The Art of Irrigating

For the last couple of weeks I’ve had the privilege of moving water for a small farmer who was called away to a fire.  He balances his good and bad years in farming with the income he makes from CDF fighting range and forest fires, and so far that strategy has worked.  I balance my low income from part-time work in the food retail business with what he shares with me from the fires, as well as my other sources of self-employment.  So far I’m still here, too.ss
But mostly I do it for the joy.  For those of you who don’t farm, “moving water” is simply turning valves on and off  so that one batch of trees (called “blocks”) is irrigated every day, followed by the next batch.  After the water is running on the new blocks, I check the sprinklers to make sure they’re all working and no geysers have developed in the lines, then go home and take off my muddy boots.  Sounds simple, possibly even boring.
The joy is in the details.  Part of the joy is physical:  sun and wind on body, feet moving surely through the rows, hands employed.  Part of it is aesthetic: the sounds of water running, crows calling, doves suddenly fleeing in a whirr; the sights of cloud shadows moving over the landscape, the smell of wet earth.
Part of it is intellectual.  Irrigating puts me right into the heart of growing food and what it means to be someone who does it for a living.  Every micro-decision - whether to replace that old sprinkler head (“fan jet” in this case) with a new one or let it limp along, to patch or splice the hose or let it leak - enters me in the contest between man and land, the challenge of getting land to produce something for the market in such a way that it will keep producing in the future.  Our great society is dependent on winning that contest, though few seem to realize it.
For some, irrigating is a science.  Calculations of how much water a tree needs and how to deliver that water more economically given evapotranspiration rates and climatic conditions, soil qualities and slope, water pH, etc., are studied and discussed not only in the ag departments and journals of our universities, but also in the coffee shops and irrigation parts stores.  Fan jets come with different sized orifices that emit different amounts of water; farmers chose what size based on calculations of water pressure, age of trees, amounts of shade (dependent on their pruning and weed control strategies,) and other factors too numerous to mention.  That choice is a small part of developing an irrigation strategy that will work on their land with their crops.
Not involved in those choices, I simply practice irrigating as an art.  Part dance, part song, I move through the trees quietly so as not to disturb the wildlife any more than necessary.  I make sure each tree is getting a drink while observing the weeds’ growth patterns and examining what comes out of the plugged-up fan jets when I insert my trusty safety pin through the hole.  I marvel at the diversity of plant and animal life in each block of orange trees, what certainly would be considered monoculture.  And when I’m finished, I hear the trees quietly clapping for my performance, breathing sighs of appreciation as they move into theirs:  uptake H2O; transpire, converting CO2 to O2, turning carbon into oranges swelling with each irrigation.
Part song, part dance, the earth’s role far overshadows ours.  My biggest reward is remembering that and sensing myself as its tiny handmaiden.
-Trudy Wischemann is a writer with dirt under her fingernails.  You can share your irrigating stories with her - P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247.