Here is a picture of a man changing the water. He is turning a metal wheel, which lifts a barrier between the feeder canal and the field. The specific irrigation technique is called flood irrigation.This, I discovered as I was looking for a good picture of how it is done, is really a picture of how it was done. Very little irrigation uses this technology any longer, and most of that is in developing nations.
We now use a wide variety of sprinklers and drips and other water saving systems, some of which result in odd looking devices reminiscent of prehistoric animals out in the fields.
4 comments:
Ally Bean,
So does old age. If you had told me when I started this blog, just about five weeks ago, that one day I would post about irrigation I would have been astounded. Not disbelieving, since it is a part of my childhood and I am apt to get interested in almost anything, but certainly not what I would have predicted.
The nice thing about having a blog is being able to write about anything at all.
I'd never seen flood irrigation in practice until I visited my sister in Montrose, Colorado 20 years ago.
Now as one flies over the California desert there are always passengers commenting on the round fields below them.
And those pre-historic looking guys are the ones that create the green circles you can see sometimes when flying over fields, right? Little green dots from high up in the air... :-)
This post reminds me of one of my posts in February about my first jobs. I posted on my irrigation days back when I was a skinny little girl. I hadn't thought of those summers, but once I did, I had to write a blog about my work. I was moving rubber dams down the ditch...a little more manual way of irrigating.
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