BDA's

When beavers and their dams disappeared in the 90’s, the land around Jason Fellows' farm started losing water. This affected riparian areas. Welcome Beaver Dam analogs referred to as bdas. Speaker2: We've seen some real advantages to doing Bdas and that's why we implemented is a sustainability practice. So riparian area is where the water actually dissipates and it's where your green grass and your vegetation is. The one thing that's really neat is we see in the West when we have wildfires, that if there are beaver in the riparian area or a BDA, there's not quite as much land lost. Riparian areas are saved because they're usually moist and wet and wildfires go around them. But as we put those bdas in our riparian areas, went further up on the hill. And to do a restoration of a creek, you have to reestablish some way to hold that water back so your riparian areas are larger and so that helps out a lot of wildlife. The big thing about a BDA is you want to attract a beaver back in, but if you don't have a pool of water where a beaver feels safe, the beaver will never stay. This bank here is about 12ft tall. That's all due to the fact that there was nothing slowing the water down. And that's how much dirt we lose. This is one thing that they've been worried about as far as sustainability forever in our country is the soil erosion. So sustainability is a big part of that. We need to protect our soil because we live on just a couple inches of topsoil. If we continue to lose our topsoil somewhere else, it blows away or washes away, we get into big trouble.