427 James Barrett - Europe has a water retention problem

Europe doesn't have a water problem. The rain still falls; we've just spent a few hundred years engineering it off the land as fast as we can, which James Barrett likens to hauling your garden clippings to the dump only to drive back in spring and buy compost.

James is a regenerative hydrology consultant, founder of Decent Water Company and lead regenerative designer for Ten Lives Festival in Portugal — where 150 people spent their mornings digging rock-lined "smiles" into a semi-arid, 70-hectare site that sees barely 400mm of rain a year. Sitting between two almond trees, he explains why he favours many small, low-risk interventions over one big dam, how those rock linings passively harvest daily fog and condensation much like the fog nets of Chile, and why transpiring trees hand a landscape a longer growing season and a few degrees of cooling. He also shows how LiDAR and AI let him read 70 hectares from a laptop, finding where water wants to pool before he lifts a shovel.

This is a practical field lesson in keeping water higher in the landscape — and in why where you choose to dig decides whether soil, ecosystems and the economics all start to regenerate together.

More about this episode.

Transcript

Koen van Seijen 0:00

Why festivals are fundamental in restoring water cycles in Europe? Today a short conversation in a degraded landscape which is in need of a lot of regeneration. The tool, animals, syntropic agroforestry, drones, or a festival. Digging water holding infrastructure in the morning, lectures on regeneration in the afternoon, and lots, lots of dancing in the evening. What's not to like? Today we talk with the lead regenerative designer for this festival. James is a regenerative hydrology consultant and founder of Decent Water Company, where he designs and builds nature-based water systems to help landowners and farmers to become more resilient against flood, fire, and drought, as well as the co-founder of Landscope.earth, a platform that makes lighter terrain analysis easily accessible to land professionals for design and planning. This is the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food Podcast, where we learn more on how to put money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities, and ecosystems while making an appropriate and fair return. Climate Action's singular focus on CO2 and CO2 equivalent misses the bigger picture. Intext water cycles cool the land, recycle rainfall, and stabilize local temperatures. This episode is part of our ongoing water cycle series where we focus on how restoring small water cycles is unusually actionable when it comes to climate change. Welcome to a very special episode on the land, not walking this time. We're gonna sit between two almond trees and talk about water cycles with James. So welcome first of all on the show. Thanks for watching. In this improv after festival Ten Lives, we've regenerated quite some smile lines, we'll get into that. But I wanted to quickly pick your brain on water cycles and water cycle restoration, as you so eloquently put it before with Louis. But first of all, what brings you here? What of all the career paths you could have picked? You're working in Portugal and beyond, actually, on land restoration, water cycles, water as a key resource and a key challenge and a key barrier. How come? How did you end up doing this? Most of your waking hours and probably some of your non-waking hours as well.

SPEAKER_01 2:10

Yeah, sure. So it's a long and winding road, like most people in this space. Coming from diverse careers, I spent a good majority of my early career in the tech space in sales, which took me around the world to a lot of wonderful places. But I started to get this sort of disillusionment that there's got to be something, there's got to be something more fulfilling out there for me that's that's worthwhile. So I started to explore all of the different typical paths like permaculture, etc. And over the last seven or eight years of self-study and workshops, etc. One thing that just kept on lighting up, like a big red light to me at the conferences and the talks that I was going to, it was all about soil and carbon and trees, but nobody seemed to be talking about water. And I thought, well, that has to be the start of the conversation. If we don't bring the water, exactly. None of the other stuff works. I started to deep dive into understanding the water cycle, understanding the problems of desertification that's happening, and also from my home country in the UK, of flooding and those types of things.

Koen van Seijen 3:13

So it's often two parts of the same coin, right? Like it's dryness, brings fires, brings floods, and many places now actually, like even in the north of Europe, we talk about the dry season or droughts, etc., which a few years ago would have been non-existent. And there were massive fires now in the Netherlands that we had a lot of trouble putting out, which also is something like forest fires. It's not something that we've had because it was such a dry spring until now. And if you had to explain to a four-year-old, we have had a few here, or a three-year-old or a five-year-old, let's say, or to someone that has no clue on water cycles, we talk about it very often on the podcast, but I do feel we it hasn't really landed yet. No offense to the people that, of course, are super expert on this and are listening. But for all the others, let's say the people in the back of the room, if you are explaining water cycles to an average person in Lisbon, what's your starting point? What's your narrative? What's your story or your metaphor, of example, you use?

