Our Precious Water

This feels like a difficult time. We’ve been made aware of climate change and loss of species, and yet most of us don’t feel in position to make things better. Instead we see people who have power wage wars that result in more suffering or make decisions that will make life more difficult for our children. I’m getting old, and I don’t want to feel this helpless and joyless for the rest of my life. Like most of you, I want to find meaningful ways to make a positive difference. There’s nothing more basic that life’s need for water, and I can do my best in that regard.

Although clean water is one of the most basic of our needs, millions of people can no longer assume to have accessible clean water. The human population not only continues to grow, but our individual usage of water continues to increase. The National Geographic says that 40 out of 50 states are currently dealing with water shortages. Some of this is because climate change is resulting in less precipitation in some parts of the country, but much of this is also caused by aging infrastructure which leaves mainly poorer communities without safe drinking water. Farmers use 37% of our total water usage for irrigation. Southern Florida and the lettuce-growing Salinas Valley of California now have salt seeping into this water from over-extraction.

You and I are not in good position to affect the repairs to infrastructure needed by the government or to change the behavior of the large corporate farmers. But we can make changes that will help preserve sufficient clean water for our families, animals and crops. We’ve all been told not to keep the water running when we brush our teeth and to use water-saving shower heads. I agree those things make a difference, but my discouragement seems to need a bigger bandage, and I’m hoping these projects may help you too.

Saving rain water from roofs in a great way to begin. Each square foot of roof gives about .6 gallons of water that means that a 1,000 square foot roof will give 623 precious gallons for the same one inch of rain. We’ve done the simplest version of this by having the water from the small toolshed run into a 50 gallon barrel to which we have a hose attached for watering the garden. It’s pretty amazing how little of our large garden that this water covers, and so we went a step further and collected the water from the house, garage and chicken house roofs to drain into a 2,500 square-foot buried cistern. This cistern is made from cement and is below ground. The water therefore has to be electrically pumped from the cistern through plastic pipes to reach two elevated 250 gallon tanks on either side of the garden. From there, the water can be fed by gravity when needed by the plants. The cistern is important because when the rains do come, the garden doesn’t need ground water which can be saved, if needed, for the dryer late summer. 

The most efficient use of this water is distributing it with a soaker hose. We were given a large roll of soaker hose which allows us to put it in place in the springtime and leave it on the rows as the plants grow. Little water is lost to evaporation or run-off this way. 

We also have set up an additional two food-grade tanks that will each hold 250 gallons gathered from the hoop house roof. A small solar powered pump can then distribute this water to the far-end of the large garden.

Besides protecting topsoil and enhancing soil health, cover crops also have a role in preserving water. Plants capture water with their foliage and direct it to the soil rather than letting it run off. Keeping the soil moist allows the water table to be deeper as it preserves the moisture on our land. The forty acres of wetlands and grasslands behind the meadow provides a large area of year-round cover crops. It captures the moisture that the previous farm fields had run off in tiles because the bare and compacted farm soil cannot capture much water. This water is now not only held in the ground, but it is filtered of contaminants as it trickles into the stream that runs through the meadow. 

The water table varies greatly with the amount of rain and how well this rain is captured. The same National Geographic article states that 165 million Americans depend on this water table for their water which means that climate change is further endangering the availability of water for the drier areas in the SW and western U.S.

This “water table” is defined as the area between saturated and unsaturated soil. Below that are found large aquifers on which 120 million Americans rely. There are five large aquifers in the U.S. An example is the large Ogallala Aquifer that extends from South Dakota and Wyoming down through Texas. Similar to all of our aquifers, the water in this aquifer is being rapidly depleted both by urban use and by agriculture. In addition, it is becoming contaminated with farm chemicals. My husband and I became concerned with our water supply when a new ethanol plant dug its deep well only about a mile from our farm. It pumps up to a million-and-a-half gallons of water a day to make ethanol. Perhaps, like the early settlers, the corporate world believes they is no end to the water supply. 

The well for our house is only about 35 feet deep and we didn’t want to risk depleting it by having it also provide water for our cows and poultry. Therefore we had a 55 foot well dug in the meadow that is pumped by a windmill and carries water to seven different areas of the meadow. There remains evidence in the meadow of hand-dug wells from previous generations of this farm where individual wells would provide water for livestock. These shallow wells were pumped with small windmills into cement tanks around the meadow. Floats in these tanks would turn the windmill off and on as dictated by the water level in the tank. You may have seen elevated storage tanks by these windmills that could hold extra water when the wind blew. Farmers understood then that they were responsible for their water supply and could not depend on turning on the tap.

Some of you may have the good fortune of having a spring which can provide clean water. Gene Logsdon once suggested, if you’re fortunate to have an area lying below a spring, digging a culvert to direct the water down to a hand-dug pond to provide drinking water for cattle. 

It seems to me that whatever the topic, I find trees part of the solution. The more trees we plant, the more water is soaked up from the surrounding soil so that the ground can hold more water. In addition, the trees’ roots break up compacted soil and allow the soil to hold more water and the water table to go deeper.  

We all, including all species, need water to survive. It feels good to me to be able to conserve even a bit of this most precious resource.