Sustainable Peatland Agriculture

Pulau Burung and the Water Management Trinity

Peta Pulau Burung - Tay Juhana Foundation

Pulau Burung’s suboptimal land is the overlap of flatland, lowland, wetland, and peatland. In managing land with peat characteristics, water management becomes the most important aspect of ensuring sustainability.

In his days, our founder worked on a water management system to address the challenge of suboptimal land. The soil is highly porous, which allows too much water seepage and excessive evaporation, which become more serious during the dry seasons. The Water Management Trinity (WMT) was then established for capturing and keeping freshwater as a resource instead of letting it leave back to the ocean.

The WMT comprises of three main components (i.e. the Canals, the Dams and Water Gates, and the Dikes) which supports the three aspects of sustainability. It is still being used until now and has been acknowledged as first of its kind in the world.

The Canals
Our man-made canals consist of the primary, secondary, and tertiary canals that add up to more than 8,000 km in total. It made available more than 25 million m3 volume of freshwater all year round. These canals hold four main functions:
1. Water retention/reservoir
2. Fire mitigation
3. Freshwater supply for all purposes
4.Transportation of people and the harvested crops.
The Dams and Watergate
Their integral role is basically to act as the water level regulator as well as the locus of control of water retention. The gates control water distribution to individual areas and ensure adequate supply of water at certain levels is consistently maintained.
The Dikes
The dikes are maintained periodically with differing frequencies which depend on the age. Its design follows specific formulation which enables them to withstand the pressure better and last much longer. Our dikes are built all around the area where they hold important containment function to separate the seawater and freshwater and to effectively manage the water level.
Crop Growth
The principal function of WMT is to enable crop growth in peatland while conserving the main ecosystem of peatland itself. Dragonfruit is one of food crops that is proved to grow very well in the area.
Waterways as Transportation
In Pulau Burung, the main transportation is through water canals. It is more efficient and effective to bring goods and people via waterways compared to land roads. The road network between villages is not all connected and it only accommodates 2-wheel vehicles.
Houses on stilts
Peat soil has a spongelike character which made them very fond of water. For a building in such peatland regions, stilts are important to make the struture robust. Many houses in Pulau Burung are built on stilts, with some houses have poles visible above soil surface and some fully submerged underground.
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Environmentally, the WMT is evident to enable our lands to be fire proof. It ensures our lands to receive the amount of water needed to keep the soil moisturized while slows down subsidence and abrasion as the dikes and water gates minimize the rain to erode the topsoil.

The WMT also ensures the provision of freshwater supply, that is a vital for regulating all economic activities in the vicinity, including the agricultural development, industrial operation, and human survival.

These impacts of WMT supports the idea that cultivating suboptimal land is more viable in a long run compared to expanding arable land in a habitable or densely-populated area. The process may require higher initial investments for making the land less acidic and building basic infrastructures. However, afterward, it produces a better quality of arable land and requires less maintenance expenditure in the long run.

Read Our Research Result of Sustainable Peatland Agriculture in This Area

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