SPEAKER_01 4:10

So the simplest way of understanding the issues that we have or the challenges we're facing, as you say, is two sides of the same coin. We talk about the fire, the flood, the drought cycle, essentially just a self-fulfilling thing. When I explain it to people, it's that we've capped off a lot of our land in our cities. The landscape just cannot absorb that water. And we've spent the last few hundred years, we had some incredibly intelligent engineers in the Victorian period, for example. They had rain, consistent climate, and wet fields. And so they put a lot of energy and effort into draining the landscape as quickly as possible. And it works really well. And it works fantastically, and unfortunately, it works too well. So we are the big issue that I explain to people is that we have this bit of an obsession of getting the rain that falls as quickly out to the rivers and the sea as possible, and then we're spending a lot of time and effort later on in the dry period bringing that water back in. I liken it a bit like the sort of madness of taking all your garden clippings down to the dump, only to next spring, go down to the garden centre to buy back your compost to put it in your garden.

Koen van Seijen 5:25

And it's really in landscapes like this, I heard you say as well, it's like a bathtub with a lot of holes in it. Like the water, even if it rains a lot, which it does here in winter, and we've seen it actually now in spring as well, it doesn't really stay. Like it's the soil's not able, or we've built the drainage systems, etc. But even without it, this landscape is so degraded that it cannot hold it, cannot spread, cannot sink, and if it rains too much, which it does, or very strongly, it takes away all the topsoil as well, which probably has mostly gotten anyway. So here in this landscape where we are, what are the interventions we've been actually physically doing, like the smilance, etc., like the whole water holding capacity to start slowing that or intervening on like a small scale? What are things that you have been working with land owners and landholders to do just to slow down? And then we will connect it to the bigger water cycle, which I think is such a powerful piece of figuring out actually you can start to intervene also with the amount of water and the intensity that it comes, which also always sounds a bit sci-fi, but I'm very curious to get into. But here, what on this landscape, on this farm, what and why have we been doing the things we've been doing over the last few days? Sure, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:31

Yeah, as you say, it's using the bathtub analogy. It's if you put a hole in in your bathtub, it doesn't matter how much and how long the tap's running, it's only going to fill to that point. You're never gonna get the bathtub to fill again. And so our landscapes have become fragmented through human intervention or through erosion and things like that. That uh the bathtub is very leaky, and the more the erosion happens, the lower the water table goes. So then you know you're reducing how much water you can then hold. So we don't have a water problem, certainly not in Europe. We don't have a lack of rainfall, we have a lack of keeping it higher in the landscape. So the interventions we've been doing here, and the ones I work with landowners, I'm very much an advocate of decentralized systems. Huge dams, right? Massive dams, civil engineering uh projects, yeah, hoover dams uh across every river. No. The small interventions, but uh multiplied across the landscape. So that can be, as we've been doing here at Ten Lives, smilons, which are simply like demilons that are rock lined, so semi-semicircle depressions with a rock lining. Okay, but we have to like it's a semicircle, it looks like a smile from above.

Koen van Seijen 7:41

It looks like a smile from above with smaller and bigger rocks to hold it in place, catch the water, make sure it infiltrates as much as possible. When it fills up, it doesn't overflow on top, but it overflows on the sides to the next one next to the next one. Spread, slow, exactly slow down, spread it, sink it.

SPEAKER_01 7:56

Yeah, it's slow it, spread it, sink it. Yep, that's the one. But that's just one intervention. It depends on obviously it's all about the context of your landscape and your soils, and of course, the context of what you're trying to achieve. But there's things like you can use in this landscape, you've got many rocks, so we can use create small rock dams in the gullies, so eventually over time, as sediment and soils and seeds flow down, they get caught, and then vegetation then kind of acts as that plug in the bathtub to then raise the water level on the area.

Koen van Seijen 8:27

Because that's what you're trying to do, infiltrate that certain springs will reappear, like water will stay in the landscape instead of going to the two rivers that surround us here, basically, as fast as possible and get basically fitting.

