Water is one of the most valuable resources on any landscape, yet in conventional systems it is often treated as something to drain away rather than retain. Harvesting Water the Permaculture Way, a DVD presented by Geoff Lawton, offers a practical and visual guide to reversing that mindset by working with natural water flow instead of against it.
At its core, the film demonstrates how to design a small acreage farm to passively harvest and store water using earthworks like dams and swales. Over the course of about an hour, Lawton walks viewers through a real-world project, showing how to read the landscape, identify natural water movement, and design systems that slow, spread, and sink rainfall into the soil.