for his Piscean pal? He looked at his farmyard friends, these days known as his staff of workers (a.k.a.the swine.) How was it that when they made a wallow the water stayed there? He saw that when they rolled in the water and worked the mud over until the fines were all deposited on the bottom the rain water would stay in that depression. That was the difference between him making a pond that drained and the swine making a wallow. Since he didn’t have control of the swine at that young age he did that molding by hand and had success. Now as a man he uses power equipment to simulate the swine vibrations in the muck.

Holzer recommends putting the narrowest bucket possible about a meter deep in the muck and shaking it up in the areas where the water seeps out. There must be water in the hole when you do this. It may take a few days to get the surface right but you’ll be keeping your water above ground in no time.

Here are two photos that dramatize the effectiveness of this method.*The first shot was taken on the day the backhoe ground shaking was demonstrated but only executed on the part of the water in the foreground. The rest of the puddle was left with the ground as the digger had left it. The next photo was taken the following day. It shows that water is still in the manipulated basin in the foreground while the rest of the water has seeped back into the earth.

Ponds are a core value in the modern day Krameterhof. Holzers Aquaculture business provides fresh fish, muscles and crawfish to local eateries. He also raises Japanese Koi, a fish known to like a much warmer clime. He listens, learns and executes strategies to use the rocks of the area to warm the ponds and the depth of the water in the ponds to regulate the temperature. He chooses the plants to compliment the needs of the fish; are they breeding, do they need shelter from larger fish and so on.

Holzer always recommends keeping the water moving so it will stay alive. Many of the 45 hectares at the Krameterhof are now ponds and wetlands. He watches what lives within the waters and ponders how it can all work together. Sepp says, “Water is life!” I say nothing fishy about that at all.

For more about Holzer Permaculture in the Yelm area go to:
www.perma-dise.com/
*Photo by workshop attendee.