SPEAKER_01 8:39

Exactly. Yeah, especially here in Portugal where you, you know, in the summers are very hot, but of course it's climbing further and further north in Europe, the hot summers. The idea is that we want to get that water under the ground, into the soil, into the aquifers, so gaps in the rocks as quickly as we can. Basically where it falls. That's where it has to keep it where it falls, flowing, and most importantly get it out of the sun so that it's not just evaporating away, so it can stay in the landscape longer, and the longer we can keep it in the landscape, the more life can take hold, diversity you have, and then it just continues to build itself there. So small considered interventions, multiple across the landscape, and then step away.

Koen van Seijen 9:19

Because that's what he also mentioned. I remember when we were digging, is the smaller you work, the less risk it is. Because working with water is risky. If you build a big dam or big intervention, you don't really know. A lot of this is coming down to observe observation. With smaller ones, the risk of go, let's say going wrong is much lower, which means you can observe and you can repeat and repeat. If you do a big one, the risk of there can be quite. I mean, we've seen damage with flooding and dams breaking, what happens? It's not pretty. And what's special here on this location, I think, is that you've been very deliberate on where to intervene. Like you've done analysis with friend of the show Ali to figure out you've walked the land with him, calculations, okay, where do we intervene? Why is it so important to let's say focus your energy and resources on certain places in a landscape in a property compared to, oh, let's start digging here, or this is the easiest or the most accessible, etc. etc.

SPEAKER_01 10:14

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so Ali and I, last end of last summer, we walked the land and it must have looked very different than now.

Koen van Seijen 10:20

It was very different. It's so green and so nice now, but of course that is after winter.

SPEAKER_01 10:24

Yeah. Very brown and dry. Yeah, we walked the land and and tried to understand as best as possible that the climate data is very limited here. The farm is actually set up weather stations to get more information on it. But we estimate that around about 400 to 400 millimeters of rainfall each year. So fairly low, semi-arid location. But the one thing that we recognize that it had is a lot of atmospheric moisture. So there's two rivers that that border this land. And in the mornings, you have the fog that comes up, the mist that comes up from the valley. So in the mornings, in certain times of the year, it can be you wake up and it feels you can feel the humidity in the air. Yeah, exactly. It's and so it was about okay, that's moisture that's not rainfall, but it's capturable. So it's every day. Yeah. And it's every day. And again, multiplying effect of capturing that, we can then increase. I mean, I'm not going to quote numbers because I'm going to get them wrong, and then I'm sure I'll get a text from Ali.

Koen van Seijen 11:21

Did you say? But you can capture that with life, right? Like with plants, etc., not with machines in that sense.

SPEAKER_01 11:29

Exactly, exactly. So it's using some people may be familiar with the fog nets in in Peru, I think, or Chile. It's a similar effect to that, is creating more surface area that can capture that moisture. And what we're the reason why we're rock lining the Smilens is because they have a different thermal mass property. So when that moisture comes up in the morning, the rocks are still a bit warmer, or sorry, they're colder than the night before. And so the moisture and then captures on the rocks and it condenses, and then that can drip through and it's just capturing it. It might be small millimeter in the middle.

Koen van Seijen 12:00

Yeah, but still it's everyday, it's passive, you don't have to do anything. And so you put where we were digging the smilands and putting the rocks has been calculated to figure out, of course, it has to be accessible. We were with 150 people, but also between the two rivers where a lot of this fog and a lot of this humidity passes through.

SPEAKER_01 12:20

Exactly, yeah, yeah. So straight up the valley, and so then essentially re-vegetating those the valleys there. Usually, typical practice is to start as high as you can. On this landscape, unfortunately, it's uh a lot of the time you get a few centimetres down and you've hit the granite. So because everything has to be washed away. So we took the decision to focus in the valleys and capture that moisture that's flowing up from there, and then hopefully kickstart that that succession, and if we can get vegetation and trees, etc., then that's going to transpire and then lift moisture up.

Koen van Seijen 12:54

How does that work? Because that's such an important piece, what the landscape itself, not just the rock capturing the moisture that comes from the river, but actually when you have more life in that area, you're starting to influence also the water column or the air above it. How does how are you envisioning that works here?

