In 1982, an Arizona couple began building what became about 20,000 small rock dams across their desert ranch; one study found stream water increased 28% and flowed four weeks longer

In 1982, Josiah Austin and his then-wife, Valer Clark, bought a worn-out cattle ranch known as El Coronado Ranch in the mountains of southeast Arizona. Soon after, Austin dumped concrete rubble and stones into a small wash near the ranch to keep it from eroding further. He wasn't trying to start a movement. He just wanted to fix a road. Later, a peer-reviewed study, ‘ Hydrologic Response of Streams Restored with Check Dams in the Chiricahua Mountains, Arizona ,’ in the journal River Research and Applications measured what that small fix, repeated thousands of times, actually did to the land. Even the scientists analysing the data were surprised by the results.

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