SPEAKER_01 13:10

So I'm envisioning that works where once we start to get higher succession plants like bushes and trees, that moisture that we've been able to capture and store in the perched aquifers, then these trees can access it and they're going to be transpiring and sweating, basically. Yeah, exactly. Sweating their moisture into the air, which they're. But you don't lose that, it's part of a cycle, it's part of the cycle, and of course, it that humidity can be absorbed in by other plants, and and it also helps to bring the overall temperature of that area, which multiple benefits. One of them is you bring the temperature down, then the plant can it doesn't close its stoma quickly, so it continues to respire and it continues to grow. But yeah, I observed that on last summer walking here, it's very hot and early on at 10 a.m. in the morning, it's very hot. But just walking between two oaks, it was probably a few degrees cooler, just next to them.

Koen van Seijen 14:07

You have a longer growing season, literally. Like your trees or your plants don't switch off, let's say at 10 a.m. and maybe get alive again at five or six, yeah, two, three months in the year, which you lose a lot of potential growth, thus a lot of biodiversity, and there's a lot of biomass and a lot of elements as we're sitting between.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

Exactly.

Koen van Seijen 14:24

And last question, because I want to be conscious of your time as well, which usually leads to other questions, but the role of technology here, you made a conscious decision as well to not only work on the land, but also combine it with sort of your previous role in tech, but bringing that here. What made you step into that? And with Landscope, with Mitch, to say, okay, we need we need technology. There's a lot of discussion on ag tech and how do we actually use technology to complexify or bring more complexity to the land? I don't think complexify is a word. What's your take on the role of technology in doing this kind of work at scale? I mean, technology to dig, but also technology to figure out where to plant what and why, and where not to focus. This is a big farm and big piece of land, and we only have limited resources. Like, where do you go first? Sure. And what do you do there? And why? And how do you use tech and technology to unlock some of that that maybe previously was only walking the land and hopefully filling out a lot of calculations and stuff, but now we can do that differently.

SPEAKER_01 15:21

Sure. I mean, there's the tools that we have available now are incredible. Nothing takes away from actually being on the land and witnessing it and observing it with your eyes, but there's only so much time that we have, and as you say, resources, this site is several hours from my home, so there's only so much time I can come up with.

Koen van Seijen 15:38

Which still is pretty close for many consultants or people involved in places like you might have them passing by twice a year or something, which is so difficult.

SPEAKER_01 15:45

Exactly, exactly. So using technology, in particular with Landscope, using the LIDAR data that the governments have been producing over the last few years and making it more available to the public, which is fantastic, just allows you to be able to read a landscape from your laptop, at least starting points to say, okay, understanding the way the land faces in terms of your aspect and how steep with your slopes, and understanding, right, I can see from these models where the water is going to be flowing, where it's likely to be pooling and collecting. And so it just helps us speed up the efficiency of going, right, I'm going to go and have a look at those particular places in my design. And with this 70 hectares, I wouldn't have had the time to just do the manual going through the map and looking for spaces. And so using this data, I was able to basically run models that looked for all of the most appropriate places to put check dams and to put the smilings on a 70 hectare.

Koen van Seijen 16:42

And then you go and check, of course, you invalidate, etc. But otherwise you have to be here when it rains, probably, because you have to see and see 70 hectares when it rains is not an easy feat. I think people underestimate how little we know of the land, actually. You're saying like even we don't know uh the rain data on many places. We don't really know. I mean, it's been changing even just to understand, okay, where do we intervene first? I think that's gonna be such a big question over the next decade because yeah, we have a lot of land to do and limited resources, even if we have a lot of money. And so how do you see that think around?

SPEAKER_01 17:14

Oh, I was just gonna say to that point we've literally just had a customer message to say I've owned my property for the last five years. I wasn't expecting too much to find out that I've walked it. I'm pretty, pretty deeply knowledgeable about my land. But using the tools available, so using Landscope, he said I was able to like uncover things that and learn things about my land that I've never in five years of walking it intensely, I I knew nothing about. So I could make interventions based on that information.

Koen van Seijen 17:43

And do you see that, and that's my last question, accelerating now with AI and computing power? Is there a an inflection point, if we like to say, on let's say reading the land from your laptop, of course, still walking it? But is that are we in a moment of of great excitement around that? I think so.

SPEAKER_01 18:00

I think so. I think it is the technologies that are coming out, so especially AI and if used in the right direction, it just helps to amplify and accelerate. For me personally, I would love it if it just became so normal that you plan your designs and infrastructure or whatever based on how the land wants to be naturally and working with it and then around those boundaries rather than the kind of current just impose it and then deal with the energy and everything else costs. And the damage when the land revolts.

Koen van Seijen 18:37

And does it allow us to do this at scale as well? To really start saying, okay, in this area, not just I think I see vultures going up there. You can see it, I'm sorry, audience. But just imagine. To on a landscape level, really start attracting rain and really start to say, okay, if we intervene at this scale, I know Ali has done a lot of calculations around it, what do we need? It sounds science fiction again, but to really, okay, if we do this amount of plots, we have a good chance of capturing more or bringing in more and pulling more from the ocean or from the sea bodies. And does technology allow us to say, okay, these are the 15 places of whatever size or the 20 places, and this is more or less the cost, and there's more or less the interventions we need to do, or more or less the amount of festivals we need to run. Do you see we're growing there?

SPEAKER_01 19:19

Yeah, as I say, it helps to just it speeds up the process a lot and scales it. You you don't have to walk every hectare to understand a place. And as you say, you can then start to do the calculations on what needs to be done, the cost of it, but also the massively important thing in this space that's needed is to be able to quantify the economic benefit of doing it. So if we can calculate how much water we can bring back into this landscape, that's not too much of a mental exercise to start to understand, okay, well, that's going to increase productivity on the site. We're sitting on a centropic farm here. So you can not these lines, people don't start emailing these. Yeah, not these ones. They're nearby. But yeah, I mean, but even on a conventional conventional.

Koen van Seijen 20:02

You can calculate almonds, need water. You can calculate olives, you can calculate whatever you can do in the middle, you can graze because you have brought water back to your system and kept it in the system. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 20:10

And you can calculate how much you're gonna save. If you don't have an expensive waters bill to have to pay, that's money in your pocket.

Koen van Seijen 20:17

So thank you. Thank you so much for doing a small, not so small water one-on-one. And thank you for listening and watching, and of course, for everyone making this possible in filming. Cheers. Just a short outro for the episode with James, which of course was an interesting one on location film, and and you could see some of the background. But I really want to hone on this point, and I hope it became clear in the conversation as well, and it's something we'll be talking about over and over again. When we're doing regeneration, it really matters where and where in a landscape. There's so much. There are very few places in the world that don't need to be regenerated or don't want to be regenerated anyway. So the choice is where we do things and how we concentrate our resources, which could be money and sunlight and water, to kickstart regeneration in a sort of domino effect. Where to start in a landscape. And I'm fascinated by that. That's why we had a conversation with Ali bin Shahid and this one with James, and we'll have many more to understand okay, where do we go first? So I'm very curious if this triggers something in you, if you see that same, like so excited to be able to do regeneration at landscape scale in a festival as well. And then that the festival and the organizers take the time to figure out okay, where do we start first? What are the hills that makes most sense in this case between two rivers that capture most moisture that can start, that can kickstart regeneration of a system where we held more moisture, can be more mature, more mature ecosystem, more mature plants, less the super, super early ones, and slowly maybe that landscape can hold more things, maybe animals at some point, etc. etc. Maybe different trees. I'm looking at a syntropic agroforestry system while I'm recording this in that mood of succession. I'm very curious about ticker that with you as well. And as always, share these episodes with people that you think could benefit from it, because our guests deserve it, and get in touch if you have any feedback, ideas, people we should interview. We read all comments, there are many, and we read all emails that come in through the website. There are many, but we definitely get back to you at some point. Thank you so much for listening and watching, and catch you at the next one. Thank you for listening all the way to the end. For show notes and links discussed, check out our website, investinginregenerativeagriculture.com slash posts. If you like this episode, why not share it with a friend? And get in touch with us on social media, our website, or via the Spotify app and tell us what you like most. And give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or your podcast player. That really, really helps us. Thanks again and see you next time.